“Masaka is waking.”
Buckle your shit up everyone, because things are about to get terrible. With “Lower Decks” behind us, it’s now a nearly straight run of unadulterated garbage from here to “All Good Things…” with only a couple of so-bad-it’s-good reprieves in the meantime. “Masks” is not one of those reprieves.
Now, I admit, I no longer know if the episodes themselves are as underwhelming as I perceive them to be, or if I’ve simply run out of patience with the show. I can see how “Masks” is the sort of plotline that would have made great hay on the original Star Trek, for example; it’s the kind of daffy, science-fiction-meets-speculative-mythology scenario that gave birth to the one where Kirk and the gang ran into Apollo. But at the same time, everything I’ve said throughout this rewatch series about “beige storytelling” comes to a head in episodes like “Masks.” There’s no inherent flavour or tension to “Masks” as a piece unto itself; it’s indistinguishable visually, structurally, sonically and conceptually from any of three dozen other episodes from the back half of the show. If you turned on your TV and stumbled across “Masks” at any point other than when one of the titular masks is onscreen, you wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from “Eye of the Beholder,” “Homeward,” or “Parallels.” I speak from personal experience: my ability to spit out the title of a Next Gen episode on half a second’s information was pretty well known when I was in high school. But most of the episodes in Seasons 5, 6 and 7 have always been completely indistinguishable to me on first blush.
Compare this against, say, an episode like “Q Who” – whose visual style, dialogue rhythm, and musical score could not be mistaken for the work of any other episode – and you see how completely Next Gen gave up on making each episode, itself, a distinct entity. This is natural as a series wends its way into comfortable formulaism, but it’s also the fundamental essence of why shows stop being good. And unfortunately, whatever happened here with Next Gen was highly contagious: the same factory-made homogeneity infected Voyager and Enterprise and, effectively, brought down the entire original-continuity version of the Star Trek universe. Yep: you can blame Star Trek Into Darkness, at least in part, on episodes like “Masks.”
Just about the only thing that really works in “Masks,” as usual, is Spiner – his portrayals of half a pantheon of mythic archetypes is effective across the board, and decidedly unsettling in its particulars too. The first time Ihat shows his face, I find it completely unnerving; and his portrayal of the old man trying to warm himself endlessly by a fire is equally memorable. And I don’t mind the notion of the ship being transformed into some kind of ancient Mesopotamian habitat in and around the crew. It all comes to nothing of note, though. Star Trek: The Next Generation lived and died by its status as one of the great “reset button” series of the modern age. After seven years of this, the inevitable status quo at the end of each installment seemed closer and closer with each passing beat.
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.