“When the train comes in, everybody rides.”
“The Royale” is far and away my least favourite episode of the season – which means, yes, I am putting it below the dreadful clip show, “Shades of Grey.” I hate this one, and always did, and am amazed watching it now that it hangs even more limp than I remembered. It’s a suicide mission of an episode: the problem of intentionally setting your story inside an awful old pulp novel (as any writer with half a working brain should have been able to predict) is that then you have a story set inside an awful old pulp novel. This reminds me of the guys who tried to make a spot-on parody of an awful movie, and overachieved.
It’s a very “original series” idea, I guess, in that Riker, Worf and Data beam down to a world that allows Paramount to make use of existing, non-futuristic sets and assets, just like Kirk and Spock were always doing. (Native Americans! The Old West! Las Vegas in the ‘60s!) There is also, admittedly, a nice, melancholy idea at the center of this episode’s setup. A human astronaut – clearly meant to echo Dave at the end of 2001, with his creepy, alien-invented hotel room – made inadvertent contact with another species, who nearly killed him; in remorse, they fashioned an environment for him to live out the rest of his days, basing it on the only information about Earth that they had available: that selfsame crappy old pulp novel, Hotel Royale. (Casino Royale?) “I shall welcome death when it comes,” the astronaut writes in his journal, after an unimaginable thirty-eight years living in a rotating simulation of a mob-run gamblers’ warren. Watching the episode, I can relate.
It’s so unbelievably dull. None of the comedy lands, but neither does the sense of unease that the dreamlike casino is meant to evoke. I must admit that I have, all my life, wanted to enter a hotel lobby to the magnificent blast of horns that announces the arrival of Mickey D.; but the scenes that follow succumb to such torpor that one can scarcely imagine what the actors (the great Sam Anderson among them) thought they were doing. There’s no B-plot, no runner; just the away team wandering around the hotel and failing to muster even a passable sense of concern for their own fates; and the crew back on the ship, trying to sort out a way to help the team walk out the door. None of the guest roles are meaningful, and the “mystery” of how our boys will get out of the hotel is scarcely opaque to anyone. Data on a run of good luck at the craps tables can’t save it. “The Royale” is a categorical misfire on every level. Giving it half an Enterprise out of five is being too kind.
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 2 is available now.