Q Who by: Maurice Hurley and directed by: Rob Bowman

 

“Q Who” is written by: Maurice Hurley and is directed by: Rob Bowman.  It was produced under production code 142, was the 16^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, the 42^nd episode overall, and was broadcast on May 8, 1989.

 

It gets quite annoying when there comes an episode where you have to give credit where credit is due.  Maurice Hurley as producer was notorious for several bad decisions and tensions with the cast and crew, eventually leaving the showrunner position at the end of the second season.  As writer, he honestly wasn’t much better: he wrote some of the stronger first season episodes, but also wrote “Hide and Q” and “The Child”, both weak episodes.  “Q Who” is somehow one of the strongest episodes of the season and series so far, Hurley essentially writing Star Trek: The Next Generation as cosmic horror, yet a cosmic horror where we see the unknowable entity beyond comprehension that will bring madness to those who look upon it.  The Borg are perhaps as iconic to Star Trek as the Enterprise and the Klingons, I was certainly aware of what they are before starting this series of reviews years ago.  As presented in “Q Who” they are an unstoppable force that in a brilliant choice actually ignores the Enterprise crew, just continues to collect data in an attempt to expand whatever they are.  Sure they are biomechanical, one particular sequence of horror is actually Riker discovering a nursery of humanoid babies that are going to become Borg, never showing the babies but hearing the human cries.  Their spaceship, a large cube that they directly interface brings up a particular comedic description from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of hanging in the air much in the same way that bricks don’t, but applied to horror.  Instead of a Douglas Adams style satire, Hurley’s script is playing it completely straight.  It’s such an imposing image and the idea is that it has only been getting closer and closer to Federation space.  Q knows this, the first act of the episode is him trying to become part of the Enterprise crew and in retaliation flinging the ship directly in their path as a petulant child, bidding them to escape.

 

Now, this is still an episode of the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so getting the padding out of the way: the episode opens with the introduction of ensign Sonya Gomez, played by Lycia Naff, a Starfleet graduate who is just so gosh darn enthusiastic she flirts with Geordi and spills hot cocoa on Picard.  It’s a perfectly fine character introduction, but it doesn’t actually add much to the episode at hand, just continuing this rather odd trend of opening these episodes with seemingly random character moments that may or may not come back in other episodes.  My personal hypothesis as to why these scenes exist is to get the runtime to the standard 45-minute length when scripts underrun, this is a season that began production in a strike after all and didn’t have nearly as much pre-production time, even this far down the line.  It’s not a terrible sequence, Naff gives a perfectly fine performance, LeVar Burton is great of course, but it is very much just outside and laying groundwork in an episode that’s almost entirely laying groundwork for future stories that is just more interesting.  The Borg after all, in a more insectoid form, were originally intended to be the villains in “The Neutral Zone”, though held over again because of budget and the 1988 Writer’s Guild of America Strike that has affected this and the end of the first season.  “Q Who” feels like it was written as a mid-season finale, meant to potentially be aired before a holiday break with the Borg set to be the big bad in the finale.  Once again, this would be pushed to further seasons, I am aware that the Borg return at the end of the third season, though know nothing about that finale, and the second season finale “Shades of Grey” is a budget savor to fill the episode count and just finish the season.  This is the only time Maurice Hurley actually writes his creations and he is laying a great foundation.

 

Yet, the best elements of “Q Who” isn’t actually down to Maurice Hurley.  It’s down to Patrick Stewart, John de Lancie, and Whoopi Goldberg’s performances and Rob Bowman’s direction.  Bowman’s direction in places almost becomes cinematic, constantly setting up interesting camera angles that enhance the character dynamics.  It is revealed in this episode that Guinan, played by Goldberg, isn’t just a human bartender, but is a refugee from a long lived species that has history with Q.  Q describes Guinan as an “imp”, the history being not a good one and the way Goldberg and de Lancie actually play off each other, if only in one central scene for the episode.  It implies Guinan is devilish and the way Goldberg plays her scenes after this moment is particularly grave, she can only watch as the Borg arrive and give the information that they destroyed and scattered her people.  She only survived because she was on the outskirts of her people and didn’t have to see the Borg destruction first hand, but she can only tell Picard to run.  John de Lancie for his part is clearly aware he has been given better material than “Encounter at Farpoint” and “Hide and Q”.  Despite giving the descriptor to Guinan, Q could also be easily described as an imp: he is devilish and temperamental, embodying traits of classic demons and classic depictions of the fae.  He has a sob story that he thinks Picard is going to take in, and Picard doesn’t.  There is an intervention from Q at the climax so the Enterprise can continue on, though with the problem that the Borg is now actively aware of them, and it very much reads as a fae having the time to calm down and realize its own mistake.  De Lancie is also basically flirting with everyone else on screen, watching as Patrick Stewart as Picard refuse to give the creature an inch, yet falling to Picard’s own faults of wishing to continually represent the Federation and explore and poke the giant cube in space.

 

Overall, “Q Who” is fantastic.  It’s the third episode this season and of the show overall that I can downright say is fantastic.  The imagery of the episode has entered just the general pop culture sphere, the performances are perfect, and a lot of the issues in Maurice Hurley’s script outside of the opening act, are largely pasted over with some fantastic performances.  It’s an episode that knows that it has some stellar performers in Stewart, de Lancie, and of course Whoopi Goldberg, that need to be centered.  “Q Who” is a mission statement for the show that there’s this feeling that every other writer will pick up and run with except the show runner so the third season can really shine and grow.  9/10.