Unfortunately, after two consecutive episodes that seemed to be indicative of a slight upward trend in quality, this heap of shit broke the streak. This one is another terrible, first-season Planet of the Week story that’s bad on the level of some of the worst travesties from earlier in the season.
A great many things are deeply wrong with this episode, but to start with the most egregious problems: not only does it contain one of the absolute worst attempts ever to depict the society of a POTW in an even remotely convincing way (the frigging Ligonians (“Code of Honor”) felt more real than this society does—and that’s saying something!), but it also once again mystifyingly ignores the fact that the Prime Directive should be preventing the Enterprise from contacting this world. Blatant inconsistencies (such as the fact that they know about other planets and can communicate with the Enterprise, or that they have disintegration devices for carrying out capital punishment) aside, Angel One is explicitly described as being similar in technological advancement to 20th-century Earth! And as for the way the society is depicted: whether budget issues, huge failures of imagination, nigh-unfathomable laziness, unconscious sexism, bad acting, or some combination of these factors is to blame, Angel One never comes across as anything other than a bunch of overgrown children play-acting at having and governing a society. (Unhelpful, too, is the fact that the general design and look of things in the building where most of the on-planet action takes place mirrors that of the Enterprise—right down to the same sliding doors, etc.)
Fundamentally, this episode—which seems to want to comment on sexism by portraying a society whose gender discrimination works “in reverse” as compared to our own—is way, waaay too explicit and on-the-nose. It caricatures a sexist society in order to deliver a heavy-handed message, instead of communicating any actual insights via the reversal, or exploring any of the ways in which ingrained and unconscious sexism operate even in a society (like ours) that wants to see itself as enlightened enough to have grown out of the kind of very explicit and conscious sexism on display in this episode. Even worse, the tone of the episode conveys a general sense of bemusement (or amusement?) toward the whole idea of a female-led society, rather than a critique of sexism per se—so that the whole affair comes off as patently sexist itself. The extreme fakeness of the society and the aforementioned sense of play-acting don’t help matters here. The episode, in short, feels like a sort of tongue-in-cheek spoof on the putatively ridiculous notion of “a bunch of chicks running a planet”—which is just flat-out embarrassing to watch, especially for someone who thinks of himself as a fan of this show. (It should be noted that Ramsey and his group feel utterly unreal as well, and that the basis of the whole conflict between them and the planet’s government is never more than hinted at; as a portrayal of a clash of ideas or a society riven by emerging social tensions, this episode barely even tries, much less succeeds.)
As so often this season, the episode cannot even manage to successfully introduce a story or depict its main characters as believable beings—much less handle guest characters deftly, flesh out settings or scenarios, structure a story, or resolve a plot satisfactorily. Consider the opening scenes: from Riker awkwardly providing unnecessary exposition about how long the escape pods would have taken to reach Angel One in a totally unconvincing way, to Picard’s comment that “Starfleet are adamant that we maintain good relations here” and talking generically about Angel One’s “strategic importance,” to everyone being utterly and relentlessly straightlaced and self-important about all such matters, nothing works at all. In later seasons, if the idea that the planet of the week had some kind of special importance were in play, it might have been communicated via a scene in which Picard directly speaks with an admiral or something—and Picard would have had his own take on the situation, rather than merely functioning as a stakes-generating mouthpiece for the priorities of faceless bureaucrats. Also, some reason why the planet was “strategically important” would probably have been offered. And why exactly does Geordi think that being stuck on a mid-twentieth-century-Earth-like planet would be like “being marooned at home”? This reaction makes sense from the show’s audience, but not from its characters! Also—and playing into the aforementioned fakeness of Angel One—when a starship shows up out of nowhere and (somehow) “opens hailing frequencies,” does it really seem right that the response—which happens virtually instantaneously—comes directly from the person who is, essentially, the president of the entire world? Why does Troi comment that the female-dominated society reminds her of her own planet, yet later act (along with Yar) all giggly and immature about aspects of the reversed gender norms? (That whole scene in which the women can’t either handle, or keep a straight face about, Riker’s outfit, has as its sole redeeming quality Riker’s own much more professional and not-insecure reaction. Very much not helping the scene, also, is the fact that Troi’s own standard outfit isn’t much less ridiculous, and no one ever calls this out until years later.) And Worf’s unsolicited “Klingons appreciate strong women” comment in the teaser seems very out of place in a world that (supposedly) lacks gender discrimination, too (as well as simply an instance of awkward writing).
Bad, too, is the episode’s unfocused structure (not as bad as in some of the most pointlessly meandering previous episodes, but still bad), its piling-up of unrelated and unnecessary subplots, and the extreme lameness of the main plot’s resolution. Though it’s mainly about the situation on Angel One, a devastating shipboard plague (which is neither convincing nor at all interesting) is thrown in for bad measure (or rather, presumably, to fill time)—and on top of that, the episode also unsuccessfully tries to introduce urgency and tension via the notion that there’s something going down in the Romulan Neutral Zone that the Enterprise should really be warping off to deal with as soon as possible. Pointless go-through-the-motions dialog in several on-planet scenes that are sort of inserted between the ones that actually carry the plot also contribute to the general vacuousness. (Riker seems like an idiot when his response to Data’s questions about what they will do in the not-implausible event that the locals refuse to come clean is “Let’s not look for problems”—but the writers look like idiots as well, in that this non-answer makes the whole discussion pointless. And the scene in which Data has never heard of perfume or aphrodesiacs, and doesn’t understand the idea of a smell enhancing sex, is just dumb.) And in the end, the resolution of “Angel One” is, alas, reminiscent of “Justice”; the fundamental conflict that has the Enterprise people in a bind throughout the episode, and that has been milked for all the cheesily overplayed tension it can provide right up until the very last minute, ultimately evaporates as a result of a smug thirty-second speech delivered by Riker (in violation, I might add, of at least the spirit of the Prime Directive). In other words, what we have here is another instance of the oft-repeated first-season formula that I outlined when discussing “Justice”: visit an exotic planet, get into a conflict with the locals, kill half an hour doing nothing but cheesing it up, and then watch the conflict magically resolve itself. If the society being depicted had had the slightest shred of plausibility up to this point (which it hadn’t), it would have lost it here—and the same can be said for any pointfulness or drama that anyone might have (mistakenly) felt that the episode possessed.