Lonely Among Us by: D.C. Fontana from a story by: Michael Halperin and directed by: Cliff Bole

 

“Lonely Among Us” is written by: D.C. Fontana, from a story by: Michael Halperin, and is directed by: Cliff Bole.  It was produced under production code 108, was the 7^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was broadcast on November 2, 1987.

 

“Lonely Among Us” is a weird episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s coming immediately after the series’ first properly good episode and is coming from the pen of a writer who penned some of Star Trek’s original series episodes, but somehow D.C. Fontana seems to have forgotten how to balance an A and B plot.  This episode is split between a plot about the Enterprise taking delegates from two warring species, the Antican and the Selay, to the planet Parliament in an attempt to establish some sort of peace between them and a mysterious entity possessing crewmembers and machinery on the Enterprise for its own mysterious purposes.  The latter plot is actually the A-plot even though it doesn’t really have the material to fill an episode of television, especially as it is presented in this episode where the entity is revealed to the audience first as blue lightning jumping from person to person diffusing any real tension as to if there is something going on that could be blamed on the delegates because the audience knows it is an unrelated, outside force. 

The B-plot of the Antican and Selay takes its general ideas from the original series episode “Journey to Babel”, one of the strongest episodes from the original series and one written by Fontana.  Fontana in converting the original story outline by Michael Halperin into a script, added the B-plot whole cloth in an attempt to fill out the runtime of a story that was underrunning.  Halperin is a writer who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page and the little research I could find shows that he wrote a few episodes of television in the 1980s, though for whatever reason scripting duties were passed fully to Fontana.  The B-plot being underdeveloped is clearly coming from this, Fontana is attempting to fix an episode premise in the writing process that was likely not working.  As a last-minute addition to the episode, the B-plot makes sense especially in terms of how poorly integrated it is.  It’s a B-plot that only really comes up once or twice before the final scene of the episode where it gives us the closing zinger.  At least the makeup on both species is good, the Selay looking better as snake aliens while the Antican are essentially dog aliens, but director Cliff Bole shoots them well.

 

The A-plot, despite Fontana’s attempts to bolster it with a poorly integrated B-plot, is somehow more underdeveloped than the B-plot despite being the main thrust of the episode.  This is especially apparent in the first half of the episode which is saddled with the issue of an uncompelling mystery.  The entity jumping through crew members is an interesting enough order: it finds its way into the ship through Worf, then jumps to Crusher when Worf is examined in sickbay, before making its way to the computer systems causing havoc, before making one final jump into Picard leading into the back half of the episode.  That is where things improve by having Riker, Crusher, and Troi contemplate a mutiny because Picard, controlled by the entity, turns the ship around.  It doesn’t entirely work, so much of that mutiny preparation is contemplating if there is enough to successfully pull it off even though turning the ship around delaying arriving at a peace conference should be enough, but it certainly beats the first half of the episode.  Because the audience already knows that something outside has entered the Enterprise it was incredibly easy to notice that despite Fontana’s ability to script compelling dialogue, “Lonely Among Us” has a script that suffers from over-exposition.  Once again Tasha Yar is used for exposition dumps, Data spending the “investigation” doing a slight pastiche of Sherlock Holmes as quite effective comic relief.  Luckily Yar’s past isn’t brought up in this episode, but poor Denise Crosby really has nothing to do but act like an idiot and repeat plot points back to other characters.  Brent Spiner as Data is perhaps given his best performance thus far, the comic relief of him imitating Sherlock Holmes is not particularly strong material but he more than rises to the occasion and is clearly itching to develop the pastiche further.  Again there is actually very little plot here to fill the rest of the runtime so everyone is going after the scraps that are there.

 

Picard being taken over in the back half of the episode does mean that Patrick Stewart actually gets to relax a little bit with his performance.  When confronted by Crusher and Riker, Stewart is clearly having a ball balancing this light giddiness and threatening nature of the entity.  Again, Stewart is outshining a script giving him scraps, the entity itself is given the motivation of wanting to become energy and take Picard with it, for some reason.  It’s never made clear as to why the entity made its way onto the Enterprise, I think Fontana intended it to be an accident and it just wishes to go back home which would be an interesting angle, but it just isn’t explored or made clear.  Stewart does get to really have a lot of fun when initially infected too, shifting the pitch of his voice up ever so slightly in a way to get close to going over-the-top and loosening as Picard who has been uptight even when his character dynamic has actually clicked in the previous episode.

 

Overall, “Lonely Among Us” is an episode that can be described as underbaked.  While not the worst thing ever, the cast is at least largely clicking and Cliff Bole’s direction makes it quite dynamic in places showing that everyone knows the script is weak but are still trying their best, it is an episode that is likely to be immediately forgotten because little makes an impression.  The best thing I can say about it is that it is largely inoffensive, unlike most of the other bad episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation thus far, it’s just a below average experience which is too shallow to really show even missed potential.  4/10.