Dark Page (⭑⭑)

TNG’s final trip down Lwaxana Lane™ is fairly painless, as these things go, but (surprise) still isn’t actually very good. The closest the show ever came to making an actually “good” Lwaxana Troi episode was “Half a Life” back in season four; “Dark Page” lacks the (relative) strengths of that episode (which I still only gave three stars), but does resemble it to the extent of presenting the elder Troi as somewhat real and relatable, and in general not being cringe-inducingly awful in the way that most of the other episodes featuring her are. There’s very little actual story here, but what the episode offers up is at least reasonably watchable. So…that’s something, I guess.

So: Counselor Troi had an older sister who died in a tragic accident when Deanna was an infant, and her mother hid this from her (and repressed her own memory of it, I guess). That, and only that, is the “point” of “Dark Page.” I’ll give the episode some credit for managing to make me feel something when this is revealed, and particularly in the scene where Lwaxana breaks down with grief and guilt about it. Also, I’ll grant that there’s some deftness to the way she is written throughout the episode; the idea of her memories of Kestra being triggered by Hedril is conveyed with some subtlety, and things like Lwaxana’s seemingly out-of-the-blue exclamation earlier in the episode that she doesn’t know what she would do if anything ever happened to Deanna make sense once you know what’s subconsciously (sorry, metaconsciously) plaguing her. Hell, a case could even be made that the revelation about Kestra helps to contextualize some things about Lwaxana, and how she has always related to Deanna, in general. (After writing this, I discovered that my favorite commenter on Jammer’s site, William B, offers an interesting critique of this very notion, but I think I stand by it. People can react to trauma in all kinds of ways, after all.) In my view, then, this addition to the back story of these two characters can be judged as successful, in that it seems believable rather than feeling retconned, and it maybe even provides a bit of insight into what made Lwaxana (a generally over-the-top, and usually obnoxious and unlikable, character) the way she is. As ever, though, the problem is that I just don’t care all that much. Lwaxana Troi is not one of TNG’s main characters; she’s a recurring side character who, if and when she appears on the show, ought to be there for the purpose of elucidating things about Deanna, who is one of the show’s regular characters. In this, alas, the episode completely fails. Deanna is stunned and intrigued, as anyone would be, to learn that she had a sister she never knew about—but, precisely because she in fact never knew about this, the revelation doesn’t shed light on anything about her at all. Moreover, since we will never hear about Kestra again after this, Deanna having learned about her won’t have any future impact on her character development, either. The revelation has character relevance for Lwaxana, but again, I’m just not invested enough in Lwaxana for this to matter very much to me. (Honestly, I’m not sure why the concept that stories should concentrate on developing the main characters, rather than guest or side characters, was so recurringly difficult for TNG’s writers to grasp.)

A second complaint that I have about “Dark Page” is that it’s one of those episodes that sort of lacks a story, if by “story” we mean events that meaningfully involve stakes, or have characters facing difficult choices that matter for what happens later. Sure, technically Lwaxana Troi’s life is endangered when her psyche “collapses,” and yes, we absolutely learn new information about her past. But all that really happens is that she seems tired and emotionally unbalanced for a while, then goes comatose, and the characters dither around for a bit wondering what’s wrong with her, and then they do a “telepathically explore her mind” thing and find the answer. No regular character confronts anything challenging, or has to come up with anything clever, or grows or changes in any way; also, the “answer,” while interesting in its way, kind of could have been anything, as nothing else in the episode is impacted by it. Indeed, the other elements of the episode (the stuff about the Cairn, and the character of Maques) turn out to be mere window dressing. Are we supposed to make anything in particular of Maques, for example? He seems nice enough (if one largely ignores the bizarre death stare that he directs at Deanna whenever he’s transmitting information to her telepathically), but so what? The episode gestures at him and Troi having to figure out how to relate after the awkwardness of Lwaxana trying to set them up, and it also briefly seems to want to make him appear possibly menacing before it turns out that he’s only trying to help, but none of this goes anywhere at all; in the end, he’s just a tool to facilitate Troi exploring her mom’s mind. He could have been excised entirely without much impact to the crux of the story. This all just feels very narratively lacking. Also, truth be told, the whole telepathic mind-exploration as resolution even feels a little forced to me. Like, there’s a scene in which Picard (and why Picard!?) helps Troi to discover that her mother deleted seven years of journal entries leading up to shortly after Troi’s birth, which is pretty much the first meaningful clue to what’s going on that has surfaced—and Troi’s immediate reaction is to assert that she has to venture back into her mother’s mind, because that’s the only way to find anything out. Really? But you just found some suggestive information via other means!

Honestly, that’s nearly all that I really have to say about this one. My only other comment, I guess, concerns Counselor Troi’s father, who appears both in a photo and in Lwaxana’s mind/memory here. I had often wondered about this character; whenever Troi has talked about him, she has generally made him sound like a pretty grounded, down-to-earth sort of person, and I guess I always struggled to imagine what this “ordinary” human guy who somehow fell in love with and married the likes of Lwaxana could have been like. Well…as depicted here, he lives up well enough to what I had imagined from Troi’s mentions of him—but this does nothing at all to help me imagine him and Lwaxana as a plausible couple!