When the Bough Breaks by: Hannah Louise Shearer and is directed by: Kim Manners

 

“When the Bough Breaks” is written by: Hannah Louise Shearer and is directed by: Kim Manners.  It was produced under production code 118, was the 17^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was broadcast on February 15, 1988.

 

Last week saw an episode going back to “The Deadly Years” for its inspiration, this week there is yet another inspiration from Star Trek to inform a plot of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Star Trek had several episodes that made children central to their plot.  “Miri” and “And the Children Shall Lead” are the prime examples of this, and with how Star Trek: The Next Generation likes to either remake or just go to the well of original series Star Trek ideas it is surprising that it took until over halfway through the first season to go to this particular well.  “When the Bough Breaks” like so many original series titles is a quote, this time from a lullaby, and is the first script from Hannah Louise Shearer who had the idea for the script based on the fact that the Enterprise also had several families living on board.  It’s not an inherently bad idea for an episode, and based on the premise alone could easily be set apart from Star Trek in terms of inspiration.  Star Trek: The Next Generation has the added bonus of having two main cast members playing a mother and son.  The premise is that a technologically advanced planet is suffering from planet wide infertility, so they decide to purchase the children on the Enterprise so their civilization can continue.  Aldea is a paradise ruled by a computer and the people of the planet have lost their drive to continue growing, meaning they have overlooked the obvious problem at their society.  Mainly they are actually all suffering from a form of radiation sickness that has left them infertile and eventually the crew just help them heal from it.  This is a particularly bad plot development in an otherwise fine episode, it means that there’s actually very little conflict in the episode and the reveal is treated like a grand twist.  The resolution just kind of happens really quickly, Shearer seems not to understand how to fill the episode in general as neither the plot with the kids on Aldea nor the Enterprise trying to get back after being catapulted away actually have any developments.

 

This is an episode that puts a lot on the several children making up the supporting cast, a mix of outside actors and children/siblings of the crew.  Kim Manners is the director, her only credit for Star Trek in general and while she shoots the episode perfectly fine (the final scene on the planet actually does some brilliant and foreboding lighting), she doesn’t do the best at directing the kids.  She also doesn’t do nearly enough to direct the adult supporting cast, this is an episode that knows it has to show the families who have had their children taken but they feel like day players who don’t know how to get their lines out properly.  “When the Bough Breaks” is incredibly stiff with Patrick Stewart being surprisingly the only loose actor, attempting to guide some of the kids through their performances while maintaining Picard’s stoicism and general distaste for children.  Shearer does place Wesley Crusher as the oldest child taken and therefore the leader of the kids, and Wil Wheaton also does the best with the material he has been given.  There are several moments where Wheaton has to read incredibly awkwardly written lines of exposition, but as a rallying point for the rest of the young cast Wheaton performs his task admirably.  Certainly, more than Gates McFadden who as Dr. Crusher doesn’t actually get too much to do in the episode outside of also give some particularly bad exposition.

 

Overall, “When the Bough Breaks” is an episode that honestly should have more interpersonal conflict to bring out the better performances in the cast.  The premise is something that could be a highlight of the season, but it’s an episode from a writer who gets so close to actually having something interesting happen before just kind of forgetting it (one of the Aldeans actually demands a kid of her own assigned toa different unit and that doesn’t ever actually become a conflict), and that means this ends up being a weak episode.  Shearer has a nearly competent script that desperately needs an actual angle for what it wants to say and to give actual life to the child characters, focusing on the Wesley/Beverly relationship would have made it work infinitely better.  It’s yet another below average, bland outing for Star Trek: The Next Generation as things seem to limp towards the end of the first season.  4/10.

