Descent: Part I (⭑⭑⭑)

And so, we come to TNG’s fourth and final cliffhanger season finale. I’ll be saving most of my my big-picture thoughts about “Descent” as a two-parter, and its place in the show overall. for my review of part two, though, and focusing here more on my reactions (as of this latest re-watch) to part one on its own. In a nutshell: There were some really good ideas here, and lot of potential, but things really go to hell toward the end of the hour. There is both a similarity and a contrast to be noted between this episode and part one of “Time’s Arrow,” the previous season’s finale. In both cases, some really nice character moments (especially in the earlier half of the episode) end up getting undermined by dumb plotting as the episode unfolds from premise to cliffhanger ending. This time around, though, the story starts out feeling “organic” (in the sense of following up on events from previous episodes in a logical and promising way) and consequential, in all the ways that the events of “Time’s Arrow” did not. Based solely on the pieces that part one of “Descent” puts into play, I’m left feeling like this two-parter could and should have been great. More on that, of course, when I get to part two…

So, as to those pieces that the episode puts on the table: On the one hand, we have a new encounter with the Borg…but seemingly not the Borg that we know. What’s going on? Does this have something to do with “Hugh” and the events of “I, Borg”? To its credit, the episode has the characters immediately speculate about this, rather than trying to play coy with it (since, for the audience, it’s an obvious enough guess)—yet by the episode’s end, we still don’t actually know for sure. This, for me, strikes the right balance of maintaining some suspense without insulting the audience’s intelligence. Then, too, we get a second visit from Admiral Nechayev, who is an interesting character in that she generally has a very different take on things than “our heroes,” but without being, like, crazy. She actually challenges Picard here, and the episode gestures at revisiting the decision that he made in “I, Borg” and questioning whether it was a good one. (Regrettably, though, there’s not much in the way of follow-up on this thread beyond the one scene in which Picard confides his doubts to Riker after his dressing-down by the admiral.) Anyway…then, alongside of all of that intriguing stuff, we also have Data inexplicably experiencing a surge of bone fide emotion, and trying to process this and figure out what it means. (It does rankle slightly with me that he calls this experiencing his “first emotion”; has he forgotten the time when Q gave him the gift of a moment’s hysterical laughter? But this is a minor thing.) This, too, was a narratively logical and intriguing thing for the show to get around to doing at some point (provided, of course, that a workable explanation for it could be dreamed up), as it pushes one of the show’s most signature themes/motifs (and in particular, one of my personal favorite elements of the show) forward into potentially new territory. But wait: It’s not just that Data felt an emotion; it turns out, as we learn when he introspects about it during the very good scene with Counselor Troi, that he felt something kind of disturbingly dark, leaving him with questions about what kind of being he might be on a path to becoming. Interesting! So, for the first half or more of this episode’s run time, it fully has me, and seems to be making just the sorts of moves that a good season finale occurring late in the overall course of a series ought to be making.

Then we come to the scene between Data and the captured Borg in the holding cell, in which it becomes apparent that whatever the Borg are up to, it has something to do with our favorite android, whose burst of emotion was in some way caused by them. Okay…sure. One hopes that this reveal will merely serve as the necessary explanation for how and why he had the emotions, and not actually end up derailing the exploration of what they mean for him as a character. But the Borg is clearly influencing Data with some kind of tech thingy (which he somehow fails to notice), while the dialogue is trying to sell us on the idea that Data is being manipulated, or seduced, into exploring dark impulses. This introduces all of my usual reservations about stories in which a character is under some kind of mind control or other malign influence: to the extent that I believe his actions to be purely the result of the outside influence, this plot development is boring; but to the extent that I believe his actions to be at least partially internally motivated, I have trouble buying into them. The episode, like so many stories both before and after it (Trek or otherwise), tries to pull off the tightrope walk of implying that it’s a little of both, and thus ends up simultaneously feeling like a bit of a letdown and a bit of a character assassination. (I find the idea of Data processing the fact that he felt pleasure in killing extremely compelling, but the leap to “you would do anything, including kill Geordi, to feel that again” totally loses me.) Also, as a weird (albeit rather minor in importance) aside, this whole scene suffers from a bizarre writing oversight: Data and the Borg prisoner are not alone! There is a security officer on duty in the background, seemingly overhearing their entire conversation! The episode conveniently skips over the actual details of Data and the prisoner buggering off together, so I guess we have to infer that Data takes the security officer out before freeing the prisoner, but still…this is just weird.

