Despite suffering from some of the same fundamental problems as many of the other episodes of the season, this baby immediately strikes one as a very different sort of terrible episode from its predecessors. It’s certainly a very odd installment; while not nearly as painful to watch as the first three post-pilot episodes, it is totally pointless, and its “plot” meanders maybe even more weirdly than that of “The Last Outpost.” It also features several instances of characters behaving like complete idiots and/or in ways that make absolutely no sense—and, as usual, it contains a story element (the Enterprise transporting unruly delegates to a peace conference on a planet with a meaningful name) that is all too obviously ripped off from an original series episode. Why did they keep doing this?
The basic structure of the episode is awkward and weird. Its main plot is kicked off by the consequences of a brief stop to investigate an anomaly while en route to a peace conference that we never get around to arriving at (because it’s merely a pretext for the derivative, comic-relief subplot). Rather than focusing much real attention on the anomaly, though, the Enterprise (and thus the episode) regretfully passes it by in its putative haste to get to the conference, only to double back to the anomaly later—which all feels very random. The episode tries to pretend that the anomaly is insignificant and peripheral, yet at the same time makes it completely obvious to the audience that it is the source of the problems that soon start cropping up on the ship. Relatedly, it’s hard to grasp what the episode is going for when it puts the characters through the paces of trying to figure out what’s going on while all along the audience, privy to information that the characters are not, knows perfectly well what is happening. In spite of the latter, the episode still seems to want to create a sense of mystery and suspense—or at least, I think it does (?). The actual consequence of all of this, though, is a profound sense that all of the goings-on are really just about killing running time.
The meandering plot’s eventual destination—the energy entity making its way to Picard, and the “two of them” deciding to beam out into the anomaly—has (like the episode as a whole) no apparent point, and makes no sense whatsoever. An attempt is made to sell us on the idea that the entity and the captain are compatible because of the latter’s yearning for exploration and discovery, but it’s totally bogus; I don’t buy for a second either the idea that any part of Picard wants to leave his life and career behind to become a free-floating energy being, or that he would ever take seriously the notion that such a thing could be possible. Also problematic is that the episode provides the audience with no basis or reason for caring at all about the energy entity itself; it wants the thing to be a character, of sorts, but this doesn’t work at all. Meanwhile, all the question-the-captain, should-we-mutiny-or-not soul searching that the rest of the characters go through once the entity has taken control of Picard is played in a way that rings totally false. They have just been talking, before Picard is taken over, about the fact that both Worf and Crusher had earlier been “invaded” by some kind of foreign entity—yet when the captain starts behaving strangely, they discuss their worries and fears about what might be up with him without even mentioning the possibility that he might not be in control of his actions because of the presence of that same foreign entity! Picard deflects their questions about his strange orders by suggesting that a captain is not under any obligation to “explain every order,” but no one points out that in this particular case, there is plenty of time and no apparent reason for him not to explain the very clearly contrary-to-mission order to turn the ship around that he has given. And then, most inexplicably of all: After a couple of scenes in which the captain has been shutting down all questioning of his strange behavior and totally insisting that everything is normal, he suddenly, out of the blue, just up and admits to Dr. Crusher (for no apparent reason) that there is another being “in there” besides himself. And yet, after this happens, Riker and the others still continue to behave as if there is no clear evidence of anything being amiss, and consequently nothing that anyone can legitimately do about the situation!
Ultimately, Picard/the entity do something amazingly stupid, it doesn’t work out, the captain is (somehow) rescued, and the whole asinine incident is then quickly dismissed. The idea that the joining of the captain and the entity “didn’t work out there,” but that the captain nevertheless somehow still exists as some of sort of conscious “energy pattern,” is utterly silly, and the use of the transporter to restore him to physical form, of course, totally removes any doubt about said device’s ability to function as a failsafe that could prevent anyone from ever having to permanently die—but of course, no one bothers to notice this, since it would be a terrible idea dramatically. It’s also baffling why the energy-being version of the captain has to inhabit the transporter in order for it to work, especially since the rematerialized captain is then very explicitly established to be a pre-beamout “version” of himself who therefore doesn’t remember any of what has happened. But whatever; the larger question in all of this is why any of it was written, performed, or filmed, as it totally fails to be entertaining in any way.
There are, to be fair, some interesting character moments on the sidelines of the episode. Worf and Geordi have a nice moment in the “sensor maintenance” room (in which Geordi again acts like the engineer that he will become in future seasons), for instance—but much more memorably, there is the whole business of Data’s discovery of Sherlock Holmes. The latter is significant in that it will become a recurring motif in future episodes and showcases an interesting side of Data’s personality, as well as in that while playing it up, Brent Spiner is able to demonstrate a bit of his latent acting talent, and Data actually comes alive a bit as a unique character (albeit one who is play-acting as someone else). On the other hand, both Data and the episode display an annoying lack of any sense of the appropriate time and place for this sort of playfulness—which makes Picard’s irritable impatience with it understandable, on the one hand, even while the way that he handles it makes him rather unlikable on the other hand (similar to his reaction to Data’s distraction with the damn finger puzzle two episodes back). Also, I can’t really give credit where due for glimmers of merit in character moments without also noting how grating the scenes of Wesley being all whiny about no one understanding how smart he is are. Finally, I want to throw in a comment about how stupid the Picard/Riker “look how far humanity has come” scene, in which they profess not to understand why warring peoples fight their petty little wars, is. For starters, trying to show how enlightened humans are by having almost every non-human guest character be an over-the-top, caricatured savage (like this episode’s peace delegates), and by having main characters adopt smug and condescending attitudes of distaste toward said characters, simply does not work. (This episode’s attempt to pretend that the Anticans and the Selay are serious candidates for Federation membership is a bit of a head-scratcher.) But even putting all that aside—Picard is especially baffled here by the backward stupidity of warring over “economic systems.” This was no doubt intended as provocative social commentary (I suppose aimed at Cold War US-Soviet animosity), but I have to ask: What exactly is so baffling about the fact that how societies distribute resources among their members is sometimes highly contentious? Isn’t this precisely the sort of thing that one would most expect to be a source of conflict among peoples?