Remember Me by: Lee Sheldon and directed by: Cliff Bole

 

“Remember Me” is written by: Lee Sheldon and is directed by: Cliff Bole.  It was produced under production code 179, was the 5^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 79^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 22, 1990.

 

“Remember Me” reads like a commentary on the difficulties women face in healthcare.  Healthcare, at the very least the American healthcare system, has a tendency to be incredibly paternalistic, reducing and ignoring their concerns to their detriment.  “Remember Me” is a slow decent into madness for Dr. Beverly Crusher as people on the Enterprise disappear and only she seems to notice it happening.  The rest of the crew are unaware and are slowly picked off one by one until she is left with Picard and then alone on a ghost ship.  Lee Sheldon’s script is clearly aware of the relationships between the characters, Crusher being given nothing but sympathy as the rest of the crew sees her condition worsening despite their incredulous attitude to her ramblings.  It’s clear that Sheldon is not intent on portraying the gaslighting of women, instead approaching the episode as examining what it’s like to be isolated and alone, lingering in the final act with Crusher on the Enterprise with nobody else.  As a plot, it should not work nearly as well as it does.  Sheldon forgoes the A-plot/B-plot structure in favor of near exclusively focusing on Dr. Crusher’s descent into madness, only cutting away once everyone is away so the audience can be filled in on what’s happening to Crusher through fairly well-structured technobabble and a reappearance of the Traveler.  Giving it a technobabble laden explanation does undercut some of the tone that “Remember Me” is going for, but it also has to be confined to an ongoing episode of television, fitting in more closely with an episode of The Twilight Zone for much of its runtime.

 

The strength of “Remember Me” rests entirely on the shoulders of Gates McFadden as Dr. Crusher.  Previous reviews have discussed Star Trek: The Next Generation’s tendency to underwrite its female characters, but that is not present here.  Crusher, having already been given quite a bit of good material in this recent run of episodes, gets an exterior life complete with old mentors and friends.  It’s integral to making the episode work that the first person to disappear is an old mentor of Crusher’s, an elderly doctor whom Crusher is immediately worried has been injured when he disappears.  Structurally starting with a guest star disappearing keeps the initial tone light, there are easy rationalizations as to how Dr. Quaice may have either gone back to Starbase without telling Crusher, even if the implication is that the crew thinks it’s all in Crusher’s mind.  McFadden’s performance throughout the episode is one of her best.  Clearly enjoying the material, McFadden keeps Crusher put together until just over halfway through the episode, making the switch when she realizes that Wesley is eventually going to disappear.  The disappearances of her friends and colleagues do affect her mental state, but it is her son that pushes her over the edge.  Crusher also does not have an tearful breakdown as you would expect from how Star Trek: The Next Generation has portrayed female characters.  It is emotional, but McFadden gets to play the part as more manic than anything else before pulling herself together to be alone and deduce what is happening.  Cliff Bole shoots these sequences particularly well, alternating between wide shots and close ups for juxtaposition of the loneliness with Crusher’s resolve to discover things.

 

The audience getting information outside of Crusher’s reality, for that’s essentially what this is a reality in a warp bubble that was slowly taking her away from reality, is perhaps where the episode is weakest.  This is not do to poor performances, focusing on Wesley is a particularly good note from Sheridan, with Wil Wheaton also getting good material, but because it runs in parallel with Crusher working things out the climax is repetitive.  It’s not fully committing to getting rid of a B-plot entirely as there is clearly a way to make this an exclusively Crusher focused episode.  It’s especially a shame since having a more concrete explanation in these scenes with the other characters does minimize some of the horror when Crusher is alone.  While the vortex phenomena are largely portrayed with smoke, wind, and glowing lights, Bole is quite good at making them feel in line with the loneliness.  The lighting is standard Enterprise set lighting but shifted ever so slightly so there can be an emphasis on long shadows and empty spaces.  The tension just does not sustain with the introduction of reality into the episode and it almost seems Sheridan did not trust the production to commit to focusing on just one character or the audience to follow what Crusher was deducing.

 

Overall, “Remember Me” succeeds at giving a female Star Trek: The Next Generation character a strong character piece.  It’s particularly satisfying to see after Gates McFadden in the first season of the show had voiced complaints and temporarily left for a year because her voice wasn’t being heard.  While the commentary on the female experience is likely unintentional, that does not mean it is any less powerful with what is on-screen.  The episode excels particularly at the horrors of loneliness and being unable to trust your closest friends.  8/10.

