“Graciously, Mister Picard! You could accept it graciously!”
I love this episode. I love it on principle: an in-diegesis explanation for why all the aliens we’ve ever met on Star Trek look like human beings with bumps on their foreheads, rather than something (anything) else. That’s the kind of tack-into-the-wind storytelling ballsiness that I can really get behind. And I love “The Chase” on its merits, too; it’s a grand, “Warp Speed Now!” adventure story that takes the Enterprise rocketing back and forth across the cosmos in search of the origins of humanoid life. When I saw Prometheus, “The Chase” was the first thing I thought of.
Now, admittedly, the episode itself doesn’t hold up particularly well. The first act – featuring Normal Lloyd as Picard’s old archaeology professor, Galen – is great, largely because Lloyd is unapologetically terrific in what could have been a tossed-away role. The episode needed someone who could credibly be master to Picard’s apprentice, and Lloyd pulls it off so cleanly it’s nearly like watching a magic trick.
But after Galen has been killed, the episode relies on a breakneck pace to conceal the fact that the following three acts are pretty much just Picard and a bunch of Next Gen rogues (Cardassians and Klingons, and later, a Scottish Romulan) zipping through space looking for DNA. The reveal at the end is quite nice, as the DNA chains come together to (quite inexplicably) form a hologram of the proto-being who seeded all humanoid life in the universe. But it plays inevitably shabby, now, to see what is ultimately a bottle episode played out on such a gigantic cosmic theme.
There is a nice filler sequence in which the Klingon captain challenges Data to feats of strength; and I have always loved the fact that it is Salome Jens – who would go on to play the nameless Female Changeling, head of the Dominion, on Deep Space Nine – who plays the proto-being, in a makeup job not unlike that of the Changeling she would inhabit a few years later (suggesting, to my young mind, that it was the Changelings themselves who seeded the universe – a bit of head-canon I’m quite content to leave intact, thankyouverymuch).
One last thing that always bothered me: the teaser sequence in which Professor Galen gifts Picard a Kurlan artifact is very nice. The scene at the very end of Star Trek: Generations, where Picard and Riker scour the wrecked Enterprise for Picard’s photo album and literally toss the Kurlan head into the trash in the process, therefore pisses me off to this day.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Six is in stores. Season Seven will conclude the blog in early 2015 – you can pre-order the final season now.