This is one of those episodes that I personally have always really enjoyed, but that seem to be surprisingly (to me) unpopular among fans in general. I mean, sure, it has significant flaws, and even though I have a big soft spot for it, I can’t give it more than three stars. But the Enterprise severely damaged and dead in space following an unforeseen mishap was just a cool idea to me, and the various groupings of characters trapped in different parts of the ship and having to resolve various crises or problems while cut off from outside help and not knowing what may be going on elsewhere really fires my imagination of what it would feel like to be in those situations. There are definitely some rough spots, and it occurs to me that with some tweaks, this could have been a much better episode than it is. Still, for me, “Disaster” is a bit of a TNG classic.
There is solid merit in the setup of the overall plot of the episode, wherein an antimatter containment breach is imminent but the only characters who are aware of it are trapped on the bridge and can’t communicate with anyone, while Riker and Data, meanwhile, have assumed the worst (that everyone on the bridge is dead) and are trying to get to engineering to regain control of the ship, but are unaware of the containment problem. This provides the stakes and some nice dramatic tension. Also, I enjoy pretty much every moment of Riker’s trip through the episode, from sizing up the situation with Data and Worf in the beginning to reluctantly agreeing to let Data electrocute himself when the two of them are trapped in a Jeffries tube, and then removing Data’s head (!) and bringing it with him to Engineering in order to help him get things up and running down there (and, as it turns out, avert total disaster). Data, of course, maintains his usual matter-of-fact equanimity throughout these proceedings. Fun stuff. I do think that the episode should have taken a moment to explain why there was no one on duty in engineering until Riker and Data manage to get themselves there, though. The most obvious explanation would have been that that section of the ship had been heavily damaged and everyone in it had been killed, and if the writers had explicitly committed to this idea (both via dialogue and by showing wreckage and bodies), it would have significantly heightened the drama and the sense of disaster, which would have been awesome. Still, the Riker/Data part of the episode is my favorite part even as written.
On the other hand (and as probably everyone who has ever written or otherwise opined about this episode has noted before me), the bridge portion is where the episode really falls short. The idea of a crisis erupting and isolating people where they are so that a character unaccustomed to command suddenly finds herself in charge on the bridge is a good one, but the execution both does a massive disservice to Counselor Troi as a character and makes very little sense on a premise level. Basically, either Troi should have to possess a basic level of expertise and competence in order to hold the rank of Lt. Commander, or she should not hold that rank (and should maybe even be a civilian), and someone else should thus have been in charge here. She may not be the most tech-savvy officer on the ship, but for chrissake, anyone on board who is above the age of ten ought to know what an antimatter containment breach is! Later seasons of TNG would demonstrate that a Deanna Troi who was both a counselor and a bona fide Starfleet officer worked perfectly well as a character, and indeed tended to be both more plausible and more interesting than she had ever been before. Here, unfortunately, it basically seems like the writers were unable to see a “girly” female character like Troi (in contrast, I guess, to Ro) as someone who could understand technical matters or make tough decisions, which is deeply frustrating. (Alternatively, one could suppose that writing her as clueless as she seems here served as an excuse for the other characters to provide exposition lest the audience not understand what’s happening. I guess I prefer that reading to the overtly sexist one, but it, too, is insulting.) As for Ro, I appreciate that she both seems competent and takes a strong stand (and one that, however cold-hearted it may have felt to the others, nevertheless has solid logic behind it), but I also think there were some missed opportunities for more substantive character work here. This is only the second time we’ve seen Ro, and in the episode that first introduced her, we learned that she had previously been court-martialed for disobeying orders and making a decision that led to the deaths of eight fellow officers. Doesn’t this character history seem extremely relevant to the situation in this episode, where she finds herself at odds with the person in command over a dilemma in which hundreds of lives are at stake? Couldn’t the writing have invoked this background explicitly in some way, and used it to complicate and inform her advocacy of separating and abandoning the drive section of the ship to save the lives in the saucer section? This might have led to compelling character growth and the forging of interesting new relationships that could have helped to integrate her with some of the other characters in cool ways. Putting her in conflict with Troi so that the latter has to assert herself and stand her ground is okay, but there could have been so much more here. Also, I’ve read that Michael Piller was dissatisfied with the peacemaking moment between Ro and Troi at the end, where the former apologizes and admits that she is wrong. Piller felt that she should have insisted that despite things working out as they had, she had still been right to push for abandoning the drive section—and I completely agree that this would have been both more interesting and truer to the character.
The remaining story threads filling out the episode are mostly moderately entertaining without being terribly consequential. Picard in the turbolift with three kids serves the purpose of isolating him from the main action (so that it can fall on other shoulders) and also, obviously, tries to get some mileage out of his established discomfort with children, and the latter is (both here and in most other places) something of a mixed bag. Our captain should absolutely have character flaws, but this particular one often led (over the course of the series) to awkward scenes and/or writing that felt like it was shooting for humor at the expense of the character in a way that I usually don’t enjoy. I’ll allow here that to some degree, I may just love the character too much to have an easy time accepting his flaws. But I also think that someone of Jean-Luc Picard’s sensitivity and intelligence ought to know better than to (for instance) brusquely demand that three terrified young children he barely knows stop crying, even if children are something of an achilles heel for him. Also, the crying and whimpering of the child actors is both grating and unconvincing. Still, once Picard finds his groove and starts pulling out tricks like making the kids “officers,” and giving them a “climbing song” (points for it being a French one, too), things get better—and the episode-ending bit of humor over the girl responding at the same time as Riker to Picard’s “you have the bridge, Number One,” works for me. Arguably, we get a bit of actual growth from our reserved, child-averse captain here (he even winks conspiratorially at the the little girl!), which is worth something. Meanwhile, Worf delivering Keiko’s baby in Ten-Forward is something of a cliche, but remains entertaining because it’s Worf, while Geordi and Dr. Crusher in the cargo bay…well, doesn’t really have much going for it beyond “wow, they opened the doors to space with themselves in the room!” (which admittedly was cool to me as a teenager first seeing this), and is also hampered by some pretty implausible plot contrivances (like having to cross over to the other wall to re-pressurize, despite the ship’s control panels normally being highly customizable—or like Geordi not being able to see the plasma fire before it erupts). Oh, well. It’s still fun to watch the characters work together to problem-solve (which, much of the time, is half the charm of TNG).