Sigh. I remember really liking this one years ago. I always had issues with its ending, but I fully expected to be charmed enough by the rest of it, even now, to declare it a “flawed classic,” or something of the sort. And I really want to like it that much. It does, for sure, have its charms, and I enjoy and appreciate parts of it quite a bit. Alas, however, I find myself disappointed by it on this new viewing. Moments it has, but those moments don’t ultimately add up to a story that I find satisfying.
Jean-Luc Picard is not, of course, a womanizing captain after the model of James T. Kirk. The show has given him romantic connections before (more often than one might immediately recall, even), sure, but rarely of the “banging the hot female guest character of the week” variety that his predecessor is infamous for. The closest we ever got to that for Picard was with Vash, and that pairing, to be sure, fell rather short of being compelling—and yet, even then, Vash actually appeared in two different episodes, and the second one did try to do some character development for the captain. Most of Picard’s other romantic entanglements, rather than being Kirk-esque short-term hookups, have instead fit into the show’s episodic structure by taking place outside of the normal continuity of his (present) life: we’ve met a couple of old flames from his younger days (and heard tell of one or two others that we don’t meet); he explored a road not taken with his academy-era female friend Marta in a time travel/fantasy experience of Q’s making in “Tapestry”; and, of course, he experienced subjective decades of married life in “The Inner Light.” Kamala from “The Perfect Mate” was somewhat different, but that was still a relationship that, from the outset, clearly could have no future, with a person who was not a part of the captain’s own world in any meaningful sense. And then, the show has always teased the idea of Picard and Crusher as a possible couple, but seemingly without ever intending to actually go there (though we’ll revisit that subject in season 7). So, when “Lessons” introduces us to Lt. Commander Nella Daren—a Starfleet officer who is present, available, and seems to charm our captain right away, as well as to find him just as interesting—one naturally senses an opportunity for the show to have Picard venture into the romantic arena in “real time,” as it were, and in a way that might actually impact his ordinary life.
And, for a while, it looks like the episode might actually be intending to do just that. Rather than making the mistake that so many other Trek romance episodes have made of pairing a main character up with some rando who largely lacks distinctive characteristics, “Lessons” manages to make Nella Daren come to life as an interesting individual, and further bothers to show her and the captain bonding over something specific (music). This both draws beautifully on the show’s own continuity and provides an opportunity for character growth for Picard, whose lingering interest in the flute that he learned to play in “The Inner Light” has previously been established but who has, certainly, never been defined, as a character, by an identity as a “musician.” Thus, his connection with Daren comes across as connected to an aspect of who he is, but also as him exploring a new direction for himself, in a way that feels both realistic and kind of exciting (and serves as its own little metaphor for the new life path that an ongoing romantic relationship would represent for him). Moreover, having him explicitly reference his experiences from “The Inner Light” as he challenges himself to open up and let this new person into his life in a way that he has rarely done before was a brilliant bit of writing. I’ve said before that, despite the limitations of TNG’s all-too-episodic structure, there is a notable series-long character arc for Picard that involves him gradually loosening up and opening up and learning to let others in, and we definitely see some of that here. There’s the expected snag where his discomfort makes him retreat from letting an anonymous crew member see him being an emotional being in the one turbolift scene, but he quickly pushes past this and apologizes for it (after first proactively seeking input from his counselor!) in a way that he would not have done in previous seasons (for instance, when Vash got angry with him for never having told any of the other characters about her, his first impulse was to argue that doing so would have been “inappropriate”). The uncharacteristic little overture that he makes to RIker (inviting him to a bout of fencing) is frankly adorable, too. (Another nice touch is Beverly subtly calling back to “Qpid” when she acknowledges to Nella that the captain is “a very private person,” but denies that he is “isolated.”) So, as I’ve said, “Lessons” is not without genuine merits, by any means.