The Crooked World by: Steve Lyons

 

In Act 2 of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, as the narrator is discussing the problem of the giant, the fairy tale characters break out of the story, drag the narrator in, and sacrifice him to the giant.  This breaks the narrative and means the characters must now actually choose what actions to take without the guiding hand of the author, they are now in control of the narrative and that leads to more death and tragedy before eventually resolving in a hopeful enough ending, though always changing and trying to be better.  It is an essential piece of metatext that is both accessible and easy to understand.  It is important to bring this up because Doctor Who novelist Steve Lyons owns quite a lot to Into the Woods for his trilogy of metafictional novels Conundrum, Head Games, and The Crooked World, the latter being the most explicitly metatextual on speculative fiction in general and the very nature of Doctor Who as an idea.  Conundrum and Head Games are a pair of directly linked New Adventures set in the Land of Fiction, while The Crooked World is a spiritual successor to the other two in a similarly fictionally linked setting though one revealed to be a physical place and single planet.  The idea behind The Crooked World is that the Doctor is a force of nature responsible for changing the narrative flow of stories.  He comes in and fundamentally changes the rules of the universe every time he leaves the TARDIS.

The Crooked World uses this through the lens of cartoons, specifically cartoons pre-1970 including expies of the characters of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, deconstructing in the first 100 pages or so what makes each of these cartoons work and the formula they have to follow before ripping it to shreds.  The inciting incident is our Elmer Fudd/Porky Pig/Wile E. Coyote expy, Streaky Bacon shooting the Doctor with his blunderbuss which nearly kills him.  The Doctor, Fitz, and Anji do not work by cartoon logic, while the rest of the world does.  Lyons specifically draws on Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, though not visually as this is a novel and there is no way to translate that technical wonder that film is, but the ideas are there.  The Crooked World as a planet is bound by cartoon morality: those shot will have an overreaction, fall over, maybe be carted off in an ambulance, but be back to normal almost immediately.  The Doctor brings injury, pain, and death in his wake to Looney Toons characters, Fitz brings meaningful relationships (through ironically the introduction of sex) to serial parodies, and Anji brings a sense of cold hard logic to the Scooby-Doo gang.  The world begins to almost immediately unravel and descend to chaos, every action the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji take ends up changing the world intrinsically and makes things worse.  Every thought they have ends up bringing the notions of war, corruption, capitalism, and death in their wake.

 

The novel eventually becomes a meditation on bringing the central idea of adult, fully formed morality, onto these cartoon characters.  What exactly are their purposes when there are consequences to their actions and the universe doesn’t essentially reset at the end of an episode?  Our Tom the Cat expy is put on trial at one point because he has genuinely attempted to kill the expy of Jerry the Mouse, and there is even at least some attempt to at least acknowledge much of the racial stereotyping of certain old cartoons.  Now this is where Lyons perhaps cannot go as far as he wishes to, the BBC was never going to get the rights to use any of the established characters, but it is clear exactly who they are so the commentary still works and is added to with the idea that these cartoon characters are already corruptions in who they are.  The big twist of the novel is that the Crooked World being this cartoon logic laden place is because of the mind of a dead child, taken and insulated at the center of the world who’s escape pod dying.  The Crooked World actually goes as far as it can go in making it explicit that changing the narrative as the Doctor and company are the ones to do is not an inherently good thing to happen.  The situation only gets worse and the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji do their best, but there’s a moment where they accidentally create an atomic bomb because they are thinking about it.  Lyons keeps reality pliable and even when the main trio try to make the world bend to their advantage, the influence of their morality eventually gives the inhabitants their own free will to override things.  It means that The Crooked World ends as a tragedy; like Into the Woods the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji are the ones to leave and the world just has to get on and make its own decisions.

 

Overall, The Crooked World is Steve Lyons’ masterpiece, it’s the crowning achievement of metatext, knowing exactly what cues to take.  One minute it has you laughing at the cartoon antics, and how weird things are going, the next it has you questioning exactly how long it will take for the idea to get old, and then finally it begins to have the shift of redirecting, and eventually losing the narrative.  10/10.