The Domino Effect by: David Bishop

 

David Bishop’s previous novels Who Killed Kennedy? and Amorality Tale were both examinations of the Third Doctor’s era, deconstructing the actions and motivations of UNIT and how the Third Doctor as a character works.  The Domino Effect is Bishop’s crack at an Eighth Doctor Adventure, continuing the arc dealing with alternate Earths and hints at the multiverse in a novel that can be kindly summarized as a standard alternate history story.  The premise is that a mysterious force has changed the history of the Earth by killing or indefinitely imprisoning those responsible for the development of computers which has created a knock on effect of a fascist British Empire ruled by racism and xenophobia as an extension of imperialism.  The big twist of the novel is once again that Sabbath is behind things, attempting to collapse the multiverse on a point, the novel ending with the reveal that the day isn’t actually saved and the multiverse is on the brink of collapse.  It’s a great last page cliffhanger and does create some forward motion for the series which has been struggling with actually going anywhere as Sabbath has been an antagonist for over 10 books, on and off, and only now is slowly moving into a point where an ending is coming.  There’s almost something there of Bishop not revealing much of the nature of this alternate history until interludes between the rather long chapters, chapters intentionally framed on a specific date, though the first being the murder of Charles Babbage among others does really give the game away.  This becomes an issue when the actual worldbuilding of the present does not actually do much to have computers or computing factor into the plot.  Alan Turing is reintroduced, in this timeline being prisoner in the Tower of London and often on the Doctor’s mind, but his actual contribution is for someone for Fitz to speak to in captivity.

 

Turing’s presence in the Doctor’s mind is an interesting reflection on The Touring Test and there’s this implication of the Doctor having extreme guilt, being motivated not to change history because there is no guarantee that this is actually a wrong timeline.  That and the Doctor is implied here to have had an attraction to Turing of some sort, not necessarily sexual but very likely romantic.  Several supporting characters in The Domino Effect actually infer the Doctor as bisexual which is one of the few interesting ideas here even if it isn’t explored.  The Domino Effect’s plot does not actually do much with the world not having computers, structurally it’s the Doctor, Anji, and Fitz being mistaken for terrorists in the aftermath of an explosion.  They are separated, Fitz captured, and the Doctor and Anji stuck to navigate a hostile Earth.  Anji is the worst served by this novel, the fascist state of Great Britain is racially segregated and Bishop basically has every supporting character denigrate her in some way.  It gets so bad to a point that the Doctor tells her not to be so on edge because not everyone asking where she’s from is interested in her race which is a dialogue exchange I could not believe I was reading in this book.  Bishop also just gives her nothing to work with, this is the third novel in a row where it is clear that she wishes to leave the TARDIS and is being strung along on adventures because of the alternate histories mean she cannot go home.  This is not entirely Bishop’s fault, but it is a plot motivation that has become repetitive and since he does not give her much more, not even examining the underlying racism and xenophobia on display instead just portraying it as a bad timeline, she falls flat.  Her best moments are when she is in conflict with the Doctor, building upon previous novels.  The Doctor is also odd as throughout he has these dizzy and fainting spells that while explained in the end, are indicative of just how repetitive the novel can be.  There is almost a lack of enough plot to get through the required page count.

 

Overall, The Domino Effect is a novel that at best is mediocre.  Things improve when Sabbath actually appears because Bishop can’t help but delight in writing a villain, and the Doctor’s guilt is at least something for the novel to explore.  There’s almost a sense that Fitz and Anji are supplementary to requirements, Fitz featuring basically as the MacGuffin.  Bishop also lacks any real examination of the setting, having the Doctor be cruel to how Anji is being treated and not really grappling with the need for violence against an oppressive state.  For a novel with quite the evocative cover, The Domino Effect is the second underwhelming Eighth Doctor Adventure in a row. 4/10.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Tears of the Nameless by: George Mann

 

George Mann wrote Tears of the Nameless at a time where he didn’t know whether or not he would live to see it through, something revealed in the acknowledgments at the end of the novel.  This adds a grave tone to the novel, retrospectively, as while The High Republic as an initiative was far from one author’s vision, Tears of the Nameless is very much about the Jedi in nothing but a precarious place.  The Nihil have the upper hand and while there have been several parties slowly advancing on their enemies, the High Republic and the Jedi have always felt on the backfoot and ready for a fall.  George Mann as a person is writing this novel through the idea that he might actually fall to a brain tumor.  The Nameless themselves can almost be read as some of Mann’s own fears of what could be killing him, even if Mann examines the fact that calling them Nameless paradoxically gives them a name within the book.  The acknowledgments don’t actually say whether or not the lesion is benign or a malignant tumor, though the implication is that it is benign as Mann describes partway through the writing process being able to add levity back into the book.

