“The name of my ship is the Lollipop. It’s just been commissioned; it’s a good ship.”
Here’s an episode that set my 12-year-old heart thundering: “The Arsenal of Freedom,” a proper run-and-jump-and-rayguns show that also pressed the eternal near-romance of Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher into a confined space beneath a planet ruled by a rogue weapons system. What’s not to like? The visual design of the selfsame “arsenal of freedom” is goofy (little golden pods that prowl the jungle dispensing laser bolts) and the soundstage jungle set strains credibility to put it mildly, but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. I love this one.
“The Arsenal of Freedom” does a great job of setting up a scenario that wrongfoots almost all of the characters at every turn – Riker, Yar and Data on an initial away mission that goes seriously awry; Picard and Beverly beaming down only to suffer mishap, forcing the Captain to provide amateur medical care to the wounded doctor; and back on the ship, Geordi and a cadré of junior officers left to fend off a hostile spacecraft. Everyone’s at a disadvantage in this episode, and it presses forward the adventure storyline with enthusiastic efficiency. The idea of endlessly self-improving weaponry makes for a good engine for the tale, an idea which would be recycled to great effect in the next season with the introduction of the Borg. The Geordi command storyline is nicely handled (and even figures out something genuinely useful for Counselor Troi to do, which actually falls within her job description!), and makes great use of LeVar Burton’s increasing confidence as the season has progressed; there are also great beats for Riker, who, we learn, turned down command of the U.S.S. Drake to take his Enterprise assignment, and who has an engaging verbal sparring match with a hologram impersonating his old Academy classmate, Paul Rice.
But the heart of the show – if you will – is in the sweaty series of beats in the underground cavern, when Picard and Crusher are cut off from the rest of the crew. Dr. Crusher has always been and always shall be my favourite character on the show, and her relationship with the Captain was always one of my favourite throughlines of the series growing up. There’s the eternal question of the “something,” some pregnant piece of information that Beverly is always on the verge of trotting out when circumstances turn dire and she is alone with the man she is… secretly in love with? Is quietly plotting to murder? Always dangling, never arriving (except for one really, really good kiss in the series finale), the solution to the Picard/Crusher non-romance lives and dies on the thumping great chemistry between Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden, both of whom play their characters as marginally too professional, marginally too old, to abandon themselves to what would otherwise be much-yearned-for passion. In modern parlance, I ship them hard – and “The Arsenal of Freedom” was one of the first season’s most delicious pieces of candy.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek – now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.