Too Short a Season by: Michael Michaelian and D.C. Fontana, from a story by: Michael Michaelian, and directed by: Rob Bowman

 

“Too Short a Season” is written by: Michael Michaelian & D.C. Fontana, from a story by: Michael Michaelian, and is directed by: Rob Bowman.  It was produced under production code 112, was the 16^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was broadcast on February 8, 1988.

 

Star Trek struggles whenever it decides to discuss the subject of aging.  The original series firmly put aging in the category of something to be feared and reviled: getting old means getting infirm and possibly disabled, something that textually is presented as one of the worst things that will happen to people.  “The Deadly Years” is perhaps the prime example of this, an incredibly weak episode where the crew aging is the threat of the episode because they cannot operate the ship.  Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season has generally been struggling with setting itself apart from the original series tonally and in terms of the types of stories being told.  There are multiple original series writers that get story and writing credits throughout the season and the third episode is a complete remake of an original series episode.  “Too Short a Season” is an episode that looks at “The Deadly Years” and writers Michael Michaelian and original series writer D.C. Fontana decide to do that story in reverse.  Instead of characters being aged up for horror, a single, supposedly brilliant negotiator, has taken a drug that is de-ageing him rapidly as he wants to be at his best to deal with a hostage negotiation.  That is the entire episode.  No, I’m not kidding.  This episode spends its time establishing Admiral Jameson and his wife, their relationship, the fact that he is a negotiator, the fact that he is being forcibly de-aged, and the twist that Karnas and his people aren’t being held hostage by terrorists but Karnas has been a terrorist this entire time and holding his own people hostage.  That last fact sounds like it would be a great twist if it actually worked, we don’t actually see any of the hostages, and it turns out that Jameson is actually a very bad negotiator but a very good capitulator.

 

“Too Short a Season” seems to want to be about how with age comes wisdom, and you shouldn’t want to fall back onto your youth because Jameson as a character gave Karnas weapons and the Federation never found out because the plot needs the Federation to have not found out how bad Jameson was at his job.  In writing, D.C. Fontana apparently greatly simplified Michael Michaelian’s original draft from actually having two sides of terrorists and decides to have Jameson die at the conclusion instead of being de-aged to 14 years old which is a money saving effort of having to cast another person (and a child to boot) while not remembering his wife.  That original ending would have actually made the age coming with wisdom actually working, there isn’t actually anything in the episode that young Jameson says that old Jameson couldn’t do.  The idea is that because he capitulated to Karnas as a young man he was actually unwise, but Jameson doesn’t actually do anything to convince Karnas to release the hostages.  Jameson just shows up as young, isn’t believed to be Jameson by Karnas, and then dies; the drug kills him and Karnas decides to let the hostages go.  It makes you ask, what was the point, and I’m not sure if either Michaelian or Fontana even know.  This would be the last script on Star Trek: The Next Generation that D.C. Fontana was credited with writing, and considering the behind the scenes troubles on the show in general she was likely quitting shortly after this episode was written.  It doesn’t help things that the actual main cast of the show aren’t actually given much to do, the closest are Picard and Crusher: the former has clashes with Jameson over his authority on the Enterprise because he’s a negotiator while the latter is essentially an exposition machine though both Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden are trying.  The same cannot be said for Clayton Rohner as Jameson.  Yes, he is acting under several prosthetics throughout the episode as he de-ages, but Rohner’s performance is incredibly stilted.  It feels as if Rohner wants to doo the weak and wheezy stereotypical old man voice that everyone has, but doesn’t actually commit, nor does he seem to understand how to move under all the makeup.  Then you see him as the younger Jameson and he still moves weirdly and struggles with putting emphasis on the proper syllable, while doing an American accent that sounds fake but isn’t (Rohner is an American).

 

Overall, “Too Short a Season” is an episode that honestly doesn’t seem to care about really trying to say anything.  It may have its roots in being a course correction from 1960s episodes like “The Deadly Years”, if only metatextually, but the script doesn’t actually make any sort of sense in terms of telling a story.  The resolution just kind of happens, the central character could have maybe worked (or at least worked better) if the performance was at least decent.  A friend mused it’s “The Deadly Years” in reverse, and that’s honestly the best assessment I could give of it.  3/10.