 

That retrospective tone means Tears of the Nameless becomes a book about hope returning, something great for the young adult audience that this is aimed at.  Mann, however, despite getting lighter in tone as the book goes on actually ends the novel with these bittersweet notes that work as the characters really haven’t won the day.  They have gained knowledge, some of that knowledge being contradictory and confusing when it pertains to certain characters, but knowledge nevertheless.  It brings this in line with the other books from Phase III of The High Republic as being often more personal stories for the characters outside of the larger Nihil and Nameless plots.  Impressive considering Mann likes to include a rather large cast of characters from Vernestra Rwoh to the crew of the Vessel with several added cameos.  It’s many of the returning characters that while not bringing the novel down, are perhaps the least explored here.  It isn’t so much as Mann not wishing to advance plot threads of pre-established characters, he doesn’t really introduce new characters here and a major supporting character was an integral part of Path of Deceit, but includes almost too many characters for them all to be established.

 

This is slightly odd as the book is split into two parts and the first half is the slower half.  It’s all perfectly serviceable setup and focused largely on connecting the reader with Padawan Amadeo Azzazzo, a character who has appeared in the publishing initiative but this is really his book over anyone else.  The actual plot builds to a secret mission with the intent of capturing one of the Nameless alive for study.  The buildup before this intended mission is revealed is slightly weaker than when we get onto the mission, this is where the characters become their most contemplative.  Doubt creeping into one’s convictions is the novel’s major theme.  Amadeo as a character is largely upbeat and caring protagonist even if his relationship with his master becomes fraught with worry and strain, but he is essentially the only one.  He is paralleled with Jedi Raeth Silas who is dealing with the loss of his master and thus his own doubts in the nature of the Jedi teachings.  While he has a new Master, one with whom he eventually can confide in and rely on.  The representation of doubt that springs to the forefront and ties Tears of the Nameless together is Azlin Rell, the fallen Jedi from Path of Deceit (among other books and audio dramas).  He’s essentially the representation of temptation and forbidden knowledge, almost more so than the Nihil and the Nameless as this novel is one that is reflective on the High Republic as an organization through its characters.  The doubt is also an interesting aspect as by the end there is this almost beautiful uncertainty as to the alignment of the Nameless, they are living creatures after all and there is a sense that they are not inherently evil.  Even for his sinister nature Azlin Rell is a fallen Jedi and not a Sith.  Mann is active in making the role of antagonist for Tears of the Nameless to be less clear cut than some other novels, just this once, to allow the characters to really grow.

 

Overall, reading Tears of the Nameless was actually quite the nice return to Star Wars: The High Republic even if it is slightly weaker than the last installment I read from George Mann.  When it works the best is when it is continuing individual characters as examination of the entire Jedi and High Republic as a setting as well as sewing specific seeds of doubt.  The second half of the novel in particular is an exhilarating ride after a first half where the buildup is just slightly overstuffed to really smooth out.  Mann is putting a lot of himself in the page in a way that you can tell even if you don’t read the acknowledgments at the end.  8/10.

Suddenly Human by: John Whelpley and Jeri Taylor from a story by: Ralph Phillips and directed by: Gabrielle Beaumont

 

