“I do remember. I just remember it differently.”
With nothing better to do in its final year, Star Trek: The Next Generation adopts the craziest “will they/won’t they” pairing in all of Star Trek, and has Worf develop feelings for Counselor Troi – and to make it all the more fascinating, they incept Worf’s romantic entanglement with the Counselor by way of one of the most creatively bizarre meet-cutes ever conceived: they send Worf to a parallel reality where he’s been married to Deanna for years, then have him come back to our reality with her on his mind. It’s love-as-earworm, with a Many-Worlds Hypothesis spine! Dandy.
Once you get the Many-Worlds idea into your head, I suppose one possible outcome is to spend your time wondering who you’d be boning in alternate versions of reality… even though the back-door logic at play here (that Worf and Troi, here and in “Eye of the Beholder,” basically fall for one another by being shown that a relationship between the two of them is at least theoretically possible, and then work backwards to actual attraction from there) doesn’t ring true to any sexual pull I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s too logical by half, even allowing for the fact that Worf and Troi have visibly grown closer since the introduction of Alexander to the show. That, to me, was always the unlikely pairing: that these two would ever even become friends, having so little in common in life experience, temperament, and even basic values. Pushing it further by making them lovers just never gels – though Worf clearly picks up a taste for non-Klingon brunettes with a bit of a sass mouth.
Nonetheless, Worf/Troi gives the Schrodinger’s Worf episode a bit of emotional oomph, in what is otherwise yet another Brannon Braga thought experiment about how many Goldberg variations you could make out of the configuration of the Enterprise crew as we know it. “Parallels” is clearly limited by the show’s production budget in terms of just how bananas Braga probably could have taken the concept: by the time a kajillion Enterprises are popping out of the rift in the final act, including one captained by Crazy Riker with a Jack-from-LOST beard, I always end up wishing they’d shown us another couple dozen Enterprise variants, and to hell with the budget.
The episode is puddle-deep and ungracefully concluded, and relies on every cost-saving method in the arsenal (from using the made-up comm badges from “Future Imperfect” in one universe, which is of course logically unsound, to drafting Wil Wheaton back into the fray for half an act, as another universe’s Enterprise tactical officer). But it has enough fun as it goes along to seem goofily entertaining, if only just barely. Weirdly, stoic Worf is both the best and the worst choice to be the hero of this particular story: the comedy beats (particularly when Deanna is giving him a massage) play all the better for his stiff discomfort, but the pathos of his situation never rises to the surface, because Worf just don’t give a fuck. Which is another reason he’d never work out with Troi.
Blogging The Next Generation is winding down to the end, as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The final season is in stores now.