The SmarK DVD Rant for Star Trek The Next Generation: Season Five
– Returning again with another review after a marathon Trek viewing session (it’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it ), this time we look at the season where TNG truly matured into the series that most people remember it as, generating three of the great episodes in Star Trek history as a result, although there were some BIG clunkers this year, no doubt about it.
One of the things that distinguished this season of the show (aside from the ungodly amount of sex Riker had) was the very “quiet” nature of it. Most of the shows involved social or moral issues rather than space battles and technobabble. Although both were there in abundance, too. Unfortunately 1991 was distinguished for another reason, albeit a much sadder one — the death of Gene Roddenberry, the Great Bird of the Galaxy and the man who spearheaded the Star Trek phenomenon from day one. His death pretty much sucked the fun and adventure of the show for a while in season 5, and you can really tell. From there, seasons 6 and 7 were lacking without him and his presence was sorely missed.
The Film:
As noted, this season was much more cerebral than even the fourth season, featuring an emphasis on internal battles rather than alien-of-the-week shows. Also, Wesley Crusher only appeared in two episodes, thus reducing the suck quotient right off the bat. My one big pet peeve about the season: The titles. Some of the worst, most undescriptive titles ever thought up were trotted out here, most of which told you nothing about the episode and were almost interchangeable. Quick, which one was “The First Duty” and which was “Ethics”? No fair peaking ahead, either. The episodes are as follows
Disc One:
– Redemption Part 2. Continuing the season finale from the fourth season, Worf takes up residence on brother Kurn’s ship, and immediately gets involved in a giant plot involving the Duras family, the Romulans, and Sela. Sela is of course a rather brilliant plot twist devised to bring back Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar) as a villain, with the idea being that she is the daughter of the alternate universe Yar from “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. And she’s REALLY evil. It’s a good episode, filled with exciting space battles and poltical intrigue, and a good start to the season. Oddly enough, the Duras Sisters would end up blowing up the Enterprise in the “Generations” movie, so they got their revenge in the end.
– Darmok. Hands down one of the best, and most thoughtful, episodes in the entire run of all the Star Trek series, as this episode explores the cliché of aliens always seeming to speak English, and explores what would happen if they not only spoke an alien language, but a language based on metaphors and examples from a mythology that only they are familiar with. Patrick Stewart is his usual amazing self, playing a very confused Picard, as the writers openly swipe the plot of Gilgamesh (even admitting it during the course of the show!) with spectacular results. There is no overriding threat — the Enterprise simply meets an alien ship, Picard is beamed down to the planet along with the alien captain, and from there they learn to communicate in order to survive. Truly Star Trek at its finest.
– Ensign Ro. Notable for introducing the Cardassian-Bajoran relationship, this episode brings super-babe Michelle Forbes into the fold as a rebellious (and disgraced) Starfleet officer, who was drummed out months before for a never-mentioned transgression, in order to flush out a Bajoran rebel leader. The mission reveals that the Cardassians are not the worthwhile allies to the Federation that they claim, and sets the stage for events that later unfold in Deep Space Nine. I never liked Ro as a character, but I certainly wouldn’t kick her out of bed.
– Silicon Avatar. Another one of those moral dilemma eps that swipes liberally from Moby Dick, as the Crystalline Entity returns and slaughters an entire planet of colonists, resulting in a prominent scientist turning the Enterprise into her own personal weapon of vengeance. A sweet subplot with Data, who almost pulls her back from the brink of insanity by bonding with her via the memories of her son, rescues this one from total wince-inducing preachiness.
Disc Two:
– Disaster. One of the most fun episodes of the season sees the writers “paying homage to” (i.e., swiping plots from) the disaster movies of the 70s, as the Enterprise is crippled in space by some vaguely-defined plot device and chaos aboard the ship follows. Picard is trapped in a turbolift with three children (and in true Picard form, immediately turns them into an efficient military force), LaForge and Beverly are locked into a cargo bay with 20 tonnes of radioactive waste, Riker and Data (well, Data’s head) travel via power ducts to Engineering, Troi is left in command, and Worf is given the most difficult task of all: Delivering Keiko O’ Brien’s baby in Ten-Forward. In the supplements, one of the writers talks about begging to have Shelley Winters do a cameo, and it would have worked perfectly. A light-hearted episode that just exists to allow the writers to have some fun and play with disaster movie clichés, and a good one at that.