“Suddenly Human” is written by: John Whelpley and Jeri Taylor, from a story by: Ralph Phillips, and is directed by: Gabrielle Beaumont.  It was produced under production code 176, was the 4^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 78^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 15, 1990.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation’s fourth season has thus far built itself around ideas of family and identity.  From “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” and “Family” examining Picard’s assimilation into the Borg as something that rocks who he is fundamentally, to “Family” and “Brothers” exploring the strained family dynamics including atypical family relationships.  “Suddenly Human” is an episode that should fit right in with where the show is currently going.  The premise is the Enterprise finds a ship of four Talarian teenagers and one human.  The human is an orphan who was adopted by the Talarians and has grown up with their culture and customs, he no longer sees himself as a human being, has no connection to his remaining human family as his grandmother is an Admiral in Starfleet.  The conflict of the episode is whether or not Jono should stay with his Talarian father or be returned to his human family.  Now, where I will definitively give the episode credit is that it ends with Jono making the decision for himself and the implication is that the Enterprise crew are in the wrong for wishing to impose human culture and force that culture onto the child.  But to get to that point, this is one of those incredibly awkward scripts where it’s clear that the attempts are being made to handle difficult themes, taking inspiration from stories like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.  Stories about people being raised outside of their own species has a long history, however, the different species is often coded to be from a different race or culture.  Burroughs was writing during periods of colonialism and that is a general angle that is left over in a piece like “Suddenly Human”.

 

The issues with this type of story is the coding of a white man’s burden to civilize a savage, lost white child.  Jono in many ways falls in this stereotype, much of “Suddenly Human” pairs Jono with Picard who is meant to act as a role model to the kid because the Talarians are a patriarchal and misogynistic society.  Jono won’t give women any sort of respect, only being loyal to a vessel’s captain so in this case it is Picard.  There is also the very odd decision to make the fact that Jono was adopted by the Talarian captain Endar, played by Sherman Howard, as a mid-episode twist.  The Enterprise crew is forcing the child into the box of a human being, arguably not seeing Jono’s personhood until the point at which he starts to assimilate into human society on the surface about halfway through the episode (that and he has traumatic flashbacks to the death of his parents).  The crew doesn’t see Talarians as people in a way that could be a commentary on how the liberally minded can still have biases towards outsiders who have cultures that have distasteful aspects, for instance the tendency to not see people of the Middle East as people due to similar misogyny and homophobia, however this isn’t evident by the text.  The text of the episode says that the crew is wrong in the end, Jono does get to chose to leave, but there isn’t any examination of Talarian culture, in many ways it’s similar to Klingon culture but is designated as having tensions with the Federation.  The ending gets to the right place in the end, but without actually examining much of the why these are the correct decisions, leaving the tropes just tropes without examination.

 

For his part, Chad Allen as Jono is a really compelling performance.  He takes on the alien customs and plays them without hesitation.  Jono feels like a teenager, which is interesting since adults often struggle with this kind of character.  Jono’s breakdown is particularly effective.  Plus the ending of the episode does work, even if it doesn’t quite make up for a lot of what the episode is doing.  The biggest problem with the episode, however, is actually an issue of intertextuality.  This is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where our main characters are often written as out of character.  Picard is the one who comes out the best, but even he has the issue of being saddled with a child to show he might be a good parent, something he isn’t interested in, and playing it as someone who hasn’t dealt with children reads as if the writers have forgotten Wesley exists.  The biggest offender of the episode is actually Worf as it’s forgotten that his own upbringing is quite similar to Jono, and he is written with a lack of empathy for the kid in the very few scenes they share.  These issues are clearly down to the fact that this is an episode written by three people who seem to be unfamiliar with Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jeri Taylor likely being the one to come out of it the best as she became a producer immediately after production for the two episodes before this (they were produced out of order).  Ralph Phillips is likely the root of the issues, he is given the story credit and a cursory glance indicates this is his only credit for both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek as a franchise, John Whelpley at least having some connection with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

 

Overall, “Suddenly Human” is not an episode without potential, but on screen there is clearly a sense of too many cooks in a single kitchen next door to the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The ideas are interesting and it is at the very least an episode with its heart in the right place in terms of examining aspects of a teenager’s identity, but the applicability is messy as the text brings up several ideas from adoption to cultural identity to even child abuse (the aspect most glossed over in the episode), while the main characters who are framed as wrong are sadly out of character.  Being out of character doesn’t actively ruin the episode, but it does mean that obvious parallels to characters are not made use of and the tropes at the heart of the episode are left unexamined.  It’s an episode that ultimately says very little, leaving ideas on the surface which weakens it greatly.  4/10.

