“Coffee and croissant.”
We’re down to the dregs of the Next Generation barrel so, like Riker and Troi at the end of the last season, it’s finally time to do an episode that directly addresses that thing between Beverly and Jean-Luc. What became an unofficial and hilarious runner in early seasons — Beverly, at the moment of every potentially fatal crisis, telling Jean-Luc that there was “something she had to tell him” — is driven to its logical end-point, when the Captain and the Doctor get telepathically linked, and no longer have any secrets from one other.
The episode goes in a different direction than expected: it circles back on Picard’s reluctance to have Beverly aboard the Enterprise in “Encounter at Farpoint” by revealing that the Captain was nursing a lifetime of guilt at having fallen in love with his best friend’s wife. (This doesn’t particularly read against the actual tone of those earlier scenes, but whatever.) If Beverly’s long-nursed “something” about the Captain is revealed to him across the mind-bridge, we’re never told about it; though at the end of the episode Jean-Luc mentions that their feelings “for each other” have been revealed, so I guess it happened telepathically.
When I was growing up watching Next Gen I naturally assumed Beverly’s big secret was that she was in love with Picard, so let’s assume that’s it. As an adult, though, I’m less and less interested in that being the outcome. It seems more likely that Beverly has a broad and complex range of feelings about the man who is simultaneously her friend, love interest, commanding officer, and the man directly responsible for her late husband’s death. (Not the sort of admission one could easily pack into a death’s-door confession, but still.) “Attached” never delves into Beverly’s side of things at all (verbally at least), and comes away the weaker for it; and it’s also the last stop on the feelings train for these two, with the obvious exception of their spectacular kiss (and subsequent marriage) (and even more subsequent divorce) in “All Good Things,” so this is all we’re gonna get.
Wherever it does succeed, “Attached” does so largely based on the natural “old married couple” chemistry between Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden. Picard and Beverly, by this point in the series, seem to have completely forgotten to have their obvious romance, and have skipped straight to routine breakfast every morning and not really listening to one another. They’re Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman in Love Actually, without the secretary sexpot and the requisite heartbreak. I suppose it would seem ungainly for the elder members of the Enterprise family to be running around like teenagers in heat just because some neuro gizmo is lining up their thoughts, but Next Gen seems to have dropped them into sexless “Mom and Dad” roles by default without really considering what that relationship might actually mean. “Attached” is an opportunity to redress that — and it does, occasionally, drip sex — but it comes to nothing.
The natural intimacy of the neuro-link makes me wish they’d at least banged down on that planet, because telepathic contact during sex is something everyone should experience at least once in their life; but no such luck. The final scene — Beverly’s pronouncement that they should be afraid to explore their feelings for one another, now that they’ve been revealed — is a bloody odd note, and it’s hard to say what the writers were attempting to do here. McFadden and Stewart are naturally effective at fleshing out thin writing with substantial character, so the scene plays — though plays at what, I’m not sure.
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.