Imaginary Friend (⭑)

Which season are we in here, again? How in the world did this amateurish, ill-conceived drivel find its way into the latter part of season five—sandwiched, no less, between the likes of “The Perfect Mate” and “I, Borg”!? I mean, yes, just two episodes prior, we also had “Cost of Living,” but while that episode was also terrible, this one is a totally different kind of terrible. The former focused on two lousy characters, but at least Lwaxana Troi and Alexander are both characters in which the audience has some investment, since they are recurring characters with (theoretical) meaningful relationships to two of the main characters. This time, though, the writers yet again make the absolute rookie mistake of trying to hang an entire episode on two one-time guest characters about whom the audience has no reason to care at all—and to make matters worse, both of them are young children. What were they thinking?

There has always been a contingent of Trek fans who grouse about TNG’s penchant for (as one writer once described them) “human interest” type stories that focus more on character relationships than on sci-fi action and excitement, but I have never been sympathetic to these fans’ complaints. That said, even I do not turn on Star Trek to watch a story about some ordinary little girl and her imaginary friend—even if (nay, especially if) said imaginary friend winds up getting incarnated by a random malevolent alien. I tune in to TNG for reasons similar to those that motivate me to tune in to any other show that I like: namely, to see stories about the characters (and settings, and ideas) that make that show what it is. If all you’ve got is a story in which a couple of the regulars appear as the hapless “grownups” in some random children’s tale, then you haven’t got an episode of the show that I tuned in to watch. Add to that a lot of half-assed dialog and TNG’s perennial issue with casting even halfway decent child actors, and you end up with something that doesn’t even pass the most basic watchability test. I mean, okay, in this case the actor who plays Clara, the real girl, is actually pretty good. The character is poorly written, but the actor manages to make her appealing anyway. The girl who plays Isabella, though, is terrible, on top of being saddled with an even more poorly written character. She’s stiff and wooden and unconvincingly menacing and just flat-out irritating. (And for icing on the cake, there’s even a scene in which Alexander makes an appearance, and is just as unconvincing as ever! I had totally forgotten that he showed up here, in an episode that is not actually about him at all.) The bare minimum that this episode needed to achieve, in order to be at all successful, was to make the experience of watching these two girls interact at least somewhat entertaining, and it just completely fails at this.

But, okay. Set aside, for the moment, the fact that making a whole episode about two child guest characters whom we don’t care about is a dumb idea, and the fact that one of the young actors isn’t very good, and the fact that TNG’s writers can’t seem to write dialog that sounds plausibly like it would come out of the mouths of children, and let’s say that, for some reason, it’s a given that we were going to get some version of this story. Could they not at least have given us a semi-competently constructed version of it? To work at all, for instance, shouldn’t fake-Isabella be written as a character who is actually charming or appealing in some way (at least at first), so that some part of us can identify with Clara’s attachment to her? And as for Clara herself: I get that she’s a kid, but is she also stupid? I don’t remotely buy her just shrugging and going with it when her imaginary friend suddenly manifests physically. Maybe there would have been a way to write her such that this could have been semi-convincing, but I don’t feel like the writers even halfway tried to achieve this. And then…take the hokey scene at the end when “Isabella” comes back and apologizes to Clara, and they talk about whether they will ever see each other again. Now imagine a version of the story where you actually empathize with Clara over her having formed this connection with this alien entity. Imagine her moving on afterwards, growing up, but always cherishing the memory of this experience that she had as a young girl, and—I dunno—maybe as an adult, coming back to this nebula in the hope of reestablishing contact, and studying these alien life forms, or something. What I’m describing here still isn’t an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but at least it has the potential to be an interesting, emotionally resonant story! Or, okay, imagine an episode in which some alien makes contact with a little girl on board the Enterprise, but the story is told from the perspective(s) of one or more of the (adult) main characters. Maybe they’re just solving the mystery of what’s going on, or maybe something about Clara’s behavior plays into some issue that they’re working through, or…whatever, but the point is that now it’s at least a story about our characters. Or, hell, what if the story were more or less what we actually get, but the interactions between Clara and the adults at least made consistent sense? In the episode’s opening scene, Clara gets upset with Troi for not believing that Isabella is real, even though Troi has not said or done anything to suggest this. But later, when Clara is talking to Guinan, the latter not only comes off (to my eyes) as much more condescending, but even explicitly refers to Isabella as imaginary, and yet Clara somehow feels uniquely understood by Guinan, who is “not like the other grownups”! Huh? Then later, there’s a long, drawn-out scene in which Troi patronizingly walks Clara around her bedroom “checking” for Isabella, which not only fails to accomplish anything dramatically, but also makes me feel like if I were Clara, I would be consumed with rage and frustration…but instead, she acts as though it’s totally fine. Come on!

Topping it all off, we also have a “plot” that resolves, in the embarrassing tradition of season one, with a confrontation between Captain Picard and the alien of the week, in which the captain delivers a brief speech explaining how mistaken the alien is about her perceptions, and the alien immediately accepts this and graciously vanishes, calling off the assault on the ship. Picard’s speech even includes a trite affirmation of the platitude that how a society treats its children is a good indicator by which to judge it, which is well and good, but rings false coming from the mouth of a character who is notoriously clueless about and uncomfortable around children. He goes on to assure the alien that what she has mistaken for mistreatment of Clara is actually the protective behavior of adults toward a loved child, which is true, but his bald assertion of it should not be remotely believable to the alien, who (given the conclusions that she has drawn up to this point) ought to hear it as nothing but convenient, self-justifying rhetoric. Besides, what is the actual message here? It can’t be that we adults should strive to be more sensitive to the experiences of children, and try harder to help them to understand that our rules are for their benefit (etc.), because no adult character particularly seems to take that lesson away in the end, despite it seeming for a moment like Picard might be going there. But then, is it that kids (and anyone who is critical of adults for being arbitrary or insensitive in how they treat kids) are dumb, and need to wise up and listen to their elders!? Fake-Isabella does seem to learn this lesson, so…maybe? What garbage.

One could go on. For instance, I’m sick to death of hokey energy-being aliens who flit about as little blips of light and don’t seem to be beholden to rules or physical limitations of any kind (can pass right through the ship’s shields; can read humans’ thoughts, but of course only do so when convenient for the plot; can take on physical forms, but vanish at will; etc.). But, whatever. I’m bored even criticizing this.

Incidentally, I also dislike the thrown-in scene in which Guinan and Data find shapes in the nebula. Guinan is fine, but Data seems to begin from a place of total incomprehension/inability to discern any patterns, then suddenly pivot to seeing one of his own, and claim that what he sees is “clearly” correct, all in a way that doesn’t feel at all authentic. Incongruity from Data can be funny, but this is just him saying something that he wouldn’t say unless he were trying to be funny, yet also somehow in on the joke of his own silly android-ness. It’s obvious, fake, and dumb. Plus, he wouldn’t use the phrase “bunny rabbit” to describe what he sees.