The Emerald City of Oz by: L. Frank Baum

 

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up would receive it’s American debut in 1905.  Its place in literature is an integral text in the understanding of adolescence and the need for children to grow up: at the end of the play Wendy Darling takes her brothers back home while the emotionally stunted Peter Pan stays behind in Neverland.  Peter Pan does not leave fairyland, he never grows up and when he returns again to take her back she refuses to go because being stuck in childhood means he forgets things left behind.  He is stuck.  The Emerald City of Oz, published in 1910 is a different take on leaving fairyland.  L. Frank Baum proposes that perhaps fairyland is a better place to be than the real world, that sometimes childlike logic and especially kindness can have a better outcome than the trials of adulthood and society.  The Emerald City of Oz, it is important to note, isn’t entirely taking on a child who refuses to grow up, but adults who have lost their inner child.  The inciting incident of The Emerald City of Oz is that Dorothy’s Uncle Henry has lapsed payments on the farmhouse, rebuilt after the cyclone in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Henry and Em don’t believe Dorothy actually went to Oz multiple times, were happy to entertain her stories since despite disappearing she always managed to turn up again safe and sound.  They are adults, adults don’t believe in lands of make believe where everybody gets along with everybody else and nobody actually has to do work that they don’t want to.  They get the grand tour of the country, encountering wonderous people from living bread, to living utensils, and of course cameos from the most famous of the Oz characters.

 

Going to the fairyland of Oz means that the grey characters of Kansas have to relearn exactly what it means to be a child.  It also means an escape from having to fend for themselves.  The farm being taken away because of bad crops and economic depression is explicitly stated in the book to be a problem of capitalism as a system.  Baum does not give faces to the members of the bank which is an important detail, dehumanizing something as grand as the system despite the adults initially denying the existence of fairyland as a utopia where everybody is provided for.  Baum also does not forget the bank taking the farm, when the Nome King invades Dorothy does propose everybody go back to the farm so Baum can make a point that a good society isn’t one where you abandon your fellow people in times of hardship.  Aunt Em and Uncle Henry maintain disbelief even while on the road throughout the Land of Oz, though Baum goes through lengths to show how this disbelief unravels slowly.  He keeps their reactions at this very adult distance of people who won’t deny the reality of their eyes, but still have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing these fantastic things.  There is also a point that life should be lived doing things, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry do want to find some work in Oz even if it isn’t for money.  They cannot spend their days sitting around doing nothing, even traveling is doing something like building community with different peoples of Oz.  Also the Wizard of Oz can now do actual magic which is the closest thing to a character in Oz getting character development so far.

 

The different places and peoples of Oz is following the same structure as Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz, becoming repetitive just before Baum gives Dorothy a slightly longer adventure being lost from the party.  Bunbury is a fun diversion, but the real parallel is Baum swapping adventures with the protagonists by following the Nome King, given the name Roquat the Red, allying himself with other creatures who are not deadly afraid of eggs.  General Guph is the Nome sent out to recruit allies, but rhetorically this gives The Emerald City of Oz this little edge of danger, a ticking clock that there is an invasion coming that the protagonists don’t actually know about until the final act.  It is a plot that also follows the structure of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz, but in reverse.  There’s actually a lot of humor in this telling, however, as Guph often has to make these lofty promises to other armies of land and people under subjugation.  Baum positions the Nome King as an authoritarian once again despite some of the humor, he is wicked because he would take away the autonomy away from the Ozites.  Guph promises some of the allied armies with as many as 20,000 slaves which is particularly fascinating as Baum is an author who lambasted war in general, this book concluding without bloodshed but trickery.  This does contradict his views of the settler colonialism of the American west of course, but people are complicated and often hypocritical in his views.  There is implication that slavery is worse than death, something that likely would have been instilled in Baum in childhood growing up in the Union during the American Civil War.

 

Overall, The Emerald City of Oz is a return to form after The Road to Oz.  It is Baum’s attempt at replicating Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”, to say goodbye and go out with a bang while actively being in conversation with what it means to go to fairyland and away from reality.  The Emerald City of Oz has several ideas around community building and making fairyland a place where people are allowed to live together, safely, free from the oppressive nature of selfish rule and by extension money.  It works best when it eschews the established formula, even if it does this by paralleling the formula between protagonists and antagonists.  Not quite the perfect return to form, but a very close to it.  8/10.