After this, the episode pretty much devolves into stupidity. Without reacting very much, emotionally, to Data’s apparent desertion (beyond some perfunctory speculations about his emotional experience perhaps affecting him more than they realized), Picard and the rest jump through the fairly dull hoops of tracking him to a planet. (By the way, the Borg have some kind of “transwarp corridor” technology. Why is this necessary/included in the episode? Not sure.) This planet, despite appearing (once people start beaming down to it) quite hospitable and earth-like, is plot-conveniently beset by mysterious interference that prevents sensors and tricorders from being able to detect much of anything. Despite this, Picard and Riker decide that beaming an away team in blind, to a probable ambush by the Borg, is a good idea. (No one thinks to approach the stolen shuttle’s location from a distance, or start with recon via another shuttlecraft, nor do they even raise the idea of tech-ing their way past the obstacle of the “interference” like they would in almost any other episode.) Despite this, the away team for some reason actually isn’t ambushed as soon as they beam down. Instead, they find Data’s shuttle abandoned and have to mount a search for him. (Given that they do, in the end, fall prey to an ambush by the Borg, who were clearly luring them here all along…why did the Borg string things out like this? Apparently just to fill running time.) Then Picard makes, for no apparent reason whatsoever, the utterly insane decision to beam almost the entire crew down to the planet to search for Data, leaving only a skeleton crew on board the Enterprise, with Dr. Crusher in command! What!? In all the previous instances where a single officer or crew member has gone missing in one way or another, when has this ever warranted virtually emptying the ship of personnel to hunt for him or her? Again, though, there is zero discussion about alternative plans; they just leap right to this crazy one as though it were the only, and obvious, thing to do. And I mean… Maybe, if the characters were displaying actual emotions about the situation of Data having freed the Borg prisoner and seemingly deserted, we could understand all of this as the writers purposely having them behaving irrationally—particularly, say, if there were some debate about whether this plan was a good idea or a terrible one. If there was more about Picard freaking out because he feels responsible for potential consequences of having let Hugh go in “I, Borg,” for instance, that might have played in here (with Riker, presumably, acting as a voice of reason but being overruled by the captain). I’m not sure if this would actually have worked for me or not, but it would have been something, at least. As is, all we have is pure, naked, nonsensical plot contrivance, and it’s very disappointing. Anyway, they eventually stumble upon a building that they can’t scan the inside of, so—doubling down on their earlier mistake—they enter it blind. And even then, the episode still drags things out just a little bit more! They wander into a big empty meeting-hall type room (do we ever learn what this building is doing here?), look around and speculate a bit, then suddenly come to their senses and decide to beat it…and only then do the Borg finally come out of hiding and surround them, so that the episode can end by having Lore dramatically reveal himself, then trot out Data for a big cheesy moment where he announces himself as in league with his brother and bent on an Evil Plan (while both of them sport big shit-eating grins).

Absolutely everything about this entire end section of the episode has been just terrible, but the big cliffhanger moment is the worst bit of all. Data’s attitude and demeanor are so different from his norm that there’s no way to believe this is anything like a genuine version of him. I don’t buy the idea that merely being fed dark emotions (or whatever) by Lore would turn him into this, and I also don’t care about this altered version of him, except to want him to go away and be replaced by the real Data. Now, if Data had joined with Lore and signaled his intent to betray his shipmates while still seeming like himself, and had voiced an actual (non-cacklingly-evil) rationale for his actions, that could have been truly disturbing, and made for a suspenseful and effective cliffhanger. (The underlying premises could still have been roughly the same; he’s being emotionally manipulated, his ethical program has been disabled, etc. I just need to believe that it’s still him in there—that there’s some level of integrity and self-awareness, and that he believes he’s doing a sensible thing for sensible reasons, as opposed to behaving like some kind of maniacal Bond villain.) As is, though, the ending is pure drivel, with no genuine emotional stakes at all.

To be continued…