Warmonger by: Terrance Dicks

 

If there’s one thing I can say in terms of positivity about Warmonger is that Terrance Dicks is an author who is always easy to read.  No matter what he is writing, his prose just has this rhythm and flow that makes it easy to get through what’s a truly bad reading experience.  There is this weird conception in the larger Doctor Who fandom that it was the Virgin line of books that were harsher and edgier, though the in house line of BBC Books always seem to go down the darker and more importantly less tasteful route.  Warmonger is no exception, once again we have another book where Peri is both reduced to a sexual object and her plot is being the hard, sexy leader of a group of guerrilla rebels made up of Sontarans, Draconians, Ice Warriors, Ogrons, and Cybermen because we need to have as many references as we can, and particularly violent aliens too because this is a book about war and the military.  It’s genuinely surprising the Daleks don’t get even a cameo, but that could very easily be the Terry Nation estate stopping them.  The reduction of Peri’s character oscillates from snarking tough guy style one liners and having to fend off potential predators, something that the Past Doctor Adventures novels just have the tendency to do with female companions.  It also feels especially weird coming from Terrance Dicks, considering how many novelizations he had previously written.  Dicks also has characterized Peri before in Players, a novel where she was a proactive character, while here she is just catapulted from situation to situation without really caring about what is happening to her.

 

Warmonger is Terrance Dicks’ attempt at doing a military space opera that is also simultaneously a prequel and a sequel to The Brain of Morbius and incredibly interested in Gallifreyean politics because why would Dicks try to just do one thing?   Military space opera as a genre is already one I am not particularly partial to, but as with going into any book there’s always the chance I will enjoy something that isn’t meant for me.  Warmonger just doesn’t really care about appealing to really anyone, the worldbuilding is technically there.  Much of the novel is set on Karn, though the Karn isn’t presented as the gothic horror of The Brain of Morbius, again Dicks is attempting military science fiction which does not really mesh with the Sisterhood of Karn in terms of aesthetic or their role in the plot.  There is an extended sequence that is just taking plot points of The Brain of Morbius and doing them again but with the Fifth Doctor and Peri.  Losing the performances of Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen particularly makes you realize both where Dicks is lacking as a writer and just the punch up to the script of Robert Holmes.  There are some that say that what would make Warmonger better is if instead of the Fifth Doctor, the incarnation of the Doctor used was the Sixth Doctor.  Dicks originally intended it to be the Sixth Doctor and Peri.  It’s certainly an easier novel to digest if the Doctor is the Sixth Doctor, the character is brash and loud and clearly meant to be.  The disagreement comes with the idea that Warmonger isn’t actually better if it’s the Sixth Doctor, because Warmonger is still a novel that posits the Doctor actually loves being a genocidal military leader.  There is an entire diatribe on how the Doctor loves power and is enjoying being the Supremo, there is a moment where characters refuse to kill Morbius so they can physically execute him and make an example of him to the rest of the universe.  This is somehow worse than the Doctor in The Twin Dilemma, were this Doctor to strangle his companion it would seem like a mercy.

 

Overall, Warmonger is essentially everything bad Terrance Dicks has ever done as a writer wrapped into a single book, with a clear lack of editorial not editing the shift in Doctor from the Sixth to the Fifth at all, maybe because Dicks is Doctor Who royalty.  It doesn’t fit in the genre it’s trying to be a tribute to and somehow is darker and succeeds less than Rags.  1/10.

11001001 by: Maurice Hurley & Robert Lewin and directed by: Paul Lynch

 

“11001001” is written by: Maurice Hurley and Robert Lewin and is directed by: Paul Lynch.  It was produced under production code 116, was the 15^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was broadcast on February 1, 1988.

