This, alas, is one of the few abject bombs of the third season; only one other episode besides it, I think, will warrant a one-star rating. It does have some good bits, but they’re very much in the background, while center stage is occupied by a painfully embarrassing, thoroughly misguided, and utterly inept primary storyline that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Aside from Riker, Troi never picks winners for her romantic partners, but the least interesting of her other flings is orders of magnitude more watchable than her dalliance with Devinoni Ral. Whoever thought this guy would be a good character (episode writer Hannah Louise Shearer, who also cursed us with the story for “Pen Pals”?) deserved to be fired. Creepy, dickish, and utterly unlikable, he gives neither Troi nor the audience any reason whatsoever to care about, be interested in, or ever want to have to look at him. One imagines that he’s supposed to seem “roguish,” but in fact he comes off simply as an amoral cad who’s completely full of himself. He’s also supposed to be this amazing negotiator, but it’s difficult to see how someone so arrogant, abrasive, selfish, and generally undiplomatic could possibly be effective in such a role. As for the romance between him and Troi, it materializes full-blown out of absolutely nowhere, and never, even for a second, feels even vaguely real. The episode eventually tries to “explain” their seemingly instinctive attraction to each other via the revelation that he’s partly empathic, but it doesn’t even come close to working. Every second of screen time devoted to their relationship is either painful to watch, dull as hell, or both; the “bedroom scenes” especially make one’s skin crawl. The words “melodramatic” and “cheesy” barely even scratch the surface here; at a minimum, “disturbing,” “pointless,” and “one-dimensional characterization” should all be thrown into the mix as well. One never feels as though anything that comes out of Ral’s mouth is remotely genuine; he’s every bit as much of a slick manipulator in bed as he is at the negotiating table, and Troi comes off as an idiotic, naive child for falling for any of it. Yuck.
The framing plot about the negotiations over the allegedly stable wormhole has potential, but almost all of that potential is squandered. Even though the device of the Ferengi putting the Federation ambassador out of commission isn’t very palatable, its purpose—maneuvering Riker into the position of taking over for him—partly redeems it, as the latter is the one aspect of the episode that’s genuinely enjoyable. The scenes in which Riker impresses the ambassador (“Poker…is that a game of some sort?”); Picard tells Riker that he has to take over the negotiations; and Riker takes Ral down a notch in Ten-Forward, are easily the best bits of the episode. If the Troi romance were eliminated, Ral toned way, way down, and the wormhole negotiations plot completely reworked, this could have been a good Riker episode. As it is, though, the wormhole proves not even to be what it seems, rendering the negotiations over it moot and the plot surrounding it accordingly pointless. The hype about the stakes and the rivalry among the negotiators deserve to be paid off with someone (hopefully the Federation) actually winning the prize; otherwise, it’s all just filler in the end. On top of that, the Barzan premier comes off as just as naive as Troi for falling for any of Ral’s transparently manipulative and dishonest crap.
The most puzzling bit of ineptitude in the episode, though, is Ral and Troi’s debate about the ethics of using their Betazoid empathic awareness. Ral’s defense of his practices, and his case that what he does is no different from what Troi does, has real merit, and Troi is unable to answer his arguments—yet the episode seems to want us to side with Troi. Obviously, Troi doesn’t stop using her empathic awareness to the Enterprise‘s advantage after this because of Ral’s critique, but neither does she (or the episode) come around to accepting what Ral does. And with good reason. Ral is right that Troi uses her Betazoid senses to her advantage and that of the Federation just as he uses his to his advantage and that of his employers, but there is an important difference. That difference, in a nutshell, is the thing that Riker observes about Ral in another scene: he has no values. Ral uses his Betazoid sense just like he uses all the other tools at his disposal: for his own selfish ends, and in a manner unconstrained by ethical considerations. In other words, the issue isn’t whether it’s okay to take advantage of one’s empathic awareness, but rather whether it’s acceptable to be a manipulative, dishonest dick. But Troi completely fails to make this point. Ral’s argument goes essentially unanswered in their debate scene; then, later, when Troi “outs” him, she emphasizes his use of his empathic awareness as the problem, when the real issue, quite obviously, is that he and the Ferengi have staged an elaborate deception to trick the premier into making a foolish decision. It’s very frustrating.
All in all, then, this episode sucks.
The only thing I would add to your insights here, other than to add as much OMG YES as I can to your criticism of the entirely unwatchable romantic plot and both the acting of and (especially) the writing of Ral, is much broader than this particular episode, and concerns the subject of Troi and female main characters in Trek in general. Having female cast members who actually do *something* is, I suppose, a step forward from TOS… but as this represented around twenty years of social change, that makes for a pretty sad showing. This episode, and indeed almost every episode, of TNG just screams with the idea that the writers had no idea how to write for Troi or Crusher. They are barely gifted with personalities at all. Troi, to the extent to which she has a personality at all outside the context of interacting with another character whom the scene is actually about, is often depicted as somewhat shallow, petty, and hypocritical. As an empath, much (most?) of the time her emotions are externally generated, and melodramatic enough to be unpleasant to watch. The characters rarely get an episode about them, but because they’re barely characters at all, it’s hard to want that to change. The truth is if they had been well written in the first place, that could have been different. This might make my top five criticisms of the series.
However, there are enough good ideas here that I do feel somewhat bad about this episode being as bad as it is. An episode about Riker as a negotiator is something I’d like to have seen. His telling Ral off worked well, and his doing so would have worked better in an episode that didn’t depict Ral so one-dimensionally. The idea of negotiating over a wormhole and its implications for the system it’s in raises interesting questions about power relationships in the Trek universe. The Ferengi are depicted as such buffoons that Picard loses credibility for even allowing them into the negotiations in the first place, but if they had been treated as shrewd negotiators, they might have added something.
I give them credit for not playing up jealousy in Riker, and in retrospect, it’s pretty surprising. Riker is the only one in the episode who doesn’t comes off looking either stupid, mean, or both in this episode. Composing the cast of complex individuals with good and bad traits could have gone a long way toward making the episode decent.