Brothers by: Rick Berman and directed by: Rob Bowman

 

“Brothers” is written by: Rick Berman and is directed by: Rob Bowman.  It was produced under production code 177, was the 3^rd episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 77^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 8, 1990.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation is Brent Spiner’s world and we are just observing it from the outside.  “Brothers” is Season 4’s first Data focused episode and the first episode written by Rick Berman, the executive producer who would be responsible for Star Trek as a franchise after Gene Roddenberry until the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005.  Berman is a controversial figure, believing Star Trek needed to be fully adherent to the vision of Gene Roddenberry, that is through the lens of the things that Gene Roddenberry put on-screen during the original series and the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation when he was alive, not necessarily the philosophy behind many of those decisions.  That is largely a discussion for other episodes when he is more in charge fully, but “Brothers” is an episode that shows Berman isn’t incompetent when it comes to telling a story.  “Brothers” is an episode that asks Brent Spiner to play a triple role: Data is taken over by a signal bringing him to the hideaway of his creator, Dr. Noonian Soong with his brother Lore following soon after, all to explore essentially a family dynamic between two brothers at odds while an oblivious and almost selfish father who sees his creations as objects.

 

Soong fits the stereotypical mad scientist: he’s an old man with frizzy white hair stuck in a home that is also a laboratory.  He’s been hiding on this planet for years and the episode very much positions him as this absent father who does not really care for his creations.  He cannot see either Data or Lore’s perspectives on life: early on in their conversations he expected Data to follow in his own footsteps and become a scientist instead of entering Starfleet and wasn’t even aware Lore was “active”.  By the end of the episode, Soong doesn’t actually learn the error of his ways or anything, he brought Data back to give him emotions and essentially complete his life’s work which is thwarted by Lore taking the emotion chip for himself.  That twist is particularly fantastic because narratively it is Lore acting out, almost rightfully, to trick a father who does not actually care about him.  He cares about Data, even asks Data to reconcile with Lore on his own deathbed seeing an error at the very last minute of his life, not properly, and the episode is aware of this because Spiner as Data gets the final shot contemplating his brother silently which is genuinely fantastic.  Spiner as Soong, really playing up the madness of a man who cares about one of his children and almost nothing else.  Spiner as Lore is also picking up right where the performance in “Datalore” left off, and because there isn’t actually a big scheme to take over the Enterprise or anything here, just eventually get that chip.  Berman’s script is one that is reliant on dialogue to communicate the story and obviously the performance of one actor.  Rob Bowman is in the director’s chair and his dynamic sense of blocking guides the heavy dialogue sequences while juggling the triple role.  There is a tendency in drama to employ a technique called backacting where you will have two actors having a dialogue scene with their faces towards the camera.  Because of the triple role, Bowman cannot rely on that, instead often times we’ll keep Data or Lore in shadows while the focus is on Soong before setting up reverse shots with Soong completely out of frame.  This is likely because of the different makeup job on Soong being more difficult to recreate with a stand in since it’s a new makeup, while the Data makeup is for the team been distilled down to a science.  Visually this does make the episode surprisingly dynamic, especially with Bowman also having the camera move through scenes with several walk and talks to keep the dialogue moving even on a smaller set.

 

The important plot point here is that both Data and Lore were summoned by Soong against their wills, the first act of the story is this horrific sequence of Data outside of his control performing a mutiny on the Enterprise.  This mutiny is quiet, starting by making life support fail with the pretense of an accident so the rest of the crew abandons the bridge and then locks the rest of the crew out of the controls.  He does this silently, Spiner not being allowed to change his face enough but the minute expressions just add to the uncanny valley of the character and the danger of the situation.  The script also adds this secondary tension of a child on the Enterprise in quarantine because of a prank of his brother’s, an obvious parallel to the Data/Lore relationship, This is the B-plot of the episode and the real shame is that these brothers are dropped largely after the first act, only to come back at the very end, because there isn’t actually a whole lot of drama there, but it really should be resolved before we get into the meat of the Soong plot.  It’s actually quite nice to see Dr. Crusher be a doctor and it once again allows Gates McFadden material to be a full character, even if the role of doctor bleeds slightly into role of mother as well.  The tension is that the sick child could die if the Enterprise doesn’t get to the nearest Starbase because of a parasite acquired from eating a plant cultivated on the ship after a prank gone wrong.  It’s an effective B-plot, made more so by Michael Piller’s inclusion of Lore in the plot as that wasn’t in Berman’s original script, reflecting that Berman is a producer over a writer.

