I said in my review of “Pen Pals” that most of the best and worst episodes of this season are clustered together in its final third. Nothing illustrates this better than the contrast between that travesty and “Q Who,” which stands with “The Measure of a Man” as one of the season’s undeniable classics, and an episode that just excels in every way. Quite frankly, it’s like an episode of an altogether different series from the one to which most of this season belongs (and that series is “TNG from its third season on”). Some episodes are so bad that it’s hard to know where to start in ripping them apart; this one is just the reverse. It combines the first truly great appearance of Q, the introduction of the Borg, a tense and exciting plot, and some good character development, all of which adds up in a satisfying way to make a subtle and thought-provoking statement about the characters, the show as a whole, and the human condition in general.
GIven all the big, exciting, important things that comprise the meat of this episode, too, it can be easy to forget (though an old, die-hard fan like me never does anymore) that it’s also the episode that opens with lighthearted and very appealing character-introduction scenes for “Ensign Sonja Gomez”—a character who was presumably intended to become at least a recurring semi-regular, though this (for reasons unknown to me) obviously didn’t happen. It’s a shame, because she’s immediately appealing, and the interplay between her and Geordi works really nicely. Her lack of a future on the show notwithstanding, though, introducing a new character in an episode as generally ambitious as this one is biting off a lot, yet it somehow works perfectly. The episode opens on a light, moderately comedic, shipboard-routine scene in engineering, giving no indication of where it’s headed—and then, wham! Suddenly Picard finds himself whisked away by Q, and the audience is completely hooked as an air of eerie mystery settles in to stay.
After a promising but uneven introduction in the pilot and a painfully bad second appearance several episodes later, the Q character is finally realized to perfection this time. Part of the trick is in finding the right balance between his irreverent wit and his mysterious, arrogant, and threatening “other-ness.” Relatedly, a big key both here and in the best later Q episodes is the ambiguity of his motives and agenda, and the lack of a clear-cut answer to the question of whether or not the perspectives with which he challenges Picard and company (and by extension, Starfleet, the Federation, and humanity in general) are valid. The clash of outlooks between Q and Picard in this episode is a remarkable instance of an inevitable disagreement between perspectives that are both simultaneously reasonable yet problematic. Q accuses Picard/humanity of smug, complacent arrogance because humans dare to explore and engage with an unknown universe that he knows to contain dangers with which they aren’t at all prepared to cope. Inasmuch as humans’ only real alternative is to metaphorically crawl under a rock and hide (which actually would, in a way, be even more smug and complacent than daring to explore and confront the unknown)—and considering also that humans, for better or worse, are what they are (to quote from Picard’s defense of humanity to Q from a later episode), and can’t reasonably be expected to be anything else (or to be sobered by knowledge that they lack)—the critique is unfair. Moreover, Picard’s refusal to let Q become “part of the crew” is the right decision—first of all because, as the captain rightly observes, Q isn’t trustworthy, and the arrangement just flat-out wouldn’t work, but also from a “we need to make our own way and learn from our mistakes” thematic perspective (even if that’s really more of a meta-reason than a reason that Picard can rely on). But at the same time, there’s still something undeniably arrogant about informing a practically omnipotent entity who is hinting at the existence of overwhelming dangers in your future that his “services are not required”!