 

To say Star Trek: The Next Generation has had a rocky first season is an understatement to say the least.  Just as it looks like they’re getting into the groove of things, an episode will come along like “Justice” or “Angel One” to really sap away the goodwill the series had been building up, but with those episodes it almost makes whatever comes immediately next look better by comparison.  “11001001” is one of those episodes that comes after and is a little odd in terms of how it is constructed.  Instead of an A-plot and a B-plot, it’s really an episode that is all one plot with exactly one thread running through it and a few scenes that could be described as B-plot by way of red herring.  It’s an atypical way of constructing an episode of television, but for what “11001001” is attempting to do it works.  This sadly is an episode that only really comes together after a first act that lasts nearly half the episode for setting up what is a particularly simple situation which would be easily resolved had any communication between the Enterprise and the alien Bynars took place, they are introduced as doing routine maintenance while the ship is at a Starbase before the halfway point instigating an evacuation and leaving Picard and Riker in the holodeck.  The holodeck sequence is the red herring B-plot, and perhaps the oddest thing about the episode.  Maurice Hurley and Robert Lewin just continually cut back to Riker flirting with the holodeck program in a jazz bar, Riker playing the trombone (though it’s clearly just a jazz track over miming Riker and the trio backing him up when really they could have at least hired a jazz trio to play or director Paul Lynch could have avoided us seeing any of the instruments being played).  The sequence is really just padding so the crew can evacuate the Enterprise leaving Riker and Picard behind, and it just keeps going.  Once they leave the holodeck it doesn’t actually take long to wrap up the conflict and get the big reveals of the episode out into the open.

 

The Bynars’ sun was going supernova, releasing an electromagnetic pulse that would completely shut down their world, they are a society run entirely by and integrated biologically with computers.  It’s a perfectly good idea and sadly there isn’t too much actually given to the Bynars outside of a particularly good design: they are generally short and purple with these little computers at their waists and implanted into their heads.  They come in pairs and seem to be single life forms in pairs reflecting the on/off states of binary code, something that I don’t entirely think Lewin and Hurley were really thinking about when writing the episode.  There are technically four of them, but they aren’t given much in terms of characterization individually, or as pairs.  Only one pair is actually given names in the dialogue, the other two being given names in credits, indicating that the way that the Bynars are named could potentially mean there are only a few of them living on the planet.  The resolution actively questioning why they wouldn’t just ask the Federation for help is a particularly good resolution, and a way to do an episode without really a central interpersonal conflict, something that Gene Roddenberry was very much against as he believed the future would have all but wiped that out in a utopia situation.  What is particularly interesting is also the fact that while Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes as Picard and Riker are fine, it’s actually Brent Spiner and LeVar Burton as Data and Geordi LaForge who are continually stealing the show.  Spiner in particular as an actor is quite underrated as there is time given to Data’s insecurities on whether he is making the right call in evacuating the Enterprise.  Again this is something that doesn’t go quite as far as it could, but it’s moments like these that actually make it feel as if the characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation are actual characters and have development.  The relationship between Data and Geordi is also this really interesting mutual friendship throughout the episode, Geordi kind of being one of the few crew members to really respect Data’s autonomy and personhood fully.  This is also an episode with some particularly nice model shots, even though they don’t actually do much to advance the plot.

 

Overall, “11001001” despite having a title that is a pain to type out because it is binary code, is actually a fairly decent episode.  It’s not one that would ever be a standout with the best of what has come before, or even the best that this season has actually been able to do, but there are certainly good character moments that elevate a script that at best is just perfectly fine if once again underbaked in terms of its ideas.  The final scenes are really what makes the entire thing become tied up to actually work as an episode, but the first half does drag far too much for what it's trying to do.  More time to make the B-plot a B-plot and not just a red herring would have probably helped this work better.  6/10.

