“Mr. Worf, you sound like a man who’s asking his friend if he can start dating his sister.”
To tie off the strangest romance inception in series television history – in which Worf went to a parallel universe where he was married to Counselor Troi, then figured he might want to try to hit that IRL – we give Troi a complementary scenario, although in her case it’s a dream, not time travel. Yep: “Eye of the Beholder” is one of the dreaded, and inevitably disappointing, “it was all a dream” stories.
The trickiest content off the top comes by way of watching the crew grapple with, and analogize (by way of an anecdote about Data’s early days), the concept of suicide. I’m hard-pressed to recall another time on Next Gen when suicide even played a role; and at least theoretically within the universe Gene Roddenberry created, I think we can assume that suicide is one of the many contemporary human elements that would have been nobly weeded out of the species by Star Trek’s speculative 24th century. In any event, the treatment here is awkward and naïve, as I suppose we can expect from an episode of television written in 1993. Its heart is in the right place, but it’s an odd fit in Next Gen’s imagined universe. And while it forms a reasonable spine for the whodunit that follows, once you know the ending, it all seems laboured.
Speaking of laboured, there’s Worf/Troi. Aside from the emotional implausibility of the pairing, which I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around as anything other than a “what’s the craziest thing we can possibly think of?” idea, “Eye of the Beholder” also makes clear on a quantum level just how little chemistry actually exists between Marina Sirtis and Michael Dorn. There were what seemed like sparks a couple of seasons ago, but once the gears are actually turning here, it’s like watching two 12-year-olds on a first date. Their pre-sexual mating dance is awkward as all fuck, and the morning after scene is laughably bizarre. Of course, by this point, we’re actually into Counselor Troi’s psychic flash-sideways / dream sequence / whatever you want to call it, which explains why Troi comes out of her night with Worf looking like she is modeling for the cover of a romance novel, rather than having just taken a tumble down a steep hill à la Jadzia Dax.
Drake from Aliens turns up, and we spend some time in a memory of the Enterprise when it was being constructed at Utopia Planitia, which I don’t mind. But the psychic murder plot is melodramatic and its resolution is very paint-by-numbers stuff, occasionally silly, and almost universally unconvincing.
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.