I scarcely know what to say about this one. I knew it was bad, but it’s somehow actually much worse than I even remembered. It has no point and makes no sense. I can’t even grasp what it was that Menosky was trying to do with this mess. There’s just…nothing there. It’s so, so boring. Believe it or not, watching “Masks” this time around made me a little bit nostalgic for the comprehensible awfulness of “Sub Rosa.”
In the abstract, the idea of the Enterprise encountering an archive from some unknown alien civilization is…interesting, sure. But that’s absolutely the only thing that this episode actually has to offer, and by itself, it’s merely one mildly interesting idea. To state the very, very obvious: what the episode needed was a story to tell (one that would have related in some way to this alien archive, presumably). Hopefully, this also would involve establishing something that was actually specific, substantive, and meaningful about the alien culture that produced the archive. Symbology and myth are undeniably the forte of episode writer Joe Menosky, and he has been known to craft profound and engaging stories that draw heavily on these elements (“Darmok” being perhaps the most notable example), but in “Masks,” there’s no “meat” underlying all the mythos. Data embodies various “characters,” but actually these are just mythological figures/archetypes, and although Picard and company eventually piece together the general outlines of a mythology, they don’t actually learn anything about the underlying culture of, like, real people that gave rise to it: who they were, what was distinctive or interesting about them, why they made the archive, etc. Indeed, the mythology and symbolism only even prove decipherable because of their similarity to that of other, known cultures. So what’s the point? I can (and regularly do) forgive the show for relying on familiar archetypes when they’re in service of, say, an engaging character story, or when they’re used to explore a thought-provoking theme, but none of that is present here; it’s just symbols and mystique for their own sake.
No, but seriously: Why does this archive exist, and do what it does? Seemingly, some spacefaring alien civilization created this thing that preserves, and for some reason weirdly enacts, what seems to be a fundamentally pre-industrial, mythological way of perceiving the world. Why? Maybe (?) there could be a plausible and interesting reason for such a thing to have happened, but the episode certainly doesn’t care about suggesting one. (That would have entailed coming up with an actual story idea.) Also, are the “personalities” that express themselves through Data (though I hesitate to even call them “personalities,” since they’re really just mythological constructs) supposed to, in some way, be sapient? Or are they essentially just computer programs that exist for…some reason? Why does the archive try to transform the Enterprise into a temple, or whatever? Whom or what, exactly, did Picard placate by play-acting as “Korgano” (thereby, I guess, completing the reenactment of a mythological cycle dreamed up by some long-dead alien culture), and why was it important for this to happen? There’s just nothing to grab onto here that resembles any kind of point, or that even really makes any sense. (Other online commentary that I’ve perused tends to feature a split between people who, like me, find the episode nonsensical and incoherent, and others who, contrarily, claim that it makes plenty of sense and is easy to understand. The latter camp seems mostly to mean that the alien mythology itself is readily comprehensible as being about the sun and the moon and cosmic balance and all that. Sure, fine, whatever. But the events of the episode still don’t make any damn sense, or add up to any kind of narrative point.)
Also, I spent the vast majority of my latest re-watch of “Masks” (and probably of most previous watches, for that matter) feeling either annoyed, or bored out of my skull. Watching the ship getting randomly turned into a weird alien whatever did absolutely nothing for me, except to kill my suspension of disbelief and damage my overall emotional connection to it as a beloved setting. There was simply no sense of reality about any of what was happening, and none of the characters even react to it in remotely believable ways. (At one point, Picard says (in his decisive, captain’s-resolve voice) “I’m not going to permit the Enterprise to be turned into an alien city,” as though this were some kind of bold stance, or a not-totally-obvious goal…but also, as though he has some kind of reason to believe there’s anything he can actually do about it. To me, the line comes across as totally ridiculous. In this same scene, the characters calmly discuss what percentage of the ship has been “transformed” so far, and which systems have or haven’t been affected, as if any of this were a thing that could be processed rationally, and not just nonsense.) And then, of course, there’s the thing that, perhaps, the writers envisioned as the centerpiece of the episode: Brent Spiner playing a bunch of different weird mythological characters. Some viewers, I guess, were impressed by his performances. For myself, though… Look, I like Spiner on this show quite a bit most of the time; I think his often-brilliant portrayal of Data deserves a large share of the credit for making the android into the compelling and memorable character that he has always been for me, and I also enjoy his turns as Soong and (usually) as Lore. But watching him do the various weird, pointless quasi-characters that he embodies in “Masks,” who mostly just hype up still other pointless quasi-characters in an intensely grating and pointlessly enigmatic way, leaves me utterly cold. I find most of the scenes featuring Data being “possessed” by “Ihat” or whoever the hell else quite irritating to watch. But hey—at least I feel something during these scenes. Most of the rest of the episode is terribly boring, and rather hard to get through.
This one is just an abject failure.