– The Game. No HHH jokes, please. Riker goes to Risa for a vacation, but finds himself returning with an addictive videogame that turns anyone who plays it into mindless zombies who only serve the side of evil. Kinda like Pokemon. Oh, and Wesley returns to save the ship. Again. Notable for the large role of superbabe Ashley Judd as Wesley’s girlfriend Robin Lefler (a character later resurrected by my hero, Peter David, for the New Frontier books), but even the lovely Ashley can’t save the stupid premise (written by, who else, Brannon Braga, and stolen from Night of the Living Dead) and turn shit into a good episode.
– Unification Parts 1 & 2. Spock returns! Although, as the producers and writers have later admitted, they didn’t exactly have a “Best of Both Worlds” type of episode to showcase him with. In fact, most of the first half is filler involving a completely pointless detective job by the Enterprise (they never actually find anything useful) while Picard and Data steal the show by going undercover on Romulus to discover what Spock is doing there. Once they go for the shock booking by bringing Sela back as the villain, they kinda lose you.
Disc Three:
– A Matter of Time. This is a little more like it, as Matt Frewer plays it over-the-top as a professor of history who travels back from the 26th century to observe the Enterprise’s assistance of a planet surrounded by a dust cloud and freezing to death. However, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s acting weird, even for a guy who’s from 200 years in the future, leading to a neat little ironic twist ending. No real drama in this one to speak of, but you’ll have fun trying to figure out what’s going on if you’ve never seen it before.
– New Ground. A retarded subplot involving a giant “cosmic surfing” technology would usually be enough to sink one of these right off the bat, but the real meat of the episode comes as Worf’s son Alexander is left on the ship to live with him, and Worf finds that being a full-time daddy is worse than facing down a fleet of Romulans. The artificial drama at the end with the fire felt too tacked-on, however, and ends up hurting this one overall.
– Hero Worship. The episode that was being filmed when Roddenberry died, and since it’s a Data episode, you’re pretty much guaranteed quality. Data rescues a young boy from a crippled ship, and suddenly finds he has a junior android apprentice. Again, this one isn’t about the silly subplot involving the ship getting caught in a pocket of “dark matter” or whatever as much as it’s about a little boy trying to find his identity and recover from a traumatic experience that he believes to be his own fault.
– Violations. The Star Trek version of the rape story, as telepaths join them en route to a diplomatic mission and one of them starts mentally raping the crew members. It’s pretty clear which one it is, so this isn’t really one of the more interesting episodes.
Disc Four:
– The Masterpiece Society. The crappy, heavy-handed moral episodes really start coming now, as the Enterprise rescues a genetically-engineered biodome from certain destruction, but finds themselves questioning whether or not the people should have the right to leave if they want. Another one of those shows where they spend the whole show preaching the Prime Directive and then blatantly break it because they don’t approve of the lifestyle of the culture in question. Don’t worry, Kirk used to do that all the time, too. Also notable because it’s one of the rare occasions where Troi gets freaky deaky with someone on the planet.
– Conundrum. Another one of those episodes where you have to make a huge leap of faith to accept in the premise — in this case, a small alien vessel probes the ship and erases the memories of everyone on board, as well as the computer, and sends a representative aboard as “Commander Macduff”, leaving everyone to try to figure out who they are and what they’re doing out there. Macduff tries to convince them that they’re on a mission from Starfleet to wipe out another alien civilization, but Picard has his doubts. If you can ignore the monstrous plotholes and inconsistencies, it’s a neat episode that sees the usual cast changing roles and playing the characters in ways that they wouldn’t normally do. It also sewed the seeds of a Riker-Ro relationship that never went anywhere.
– Power Play. Star Trek meets Die Hard, as an away team is possessed by what appears to be the ghosts of a long-dead starship crew, and it quickly turns into a hostage situation, complete with gunfights and mental games of chess as Picard tries to take his ship back. Some good creepy portrayals by Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner and the underappreciated Colm Meaney. And in true action movie style, the bad guys stop to brag about their brilliant plan, and it proves to be their undoing. Some things are constant even 400 years in the future.
