“That’s the short definition of ‘captain.’”
It took 23 years but I finally found out what the title, “The Ensigns of Command,” refers to, which has been kicking the back of my head all this time. It’s a line from “The Wants of Man,” and refers to the ensign as a flag, rather than, say, Wesley Crusher’s rank. I’m sure I’ll forget this again in a day or two, and what the hell it has to do with anything that happens in “The Ensigns of Command,” I’ll never know. Meanwhile, this is an episode in the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I pretty much forgot all about. That’s happening more than I expected.
I don’t much like the A-plot here, where Data is sent to evacuate a colony that refuses to be evacuated, and must improvise a solution to forcibly convince them. It’s just not very interesting stuff, and both the colonists and Data behave so stupidly throughout that it’s pretty demeaning. There’s even a prototype slow-clap, when Data tries to use reverse psychology to paint a grim portrait of what will happen to the colonists if they don’t leave the planet; but the battle of wills between Data and the colony leader, Goshevan, is contrived. Meanwhile, Data catches the eye of Ardrian McKenzie, one of the colonists, who plants a kiss on him at the halfway point because she is, like the very best geek girls everywhere, developing a crush on him. Data reciprocates at the end of the episode, immediately after telling Ardrian that he has no feelings for her whatsoever. So at least he comes by his male genitalia honestly.
I like the B-plot more than the A-plot, in which Picard must negotiate with a one-off alien race called the Sheliak Corporate in order to buy time for the colony negotiation. Like the Jarada in Season One’s “The Big Goodbye,” the Sheliak have stuck with me as an alien race that was interesting enough to warrant further exploration, though they never returned after this episode. Non-humanoid and fanatically obsessed with the details of their 500,000-word treaty with the Federation, the Sheliak are awesome dicks and fly around in ships whose interiors are decorated like mid-‘80s European discos. (And boy, blu-ray doesn’t do these guys any favours, let me tell you.) But it’s fun watching Picard and the gang rise to the challenge of out-legalizing the lawyer race, and especially fun to watch Patrick Stewart dust the Enterprise’s commemoration plaque with his fingertip while patently refusing to pick up the Sheliak’s panicked phone call.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Three is available now.