“That is an incredibly outmoded and sexist attitude. I’m surprised at you. Besides, you look good in a dress.”
In the annals of low-rung Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes which have vanished completely from my memory (of which we will see many this season), behold “Liaisons,” the one where… uh… three alien ambassadors in an exchange program with the Enterprise test Picard, Worf, and Troi in various uninteresting ways. Troi’s alien, for example, asks her for a lot of desert. It’s a real trial for her.
It’s a fucking weird one, and so trivial in its plotting that it’s sort of amazing it made it through the pitch process at all – let alone as the second episode of the season! Picard’s storyline, in which he gets stranded on a planet with a mentally unstable woman, plays as the episode’s hook, but it all turns out to be part of the aliens’ experiment anyway, which is about a stone’s throw away from “it was all a dream.” “Liaisons” suffers mightily from its own inconsequence, and the character drama between Picard and Anna isn’t strong enough on its own terms to carry our interest till the trick is revealed.
The episode is so bland that it skirts around one of the wilder aspects of its construction: Picard’s alien basically strands him in a slash fiction scenario, masquerades as a woman, and tosses the angst-o-meter up to the rafters before attempting suicide in a Hail Mary attempt to win the captain’s love. That’s fucking nutballs and halfway pervy, but Picard takes it all in stride and turns it into a teachable moment about how humans might have gone about acquiring the same information. He smiles a lot. He’s not particularly put out by any of it, why should we be?
If Next Gen has a strength at this point it’s simply the comfort and familiarity of the principal cast, whose characters and relationships are so lived-in at this point that they really do feel like family. Worf describing to Riker and Troi how much he wants to strangle his irritable alien ambassador works better here than it would have in, say, Season 2; and Dorn is generally so hilarious in this episode (“It was… excruciating!”) that he almost saves the whole thing. It’s fun to watch these people together, and will be all year, even if nothing much comes of it most of the time.
One Enterprise out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation is winding down to the end, as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The final season is in stores now.