– Ethics. Probably the second-worst episode of the season, as Worf breaks his back in a shipping accident and it turns into a ham-handed debate about euthanasia and cloning. Frankly, Beverly Crusher becomes so petty and closed-minded (with about 6 people having to explain to her that 60% mobility might as well be paralysis to a Klingon) that she’s almost the villain of the story. Worf, of course, survives thanks to the ability of the writers to re-write Klingon anatomy to whatever is convenient for that episode. I mean, talk about your cheap, deus ex machina endings — this one has got it in spades.
Disc Five:
– The Outcast. But no discussion of the worst Star Trek episodes of all-time would be complete without the J’Nai. If not for “Shades of Grey” from the second season, and most of the first season in general, this would probably be regarded as some of the putrid sci-fi ever to come out of the Star Trek universe. An androgynous race called the J’Nai visit the Enterprise in order to rescue one of their ships from a plot device, and Riker wastes no time in scoring with one of them. However, taking sexual sides like that is a very bad thing in a gender-neutral race. Of course, this immediately turns the show into a preachy lecture about tolerance and gay rights. They couldn’t have made the message any clearer unless they had a subtitle running along the bottom of the screen declaring that everyone in the 24th century voted for Al Gore, as they really go for the bleeding heart gusto by having the wayward J’Nai, who picks a gender and thus gets called “deviant”, be brainwashed by the government into happiness as part of the collective. Okay, individuality is good, socialism is bad, we get it. That’s the only thing that really bugged me about Roddenberry’s vision of the future — it touts the tolerance of all cultures and beliefs, but if you’re a conservative or a socialist, you’re portrayed as being a villain (The Romulans and the Borg, respectively). It seems that only liberals need apply in the Star Trek utopian future.
– Cause and Effect. As much as I hate to say it, this is a Brannon Braga episode that is one of my favorites of this season. The Enterprise gets caught in a temporal loop that ends with their total destruction each time through, and after 4 or 5 passes the crew starts to realize that they’ve been repeating the same events ad nausea. Kind of like the writers and Moby Dick. Jonathan Frakes originally thought it was a joke when presented with the script to direct, but the end result is a really cool episode complete with a big cameo at the end.
– The First Duty. The first real visit to Starfleet Academy sees Wesley Crusher on trial for a flying demonstration gone horribly wrong. Sadly, it’s another cadet who was killed, not Wesley. However, as Picard does his own investigation, it turns out that it may not have been the innocent accident that the cadets all claim, and it turns into a battle between loyalty to your friends and loyalty to Starfleet. Robert Duncan McNeill plays the arrogant leader of the cadets, a role which would later be re-written for him into Tom Paris when Voyager debuted in 1995. More morality tales here, but thoughtful enough not be annoying.
– Cost of Living. Ignore the nonsense with the space dust that turns the ship into hair gel, and check this one out for the comic gold of Lwaxana Troi trying to teach Alexander the value of having fun, while Deanna and Worf try to teach Alexander to ignore everything Lwaxana teaches him. Worf’s constantly-building anger throughout the show leads to the funniest bit of the episode, as a soap bubble looks at him the wrong way and pays the price. Again, the BIG MESSAGE about “liberal good, conservative bad” comes through loud and clear, but the preaching is toned down a lot and tempered with a lot of humor.
Disc Six:
– The Perfect Mate. Another dumb one, as Picard mediates a diplomatic meeting between two warring races and ends up falling in love with the arranged bride (played by Famke Janssen), along with half the men on the ship. And that’s pretty much it. She’s an empath who can immediately sense what any man requires and adjust herself accordingly, and she’s also in heat. If I was LaForge I would have shoved Picard out of the way to introduce myself, but alas it’s Riker who ends up testing the waters first. Do they have STDs in the 24th century?
– Imaginary Friend. The weakness continues, as a little girl’s imaginary friend is made real by an alien lifeforce, who then wants to suck all the energy out of the ship. More heavy-handed preaching about the proper way to raise your children so they don’t grow up to be alien parasites or something.