The Book of the Still by: Paul Ebbs

 

Perhaps it’s because it has been such a long time since I’d dipped back into the adventures of the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji, but I found their involvement to be the best part of Paul Ebbs’ Doctor Who debut The Book of the Still.  Okay, this isn’t really doing much to move forward the larger arc, but Paul Ebbs as a writer is clearly overflowing with ideas on what he wants to do with this book that The Book of the Still is at its core a fascinating read.  Structurally, it begins at the end with an epilogue opener and prologue closer, both written with this very light tone of an author beaming with the fact that he is getting the chance to play in this little sandbox.  The Eighth Doctor Adventures as a series of novels often likes to play around with the idea of the Doctor being unable to stop things, often making the Eighth Doctor far more deadly and dangerous than the Seventh Doctor before him, paradoxically with an almost lighter attitude towards the universe being on the surface.  The Book of the Still is Ebbs’ one chance to really explore that, wrapping the titular book as in a roundabout way a take on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but for stranded time travelers, plus the actual plot involving the creation of a species that should not exist means there’s a lot of influence on the novel from other eras of Doctor Who.  The plot itself actually wraps itself up nicely by the end, sadly being perhaps the weakest element outside of Ebbs brimming with ideas.  When you get to the end of it, despite Ebbs using his structure to be intentionally backwards, it’s a simple creation of a paradox that the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji are technically only tangential to actually happening.

 

Despite the simplicity of the plot, being split into Anji doing the actual work, Fitz having a fabulous romance and heist for the actual book, and the Doctor just trying to keep everyone alive while being a prisoner himself, it’s actually a lot of the set pieces that Ebbs includes that really make The Book of the Still stand out.  There is a museum of locks, a masquerade ball, and several high-tension chases that are at the very least competently written.  The idea of the villains literally being the Unnoticed is another great conceit for storytelling, the way they eventually come about is perhaps a bit obvious in hindsight, Ebbs is tributing a bunch of Doctor Who with this.  The supporting cast is also quite small, only really having five characters because this is attempting to replicate what possibly could have been done on television in I suppose 2002 when this was published (or possibly recalling the cast sizes of Big Finish Audio Dramas as Ebbs had written The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy around the same time).  Yet, for whatever reason this is a novel that just doesn’t ever quite add up.  It’s certainly a well-written book, the plot is interesting and fun, the characters are brimming across the page (there’s this one moment where Fitz nearly realizes that he actually loves the Doctor yet for whatever reason the BBC Books range never makes that connection proper), but somehow it is held back because there are almost too many ideas.  Despite hitting both the page count of approximately 280 pages, plus enough of a word count to use a smaller font size while keeping the hard page limit of these books, it doesn’t seem to have enough time to explore everything that it wants to.

 

Overall, despite having several problems with how everything adds up, The Book of the Still is actually a very solid little adventure that puts a lot of classic Doctor Who ideas together.  Really what’s impressive is actually Ebbs’ strengths as a novelist establishing a surreal mood that while clearly being inspired by Douglas Adams isn’t trying to be or even emulate Douglas Adams.  There are problems but it made me realize how much I still love this particular team.  6/10.

Angel One by: Patrick Barry and directed by: Michael Rhodes

 

“Angel One” is written by Patrick Barry and is directed by: Michael Rhodes.  It was produced under production code 115, was the 14^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was broadcast on January 25, 1988.

 

After three weeks of Star Trek: The Next Generation generally looking up in terms of direction and tone, “Angel One” is another episode to plummet everything back down.  The B-plot is probably the best place to start, mainly because it is a B-plot that could have been anything to pad out the episode and keep the away team on the planet Angel 1.  A better writer would have found a way to tie events on the Enterprise into the rest of the episode, something that could have been done by making the pathogen as it is a virus which strikes the crew down, could have come from the planet.  No, instead there is just a random virus that is slowly making its way through the crew, travelling through smell and presenting as a respiratory virus, and that’s literally all the B-plot is.  Okay, so Geordi La Forge has to take command and Dr. Crusher spends much of the episode looking for a cure, but scriptwriter Patrick Barry clearly doesn’t understand the point of a B-plot in an episode because there really isn’t any plot to be had.  Barry seems to have heard B-plot and thinks it just means something that the episode can cut back to that is completely different, oddly enough taking up approximately half of the episode itself.  There is barely 10 minutes of material for the B-plot, going so far as to even have a moment where it looks like Crusher has found a cure.  She feeds an ill Picard some liquid which will apparently help his symptoms and both Barry’s script and the way director Michael Rhodes shoots the scene makes it look like this is meant to be the cure.  It also feels as if the writers want to commit to a Crusher/Picard romance, except without actually ever having the pair address the romantic tension.  Picard is stuck being hoarse throughout the B-plot, barely being in the episode which would be fine if there was actually any focus on the other characters on the Enterprise.  Geordi being put into command should allow him to develop, Crusher looking for a cure should do the same, but they are both just relegated to having a function to perform.  That’s about it.  In Crusher’s case it’s probably worse because it was also her function in the equally weak “The Naked Now”, some of the dialogue being quite similar.

