“If you drop a hammer on your foot, it’s hardly useful to get mad at the hammer.”
Well, here we are – the end of the season, and the notorious clip show. The WGA strike shortened Season Two to 22 episodes, and “Shades of Gray” was hastily installed to cheaply fill out the order. It’s Dr. Pulaski’s last appearance on the series, so it’s nice, at least, that she is featured; it’s also not as bad as all that, as clip shows go. The plastic planet set onto which Riker and the away team descend, only to have Riker stung by a tree, is one of the better plastic planet sets; and the thumping red heart that Deanna inevitably displays as Riker hovers close to death does, of course, bring the feels. The real trouble, then, is simply the clips: “Shades of Gray” plays like an unselfconscious précis of Season One and Two’s many ups, and many downs. It’s the last stop: as of the start of Season Three, Star Trek: The Next Generation would finally become what we’re all talking about when we say Star Trek: The Next Generation.
So yeah, you get clips from “11001001” and “The Measure of a Man,” but you also risk cerebral hemorrhage by flashing back to the ridiculous planet set in “The Last Outpost,” or the open-chested sex garb Riker dons in “Angel One.” With Riker lying prone on the entirely defenceless sickbay beds, wearing spandex, one wonders how noticeably he tented his skin-tight spandex while dreaming about Minuet; as the clips wander into the more “intense” experiences at the tail of the episode, the effort to supercut various moments of high suspense is a little silly.
Of course, since I joined Next Gen at the end of its first season, some of the clips – notably Riker’s meet-cute with Data in “Encounter at Farpoint,” and Tasha’s death in “Skin of Evil” – were the first time I was seeing these moments, which, at the time, at least made them interesting. Seeing clips from episodes from the previous few weeks, like “Up the Long Ladder,” is just redundant and strange.
Someone in the writer’s room must’ve known they were slumming here; if they’d conceded the point and called the episode “Commander Riker’s Brain” in a nod to the other first officer’s most ignominious moment, I might even have given them a full pass.
The image above is from the Cinefantastique issue which heralded the arrival of The Next Generation’s second season, and gives about as solid an overview of the creative challenges, and changes, tackled by the show as it moved into the year I’ve just finished writing about. A lot of my early insights came from this issue; it’s well worth reading.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. That’s it for Season 2! Season 3 starts next week.