“Lunchtime, Miles!”
Once a year or so, Star Trek: The Next Generation gets it into its head to do a ghost story of one kind or another, of which “Power Play” qualifies – though thankfully, it moves away from any attempt to frighten us, settling instead for a hostage negotiation drama. O’Brien, Troi and Data are possessed by alien ghosts, and take everyone in Ten Forward prisoner in their attempt to force Picard to free the rest of their people. It’s the sort of loopy-doopy concept that doesn’t really work on paper but comes off pretty well nonetheless, thanks to its confident execution.
“Power Play” might qualify as the nascent entry in what became the unofficial “torture O’Brien” sub-genre, an annual tradition on Deep Space Nine where the Chief – usually all alone – was put in (often Keiko-threatening) trouble. Here it’s the Chief who’s in trouble, and threatening Keiko, as his alien possessor becomes increasingly fixated on his host body’s wife and newborn baby. Simultaneously, Possessed Data figures out that he really doesn’t like Worf; and Possessed Troi gets to march around using a deep voice and bossing the Captain around.
It’s a big, brassy show that’s ultimately not really about anything terribly interesting; the music is huge and everybody brings their A-game, performance-wise, but the misdirection about the nature of the ghosts (they initially claim to be the remains of a Starfleet crew from 200 years ago) ends up being one of those instances where the fake story is more interesting than the real story. A mid-episode conversation between Worf and Picard – where the Klingon muses that if the Starfleet crew had been trapped in non-corporeal form on a lightning planet for a couple of centuries, they might simply have gone mad – presents a more compelling notion than what the story ultimately provides.
“Power Play” is one of the rare episodes in the Star Trek: The Next Generation blu-ray project where all of the original film footage couldn’t be located, requiring the up-conversion of about a minute and a half of standard-definition video. Throughout this blu-ray release, I haven’t been able to work out what I find more amazing: cases where some of original film has been lost over the course of the last 25 years; or the fact that the rest of it was kept.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.