“Allegiance” is written by: Richard Manning and Hans
Beimler and is directed by: Winrich Kolbe.
It was produced under production code 166, was the 18th episode
of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 66th episode
overall, and was broadcast on March 26, 1990.
With any season of television that has 26 episodes
there are going to be episodes that don’t really give you anything. For Star Trek: The Next Generation
that very often is scripts from Richard Manning and Hans Beimler. Manning and Beimler’s written episodes are
all over the place from incredibly strong like “Who Watches The Watchers” and one
of the rewrites of “Yesterday’s Enterprise” but they also had their hands in “Shades
of Grey”. “Allegiance” is their final
script for the show and it can best be described as unnecessary filler. Now filler is not a bad thing, for the medium
of television: it is necessary. It’s the
chance for the characters to be characters so they can develop outside of
whatever overarching plot for those more serialized shows. “Allegiance” doesn’t actually have anything
to say about the characters. The premise
should be gold, Captain Picard is abducted by mysterious aliens and replaced
with a doppelganger as the episode wants to build suspicion among the crew
until the climax where Riker, Worf, Troi, and Crusher succeed in a mutiny
before the real Picard is back. This is
the strongest material in the episode, it is the A-plot after all, but the
script itself does not allow for the suspense to build because the pre-credits
scene is Picard’s abduction. This is an
episode that should be building that tension about what’s happened to Picard
because he is acting strange, but not in any sort of malicious way which is a
fascinating examination of what the crew thinks of Picard. Potentially the episode could have examined
how Picard as a person is far too stiff and ordered for his own good, many of
the “wrong” things fake Picard does include going on a date with Dr. Crusher
and singing a drinking song with the crew.
The singing is explicitly joked about in the closing stinger of the episode
as the most ridiculous aspect, but these scenes are of Patrick Stewart getting
a chance to have a lot of fun in the role.
There is also a lot of secret keeping that provides the sinister aspect of
the episode and the mutiny itself is fantastic, especially how sinister the rest
of the cast play it.
While the A-plot is fine, flawed because the audience
knows that Picard is a doppelganger and we lose tension, but the B-plot is just
absolutely nothing. It is following the
abducted Picard with other, alien prisoners who slowly have to unravel the layers
of their capture. There are trials like
food that one of the prisoners cannot eat and scenarios where they have to work
together, but this is a type of story that at this point feels stock. It’s a stock story that Manning and Beimler
just write almost to fill the runtime so the episode can have something different
to cut back to when the A-plot needs a cutaway.
There also really isn’t enough plot because the characters are clearly
intelligent enough to realize they are in an experiment as is the big twist of
the episode, but that could be fine if the characters are given the time to
shine even if like in this episode they are non-recurring characters. Manning and Beimler provide basic characters
for the episode: there’s an alien that’s a warrior, a Starfleet cadet, and a
pacifist. These are all things that are
perfectly okay for characters, but they are also skin deep which is a
problem. It all means that this big
plotline in the episode is a complete afterthought, something that could be
almost entirely cut without losing anything.
“Allegiance” would be better in practically every way if this were excised
entirely.
Overall, “Allegiance” is one of those episodes that’s
just going to be lost in the shuffle of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s
third season. It’s an example of one of
those episodes that is by no means bad, it is just an hour of television that
exists and is taking stock elements to put on screen to fill time. Patrick Stewart in a double role is clearly
having a good time to cut lose as the doppelganger of Picard and the rest of the
regular cast each get a moment to shine but having a B-plot that does not
actually do anything of note with the stock plot. It’s mediocre.
5/10.
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