– I, Borg. Forget the first two clunkers on this disc, however, because this one saves the day. The Enterprise rescues a lone Borg drone on a deserted planet, but soon everyone from LaForge to Guinan is finding themselves second-guessing their original plans to commit genocide by using him as a catalyst. Once again, Beverly Crusher acts as the voice of hysterical over-reaction, almost seeming ready to start screaming “WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!” at one point. Picard, however, is a REAL MAN, and knows that sometimes you just have to commit genocide to prove your point. Until he actually talks to the Borg, who it seems is lonely. “Don’t you have other voices in your head at night?” he asks of the crew. Only if you’re Anne Heche, Hugh. All kidding aside, this is a very powerful (and quiet) episode, all about self-discovery and how you find humanity where you least expect it sometimes. Best of all, no cheesy confrontation with the Borg — when they return for Hugh, they simply ignore LaForge and go about their business. This probably would have been considered the defining episode of the season if they hadn’t topped themselves two episodes later
– The Next Phase. More techno-silliness, as Ro and LaForge get turned into “ghosts” by a transporter accident, and proceed to find a way to contact the crew and let them know that they’re still alive. Stop and think about any one thing that happens in this episode for more than 5 seconds and you’ll go nuts, trust me. For instance, they can pass through walls, but not the floors. Still, a neat concept in theory with more of a tease of the Ro-Riker stuff. One thing to notice when you’re watching this one — On at least two occasions (once in a turbolift with four characters talking and once in Ten-Forward) there are shots where the composition is very clearly intended for widescreen and then pan-and-scanned to 1.33:1. I have no idea why this is, because it’s not like today where shows like Enterprise are shot widescreen, but it’s very obvious when it happens and very distracting and un-natural to watch.
Disc Seven:
– The Inner Light. Without a doubt, the greatest episode of any Star Trek series ever. While it doesn’t have the epic punch of Best of Both Worlds or Yesterday’s Enterprise, The Inner Light is Patrick Stewart doing the acting equivalent of taking the snap at the 10-yard line and running for a touchdown. Probably the most quiet of the quiet episodes, it leaves you just as moved and transformed as Picard himself. The plot is simple: An alien probe zaps Picard, causing him to dream of a life on another planet that spans nearly 40 years, as he raises children and grandchildren and learns of the history of the alien civilization through their own eyes. There’s no villains, no conflicts, no shocking plot twists or technobabble, just Picard learning to play a flute and trying to save his adopted planet from extinction, but failing. This one won awards out the wazoo, and for good reason, as it truly shows the potential for great acting and great writing that the show as a whole could aspire to given the proper treatment. The bittersweet ending, with Picard’s flute theme replacing the usual orchestral finish, is just another great touch in a series of them. If you need one episode to justify buying the set, this is it.
– Time’s Arrow. And from there it’s back to the silliness, as a slapped-together finale sees the discovery of Data’s head in a cavern under San Francisco turn into a chase through the galaxy for energy-sucking aliens. Time travel stories give me a headache, and this one is no exception, and even the cliffhanger is completely weak. Data playing an android stuck in 19th century Earth who earns his keep as a card shark is worth the price of admission, but the story is so flimsy that it might as well be HHH’s quad muscle.
The Video:
As good as 10 year old TV material is gonna look. Unfortunately one side-effect of the super high resolution of DVD is that the cheap green-screen and CGI effects look incredibly cheesy and fake when viewed on such high-quality media. Other than that, colors are bright, the picture is noise-free and without compression artifacts for the most part, and contract is always good — the black of space is a good solid black. No complaints here at all.
The Audio:
Kudos to Paramount for the excellent job of remixing everything in full 5.1. This is the treatment that the show needed all along — surrounds are used for everything from space battles to mysterious noises in the background to music. The subwoofer rumbles throughout the shows to represent the ever-present engines of the ship. Dialogue is crisp and clear and the sound is aggressive without being overpowering. I’d say this is a better sound mix than many movies I’ve heard on DVD. Great job on this season, and all the others.
The Extras:
The usual excellent 90 minutes or so of documentaries and featurettes covering a variety of topics. The standout on this set is the 30-minute “Tribute to Gene Roddenberry”, which concludes with an unexpected surprise that I won’t spoil here. Future Shop offers the set with an additional 20-minute DVD with fluff about guest stars, as well as a mini-disc with hype for Nemesis, most of which is done in Macromedia Flash. I am, to say the least, pumped as all hell to see that movie next month, so that was an appreciated addition to the set.
Ratings:
The Film: ****
The Video: ***1/2
The Audio: *****
The Extras: ***