Where problems set in for me is when the episode moves beyond simply introducing Daren and establishing the connection between her and Picard, and gets into the actual story that it has to tell. As it turns out, what the episode is actually interested in is specifically the idea of our captain falling for someone who serves under his command, and the complications to which this situation would give rise. Now, to be fair, this is a genuine issue, and one that could absolutely generate meaty character drama. Still, as a direction for this episode to go in, I find it rather disappointing for several reasons. First and foremost, it ends up providing the writers with the “out” that they need to preserve the show’s episodic structure, by manufacturing a scenario that (supposedly) forces the relationship to end, thus restoring the show’s status quo by end of episode. What the promise of the early scenes in “Lessons” demand is a scenario in which Daren actually remains part of Picard’s life in an ongoing way, so that we see how he might grow and change through being involved in a continuing intimate relationship. A less rigidly episodic show might have made her a recurring character, and even done a whole arc centered on Picard’s relationship with her (even if that arc still ultimately ended similarly to how the relationship ends in the episode we got). Alas, TNG (for all its charms) was never that show. Secondly, making the story be about the pitfalls of dating someone under your command leads the episode to a troubling ending from a gender politics perspective, wherein the female character “has to” disrupt her career and transfer to a (less prestigious, one assumes) post in order to remove herself as a complication from the male lead’s life and career. (This was the major reservation that I had about “Lessons” back when it originally aired.) And then, finally, I feel like going in this direction with the episode leads to the wrong character-development takeaway for our captain. After all, we are not dealing with a character who needs to learn that his position as captain calls for a degree of professional distance between himself and those under his command (!); rather, we have a character who has always hidden behind the isolating “burden of command” too much, and used it as an excuse to remain solitary and aloof. Why, then, choose to tell a story in which he opens himself up in an unprecedented way to an officer serving under him, only to have events immediately demonstrate why doing so is a bad idea (thereby “proving him right” in his instinctive stance that, as a captain, he has to be ultra-reserved)? Sure, it’s true that intimate relationships between superiors and subordinates are fraught with pitfalls—but that doesn’t mean that this is the right story to tell about Jean-Luc Picard as a character, because it reinforces his existing flaws rather than pushing him toward growth.
I also think that, besides being disappointing to me in the various ways that I’ve just identified, the story that the writers chose to tell suffers in itself from being crammed into a single episode that needs to restore the status quo by its end. “Lessons” does a lovely job of getting the Picard/Daren relationship started, but it doesn’t really have enough time to cement that relationship as a sufficiently important part of Picard’s life, or to build the level of emotional resonance that the story is aiming for, before the “plot” kicks in. Thus, when the situation arises that prompts them to terminate their relationship, it feels like a writers’ convenience that pops up just in time to allow for the inevitable reset, rather than like a destination that the story was always bound for by its own internal logic. Indeed, I’m left not fully believing that Daren’s apparent death would really hit Picard as hard as the episode suggests it does, or that he would have as hard a time with the idea of potentially having to order her into danger in the future as he concludes that he would. Some pretty serious work would have been needed to really sell me on this, because I rather feel that Picard’s character and life experiences ought to have prepared him pretty well to be able to handle such situations. There are certainly plenty of examples of other characters, both within and beyond Trek, dealing with similar things—and Picard himself has never been portrayed as someone who balks at having to make difficult choices. (In particular, it’s a shame that Jack Crusher doesn’t come up at all here. Picard does acknowledge that he’s lost people under his command whom he was close to before, but not being more specific makes it too easy for the episode to dismiss those precedents as not being the same as someone he was “in love” with. This also exemplifies an annoying trope wherein TV shows tend to treat romantic relationships as orders of magnitude more significant than other relationships, even when the former are brand new.) Anyway, the point is that the episode fails to do the work that it would take to make me really feel what Picard is supposed to be feeling at the end, or to convince me that its resolution is really warranted—and this failure was, I think, probably inevitable, given the imperative of wrapping the story up within a single episode.
So, there we are. “Lessons” offers up a rare-for-Trek blossoming romance that actually works, but rather than taking that and running with it, the writers wrap it into a story that isn’t really right for the character, then abruptly cut it off before even that story really has time to play out. I still enjoy parts of it, but…disappointing.