I find “Power Play” to be a surprisingly compelling episode given its limited ambitions and lack of anything that could be called “depth.” It doesn’t really try to be anything more than a suspenseful hostage drama; there’s no character development to speak of, no thought-provoking ideas, and even the plot is pretty simple and straightforward. But for what it is, I enjoy this episode. I also don’t know that I have a ton to say about it, really.
The fun of this episode consists essentially of two things: watching Sirtis, Spiner, and Meany play villain characters, and watching the rest of the regular characters react to their attempted takeover of the ship and work to get the situation under control. We know from the outset, of course, that the three characters are presumably under some kind of alien influence, since we see the little dots of light enter their bodies (and since Data seems subtly off), but the moment when they suddenly erupt into violence on the bridge and catch everyone else by surprise is still gripping. Their actual ploy is boneheaded, showing poor planning and coordination, but the episode acknowledges this and consistently characterizes the thug inhabiting Data as impulsive and rather dumb, so it works. Riker, on the other hand, reacts intelligently, but since the villains have the element of surprise, he is not able to immediately defeat them. After that, Picard and Riker working together to try to get a handle on the situation, and Worf reporting from Ten-Forward, and the ploys and counter-ploys (particularly the Geordi/Ro plan that almost works, but goes awry), are all just a lot of fun.
The down side, of course, is that that’s about all there is to the episode. Although it’s kind of fun to watch three of the main cast members playing thugs, the characters inhabiting them don’t turn out to be particularly interesting. It’s a bit interesting that the one possessing Troi is their leader, but Sirtis unfortunately delivers her lines overly dramatically, and all the misdirection over who the villains are (with them claiming to be Starfleet officers from 200 years earlier) isn’t particularly intriguing. Meanwhile, the thug inhabiting O’Brien evinces a weird fascination with his host’s connection to Keiko and Molly, which adds some tension and pathos to the proceedings but doesn’t really go anywhere or make a ton of sense. The eventual reveal about the villains being escapees from some kind of disembodied penal colony is ho-hum, and honestly, almost everything that happens after they leave Ten-Forward is fairly dull, culminating in a too-easy, by the numbers technobabble resolution. Things might have been somewhat more interesting if the villains really had turned out to be the officers of the Essex (and if the episode had found something worthwhile to do with that idea)…or, who knows, maybe not. Basically, what works about “Power Play” is watching the action play out, not the rather routine premise that gives rise to it. As such, it’s a fun but ultimately trivial episode.