“Impudence is pretending to be Fek’lhr of Klingon!”
Is this the last episode from the treasure trove of (usually terrible) unproduced Star Trek Phase II scripts used on Star Trek: The Next Generation? I think so. I have a weird relationship with “Devil’s Due,” in that I’ve never particularly thought it was very good, but it’s so peculiar and memorable that it ends up in my head a lot when I think back on Next Gen in general and the fourth season in particular. Appropriately, it’s a highly “Old Star Trek” idea, with a premise that straddles science fiction and historical mythology (and courtroom drama). And one can’t help but wonder if Ardra – the Ventaxian devil figure who returns to trouble a superstitious people, and the Enterprise – and the poser “God” that Captain Kirk and company discovered at the centre of the galaxy back in Star Trek V ever get together to play cards.
The episode is not without its charm as an idea, and it lets Trek play one of its favourite gongs, the atheist credo which holds that beliefs in magical beings fall away as societies evolve into rationalism – which is basically Picard’s first attempt at a legal defense against Ardra, in the episode’s weird courtroom finale. But the problem, upon review, is that “Devil’s Due” is really stupid. For those who can’t recall the episode’s solution, Ardra is revealed to be a con artist who is using an ancient legend about a planet’s “Devil” to take possession of that planet. That’s a pretty ballsy move, I guess, but it nonetheless feels pretty fucking ridiculous that the con artist in question, upon the arrival of the Enterprise, feels ballsy enough to try to make a play to take ownership of the ship – and Captain Picard – too.
I mean, reverse-engineer that thought process: you are in the middle of an unbelievably complex con, essentially trying to David Copperfield a whole planet’s worth of people into believing that they sold themselves to the Devil a thousand years ago, and that they are now owned… by you. The people are superstitious, so maybe you can get away with it. Then a starship full of militarized rationalists show up – and you decide to not only try to trick them, but convince their captain to become your indentured sexual slave? What’s the over/under on that improvisation?
It doesn’t help that Ardra’s “magic” is a really flimsy plot driver. Picard explains away all of her special powers in the second act (they would likely be transporters, tractor beams and holograms, he says), and though we see nothing to contradict that theory, Picard himself dismisses it as unprovable in the fourth act. Well, Picard may be acting dumb, but we’re not. If Ardra did one or two things that were beyond the scope of made-up Starfleet technology, we might be fooled, but she doesn’t, and we aren’t.
Before I go, though, we need to talk about Picard’s sleep-smock. We’ve seen it a few times, and he gets beamed down to the planet while wearing it in this one. Where does one imagine the sleep-smock comes from, in the development of human sleepwear over the next 300 years? I’ve never been able to work out if it is the greatest idea in menswear, ever, or the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.
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 is in stores now.