The Outrageous Okona by: Burton Armus from a story by: Les Menchen, Lance Dickson, and David Landsberg and directed by: Robert Becker

 

“The Outrageous Okona” is written by: Burton Armus, from a story by: Les Menchen, Lance Dickson, and David Landsberg, and is directed by: Robert Becker.  It was produced under production code 130, was the 4^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, the 30^th episode overall, and was broadcast on December 12, 1988.

 

“The Outrageous Okona” comes one week after a brilliant episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in an attempt to do something with a swashbuckling, Han Solo type character and a message about women being allowed to make their own choices, subverting the expectations of a shotgun wedding.  The general message behind the episode is fine, but feels honestly a little too late for 1988, and while there is no evidence of this being an episode that was proposed for either the original series or the proposed Phase II, it reeks of being just out of date.  It does not help the episode at all that the female character who makes the choice for love only appears in the final 15 minutes of the episode and gives a particularly flat performance from Rosalind Ingledew (she enunciates practically every word).  The climax of the episode attempts to use trickery to get to the bottom of the contradictions around what Okona was doing out in space to be in need of rescue.  The central conflict begins as the accusation of stealing a jewel and getting a woman pregnant, though neither of these things are particularly compelling in terms of telling a story.

 

It does not help that director Robert Becker doesn’t seem to know how to shoot this episode to convey Okona as the lovable rogue Billy Campbell is trying to portray.  The costume work is good, Campbell is giving it his all, and the episode conveys that he does seduce several women on the crew, but that’s all in the script.  Becker shoots the episode to be almost entirely flat, both in the A-plot with Okona an the B-plot with Data, meaning that there is very little emotional communication in the episode.  This leaves the episode with this sense of complete blandness, it’s an episode that doesn’t visually communicate anything in any real way.  Becker has directed for Star Trek: The Next Generation before, on “We’ll Always Have Paris”, another episode that attempted to have love and passion at its center that also refused to film the episode to communicate those emotions.  Because of this it means that Campbell’s performance in many ways comes across as completely muted.  Now some of it is also down to the script itself.  The story is credited to three writers, with a fourth actually writing the script.  Burton Armus’ script tries to make Okona have this dangerous edge, but there isn’t actually a whole lot of edge to what the character does.  The title of the episode calls him outrageous, but he’s largely portrayed as carefree yet slightly nice.  Since it’s the A-plot it means that so much of “The Outrageous Okona” is an episode that spends so much time on it without nearly enough plot to really satisfy it.

The B-plot of the episode is Data attempting to understand comedy and humor, basically another episode of Data learning something about humanity.  It’s a plot that’s largely paper thin, with a dive into the holodeck so Data can try his hand at standup comedy.  The standup comedy is framed as bad standup, including a random Jerry Lewis impression.  There isn’t much to the subplot, but there are some particularly good scenes between Brent Spiner and Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan.  Goldberg making her second appearance, once again is coming in to make a pretty bad episode better because she’s probably the best actor on this show and Brent Spiner as an actor is always giving it his all.  It’s just a subplot that doesn’t really do anything interesting, Spiner does a silly voice in places and it ends the episode on an original series style quip.

 

Overall, “The Outrageous Okona” in several ways feels like an episode badly impacted by the Writer’s Guild of America strike of 1988, it was one of the first five episodes put into production as soon as the strike ended.  It’s not a previously proposed story as far as I can tell, but it feels like a really outdated idea of what a progressive story is.  That doesn’t mean it comes across as regressive, but as bland which is compounded with being underwritten and poorly directed, leaving just a bad experience.  4/10.