We'll Always Have Paris by: Deborah Dean Davis and Hannah Louise Shearer and directed by: Robert Becker

 

“We’ll Always Have Paris” is written by: Deborah Dean Davis and Hannah Louise Shearer and is directed by: Robert Becker.  It was produced under production code 124, was the 24^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was broadcast on May 2, 1988.

 

Casablanca is one of the best films ever made: endlessly quotable, unrelentingly anti-fascist, and one of the best films ever made.  “We’ll Always Have Paris” is a late episode from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation that desperately wants to be a riff on Casablanca, but in space with Jean-Luc Picard in the role of Rick.  Star Trek does a riff of a classic film/story is honestly something I wasn’t particularly expecting because it feels more akin to what Doctor Who was doing from 1975-1977, and “We’ll Always Have Paris” is an episode that suffers greatly because it doesn’t seem to understand why Casablanca works and how to do a riff.  The central character conflict of the episode is Picard reuniting with Jenice Manheim, now wife to a pioneering doctor working on time experiments causing distortions.  The script adds in a bunch of quotes from Casablanca but really the only thing properly riffing on the film is the central love triangle.  Now the love triangle that is central to Casablanca is so compelling because it is in the backdrop of first Paris in the early days of Nazi occupation and then the rest of the film proper in Nazi occupied Casablanca, both legs of the triangle are explicit anti-fascists fighting the Nazis in their own way, and both sell the relationship to the central female character who actively makes the choice to be with one of them.  This choice is made twice, plus the tension is coming from the active threat of the Nazis and the fact that the film is being made during World War II.

 

“We’ll Always Have Paris” has absolutely none of that, Picard is actually put into the role of Ilsa Lund, he’s the one who left Jenice in Paris to go off and be captain of the Enterprise.  As a conflict it would actually be really well done, were this the original run of Star Trek because that was a series that very much setup the idea that people working on a starship couldn’t have a family.  Star Trek: The Next Generation has a mother and son in the main cast and has often focused on the fact that there are families living on the Enterprise full time.  There also isn’t a war or really any conflict that is pulling the pair apart.  Paul Manheim isn’t a freedom fighter and wasn’t even in the picture when Picard and Jenice were in Paris, so it doesn’t read like Casablanca’s a woman discovering the love of her life alive and rushing to be with him, just a basic relationship not really working out.  Manehim is a scientist, and writers Debroah Dean Davis and Hannah Louise Shearer clearly want to have this entire love triangle play out with passion and romance, but they don’t have a script to back it up.  Patrick Stewart is the one holding it together because he’s Patrick Stewart, he’s dealing with absolutely no direction or substantive material but he is the one selling the relationship, especially when paired with Michelle Phillips who lacks chemistry with Stewart.

 

Now, this was made in 1988 and was written just before the beginning of the Writer’s Guild of America Strike, leaving the script unfinished and you can really tell on-screen.  The drama is not there, the script was apparently written in five days and finished during production, though it’s vague as to who finished it.  It’s very possible that the people finishing the script were scabs, non-union writers breaking the strike which is objectively wrong.  It does not bode well for essentially the next year of the show, this episode aired two months into the strike estimating a two-month lag time between production and broadcast (fairly standard for a television series).  The strike will affect the show until the end of the second season, a season shortened by four episodes and pushed back two months from the typical starting month of September.  I fully believe the strike is responsible for the rest of the episode’s conflict being time disturbances to be solved, a plot that is equally underbaked.  There’s an experiment that ran out of control and really the only scene of note is the resolution which has Data solve the problem but briefly becoming three Data’s which allows Brent Spiner a genuinely great scene.

 

Overall, “We’ll Always Have Paris” is one of those episodes that’s fine when you end up watching it but then you think about it and realize that there is absolutely little of substance.  This is an episode that Patrick Stewart is carrying on his back, the script just is incomplete but there’s an episode order, a strike going on, and there’s absolutely nothing that people can actually do.  Just as things felt as if Star Trek: The Next Generation was clicking into place here comes another hurdle to overcome.  4/10.