“What a perfectly vicious little circle.”
“Pen Pals” has its heart in the right place but is a fairly boring affair; both of its plotlines are competent but uninteresting. In the A-plot, Data makes contact with a little girl on a dying planet, and drags the Enterprise into a debate about the Prime Directive when trying to determine whether they should intervene to save her. In the B-plot, Wesley is given his first taste of command, leading a team that is studying the geological instability of Sarjenka’s world. I should, at least, eat the B-plot up like candy, but it’s weakly done, and gets dropped halfway through the episode anyway. And meanwhile – there’s no point denying it – Sarjenka just creeps me out. She’s one of the less successful makeup designs on the show (bright orange, with overlong fingers and sunken, skull-like eyes), and one does well not to think too deeply about the modern-day equivalent of adult Data trolling the universe for little girls to cyber-chat with. That dog don’t hunt.
Aside from Picard riding around on a horse, the episode’s only real goldmine is the inevitable scene in the captain’s quarters where the bridge crew gets together to hash out whether or not to save Sarjenka and, thereby, break the Prime Directive. They have an actual argument about it, which is a rarity on the Enterprise’s conflict-free decks. The debate is a good outline of the Prime Directive’s notions and values as these things go, and in a post-Iraq world, it’s a bit of a jolt to the system to hear American actors describing the unseating of tin-pot dictators as some kind of a war crime. Even stranger than this is the fact that several members of the crew raise the idea of a larger “cosmic plan” in their efforts to justify their desire to help Sarjenka; given that all seven members of the Enterprise bridge crew are, without exception, atheists, this is a strange runner for the conversation, but might be in place in the scene for our benefit more than theirs.
On a philosophical level, Roddenberry’s invention of the Prime Directive is in many ways the specific thing that makes Star Trek Star Trek. It doesn’t make for very good episodes as a plot mover on its own, but as a guiding principle for the behaviour and ethics of Starfleet officers, it remains a worthwhile Gordian knot for our various human heroes to try to untangle from time to time – or, as in “Pen Pals,” to occasionally just cut straight through.
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.