 

The rest of “Angel One” isn’t so much stretched, as an example of Star Trek: The Next Generation not understanding its own politics and the messages it is pushing.  “Angel One” as an episode wants to be about the apartheid in South Africa, setting up a fictional society run by authoritarian oligarchy against a group of people, subjugating and segregating them while working tirelessly to put them down.  This is a perfectly laudable idea for Star Trek: The Next Generation to do, something the original series often did with both good and bad results, and something that seems obvious to comment on in 1988.  If we take this episode purely as a commentary on apartheid, ignoring almost any other aspect of the episode itself, its ending something framed as the best possible left forward puts the people who are meant to represent those fighting back against the oppression being put into exile.  Riker even ends the episode with a smile on how great a situation this is, because the anti-apartheid inserts could have been executed by the authoritarian regime and were only saved in the end not through direct action but because Riker is good in bed (more on that later) and because one of the oppressors is in love with one of the oppressed.  Now, the idea of romance between oppressor and oppressed is a framework for storytelling that is a tricky needle to thread at the easiest of times, West Side Story is a story that is perhaps the most interesting way of making it work because of the gang violence framework.  This episode does not thread that needle, something that shouldn’t really be expressed because it’s treated as a twist, again about halfway through, and the supporting characters are not really fleshed out characters despite there literally being only four of them.

 

I’ve been dancing around the other aspect of the episode that makes an episode that has already largely fallen apart to fall apart and be on about the same level as “Code of Honor” in terms of how it doesn’t work.  Apartheid was based on race.  “Angel One” decides to draw the lines of the authoritarian regimes on lines of sex.  Angel 1 is a matriarchy, the men are the ones who are oppressed, being forced to wear sexually revealing episodes (by 1980s television standards).  Patrick Barry is clearly a man who knows how to write men, but hampering the episode is actually the guest cast in general.  None of the four can actually act, and for once it doesn’t seem to be Michael Rhodes’ poor direction, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Marina Sirtis, and Denise Crosby are doing fine with the poor material even if they clearly are hating it.  The matriarchy of the episode is poorly defined, men are literal servants yet aren’t given any inner life or characterization.  The ‘sexism’ of the society is reduced to the simplest sexist talking points about how one sex basically needs to be providers and doing all the duties, the leader having to be taught that the right way is to share the duties.  It’s basic egalitarianism, I’d say feminism but the script feels more like what an online anti-SJW would argue for circa 2015/2016.  The episode is also really strict in exploring gender roles, to the point of coming across as subtly homophobic.  Riker puts on one of the men’s outfits for diplomacy’s sake and is ridiculed for it, the implication being that it makes him less of a man.  I say homophobic because the outfits are clearly meant to be coded as queer, and therefore lesser in what the episode is presenting.  At least Riker as a character is totally confident in wearing it, partially making it a shame that explicitly making the character bisexual would not happen (he could have been an icon).

 

Overall, I’m going to put as much effort into concluding this review as “Angel One” did in making it.  If it could go wrong, it did, and this is clearly the fault of a writer that like “Code of Honor” the cast tried stepping in to stop but failed utterly.  1/10.