“From the moment I met you, I knew you were going to be trouble.”
Captain Picard takes a vacation and ends up on an Indiana Jonesish adventure for a mythical artifact, accompanied by a beautiful sidekick and squared off against a Ferengi and two time-traveling security guards. I mean, come on. “Captain’s Holiday” sports a premise so gleeful it’s nearly dizzying.
Captain Picard is a changed man by this point in The Next Generation’s third season. When reviewing “Who Watches the Watchers” half a season ago, I remarked that the Captain had reached the nadir of his least entertaining personal traits, wandering from episode to episode as a stuffy, imperious negotiator given over to eloquent speechifying but not a lot of good, old fashioned fun. In “Captain’s Holiday,” he’s the reverse – we get to spend time with a Picard who’s sexy (and sexual – and evinces the most astonishing seduction technique in Star Trek history, successfully bedding Vash by getting under the covers with her and then blithely trying to get some sleep), physical (his coldcock of Sovak doesn’t match his haymaker of a punch in “The High Ground,” but hey, whatever man), and actually seems to be having a good time. We might take the first act of the episode literally: Captain Picard really, really needed a holiday. There’s no stiff bureaucrat who can’t be loosened up by a bit of sex and sun.
Ira Steven Behr’s screenplay is fun from soup to nuts. Risa, the resort planet (I love how, in Star Trek and especially Star Wars, planets are defined by single characteristics), is a gangbusters idea that pops up again and again in Star Trek for years to come. Riker is the planet’s biggest big fan – well, obviously – and the women walk around without a lot of cloth in the bum parts of their bikinis, enjoying a “sybaritic” outlook on life which seems to include offering free and easy sex to anyone who bought the local fertility idol at the gift shop. It’s the least Picard-ish environment imaginable, which is why it immediately becomes the most Picard-ish environment imaginable, because Picard is basically a badass – a badass for bringing Ulysses to read on vacation (I did the same on my trip to Cuba when I was in my twenties), and an even bigger badass for abandoning the book as soon as there’s something better to do. Once there’s – ahem – a girl to chase and an archaeological relic to find, he’s having the time of his life, backstroking his way through his own personal Dixon Hill novel like a living avatar of his fictional hero.
Jennifer Hetrick is dreamy as archaeologist/con-woman Vash, although I learn with some horror that she was 31 when she filmed “Captain’s Holiday.” Given that she will likely stand as my lifelong paradigm of “hot older woman” and I’m now 5 years older than she was at the time, I no longer know what to think. The episode also brings Max Grodenchik into the Star Trek fold, who is delightful as Sovak (though he seems, ill-advisedly at best, to be playing the Ferengi as a Chinese stereotype) and would go on to be one of the biggest, most valuable components of the massive working machine that is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
And I love the time-traveling bad guys, the Vorgons, who know enough of history to know that Picard found and destroyed the Tox Uthat, but apparently not enough to know where or precisely when. It’s a completely needless detail from a basic storytelling perspective – the kind of thing you only write into your adventure when you’re having a really good run of creative spunk – but it complicates the landscape for Picard’s adventure in a fun, free-spirited way, and the episode’s all the better for it.
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 Four arrives on July 30.