 

Overall, “Brothers” is less an examination of brothers, but of the issues a father can create in their children from the viewpoint of being absent, an added layer that writer Rick Berman likely wasn’t entirely intending to be there.  What’s elevating a good script is Brent Spiner’s ability to play three parts at once and carry the entire episode on his back.  8/10.

The Satan Pit by: Matt Jones

 

The Satan Pit was written by: Matt Jones, based on his episodes “The Impossible Planet” and the episode of the same name.  It was the 202^nd story to be novelized by BBC Books.

 

It’s no secret that the BBC decision to continue novelizations of the revival is one mainly aimed at the fans of Doctor Who.  The home media market already started to make the novelizations at least partially obsolete in the late 1980s, and by the time of the revival in 2005 and streaming video being just around the corner, there was no reason to really continue them.  That means that often the best of these revival novelizations do something to set themselves apart from just a standard retelling of the original episode.  Matt Jones’ The Satan Pit takes the approach of not centering the Doctor and Rose, instead telling the story near exclusively after the fact from the perspective of the three survivors with one interlude, placed just after the adaptation of “The Impossible Planet” from the perspectives of the detective and corporate representative interrogating our protagonists, and one scene from the perspective of the Doctor for the actual confrontation with the Beast.  That latter scene is the closest the novel gets to Jones just taking the script and translating it into straight prose, though he is very much interested in exploring the Doctor’s love of Rose Tyler through subtle amendments to the dialogue tags, channeling David Tennant’s performance into the prose.  This should annoy me, the Doctor in my mind should be an asexual character, however, Jones sells it particularly well because it’s one of those romances where “I love you” isn’t actually said.  There’s also the insecurity that the Doctor isn’t able to get Rose back home, he did promise her mother and it is eating him up from the inside.  Jones makes it explicit that the Beast is psychically enhancing everybody’s fears and trauma’s on the base, including the Doctor emphasizing the Doctor as fallable but not human.  His mind may work differently, but he is against something far bigger than him.

 

Jones is also careful about when he gives the Doctor his scene, instead of putting it in chronological order, it’s moved towards the end.  Ida, Danny, and Zach have actually finished their individual interrogations and we as the audience see a portion of their trial.  For the reader this has the effect of a mysterious resolution, theoretically we don’t know exactly how they got out, especially Ida who was unconscious for the climax of the story.  There was a possibility of ending it before the trial, and letting the audience not know the fate of the three, even if Big Finish Productions have brought them all back in their Torchwood range.  The trial sequence does make up for it in general.  Jones brings in ideas from “Planet of the Ood”, that the Ood are actually freed by the Doctor and Donna in between the end of “The Satan Pit” and the survivors making it back to Earth, and The End of Time, with the psychic link of the Ood to the Doctor specifically near the end of his life and the visit to people the Tenth Doctor had previously met included as an epilogue.

 

The Satan Pit’s worldbuilding is its biggest success.  Because we are in the heads of the supporting characters, many of the scenes that are just the Doctor and Rose that couldn’t be overheard are either omitted completely or are trimmed down to what could theoretically be on security cameras.  This makes the pair more distant and the supporting characters, especially Ida and Danny, as our real humans here.  Their traumas are always just below the surface of the mind, the Beast bringing them there for as long as they’ve been on the base, even before the beginning of the story.  It also adds this pressure of a society not so much on the brink of collapse, but one built on a capitalistic empire.  The interrogations take the events of the story as ridiculous, something cooked up between the three survivors for some unknown and frankly impossible game.  Jones uses it to reflect the current system of capitalism, stretched quite thin while being under the thumb of corporations who only care about the capital and not the human life.  Jones also posits an almost religious like fanaticism forming around the Doctor because of the destruction of property which while slightly silly feels almost like a commentary on certain aspects of internet culture.

 

Overall, The Satan Pit is a riveting read.  There is a sense that Jones isn’t actually writing for Doctor Who fans, which makes sense as he has written books that are meant to be for the general public even if they were technically spin-offs.  Swapping out the protagonists means the novel is a fundamentally different experience, with the focus on different aspects of the story and the society in which it is set and reflecting upon.  It changes much of the horror to work in the prose setting over two episodes of television.  10/10.