The intriguing question here is whether Q is truly there because he wants to “join the crew,” or whether it’s all a big game that he’s playing in order to communicate the very lesson that Picard finds himself drawing from the events of the episode at its end. I tend to prefer the latter interpretation, but it’s precisely the lack of a clear answer either way that makes Q at his best such an intriguing and effective character—one who seems to walk a line between being a dangerously reckless titan who toys with lesser beings for his amusement, and almost a sort of guardian angel (albeit a highly irreverent one) who employs subtle manipulation (masked by all his flashy powers) to covertly guide humanity/Picard’s development. Q has the annoyingly arrogant and condescending traits of a conventional god, but he’s presented as annoying and audacious first, with any possible underlying wisdom and good intentions merely implied—and also as, at best, morally ambiguous, so that even when his interventions in the lives of mere mortals have positive outcomes, his motives remain questionable. This delicate combination of traits makes him uniquely intriguing and appealing as a character. In this episode, for instance, even though (as Picard protests) his actions lead to the loss of lives, there’s still a level on which his point about how “it’s not safe out here” is well-taken; he’s pointing out, essentially, that implicit in the philosophy that humanity should dare to explore and confront the unknown rather than cower under a rock is an acceptance of consequences, and that the “we’re doing the best that we can” response (to once again quote Picard from “All Good Things…”) to Q’s accusations of humanity’s inadequacy calls for a degree of humility regarding our ability to cope with what we encounter when we do brave the unknown. But even so, the fact remains that the particular consequences that are experienced here (the loss of the 18 crewpersons) come about because Q himself puts them in harm’s way! So his defense of his actions simultaneously carries weight and falls flat; it’s brilliant.
All of that, and I’ve scarcely even talked about the Borg yet! They will eventually be ruined by the second TNG movie, alas, and in a sense, their very concept contains the seeds of its undoing. The Borg are so unstoppable, and so beyond the ability of Starfleet to cope with, that it will quickly become hard to keep coming up with workable stories involving them (which their popularity will make irresistible) without unraveling aspects of the original concept. But here, in their pure, original form, they’re just great. Part of the beauty of the Borg is that they provided a workable way for Star Trek—with its philosophy of reaching out, embracing difference, humanizing the “other,” and affirming the possibility of achieving a modus vivendi with even the most initially hostile of adversaries—to nevertheless smuggle in a terrifying and utterly implacable “villain” race, with which (at least initially) our characters can interact in only one way. This both forces the characters to play against their strengths, and at the same time justifies all-out conflict on a show that normally isn’t about such things. It works because, even though there’s a “human” core to the Borg just like there is to every other Trek adversary, it’s inaccessible to our characters—and because the peculiarities of the Borg’s evolution make it the case that they really do have goals that simply can’t be harmonized with those of others, no matter how accommodating. They thus function as a metaphor for the reality that, no matter how earnest we are and how hard we try—and in spite of the fact that there really is no simple “evil” in the world—in real life, there really are situations in which we can’t reason with people who are determined to be our enemies. Star Trek‘s strengths (and its heart) lie, most of the time, in dramatizing the point of view that this is rarely the case—so by introducing the Borg, the show strengthens its usual argument by conceding its limitations, and becomes that much truer a consideration of the human condition as a result.
Almost everything about this episode is just done really well: there’s a visceral creepiness to the Borg; the Enterprise goes about responding to the situations in which it finds itself in sensible and satisfying ways; the tension keeps escalating throughout (gradually at first, then by leaps and bounds toward the end), but never by resort to cheesy gimmicks or over-the-top execution; the characters (with one exception) are all their competent, layered, likable selves; the dialog shows both sophistication and flair. About the only sourish note is Guinan, who gets infuriatingly cryptic and vague almost every time someone asks her for information or insight about the Borg. I do like the character most of the time, but every so often Guinan edges into this “annoyingly smug and cryptic” territory, and this episode is one of the worst instances of that. Picard is handled beautifully, though; his various reactions to Q early on have the right mix of annoyance, depth, wisdom, self-assertion, and uncertainty; his climactic show of humility and the admission of his inadequacy is well-written and just right; and he generally comes across like the shining, admirable exemplar of humanity that we see in later seasons, rather than the two-dimensional, stodgy, officious, short-tempered authoritarian that he was often portrayed as being in the first and second seasons. What’s more, he goes through a real “arc”—the comeuppance that he receives when his initial rejection of Q’s aid results in the Enterprise getting in over its head—without having to be written as unusually or unpalatably dumb or arrogant to begin with, and he comes away at the end with a “lesson” that’s neither heavy-handed and obvious, nor stupid—just subtle and thought-provoking. The final scene between him and Guinan is the perfect ending to the episode. Beyond the character level, the scene also—unprecedentedly for the show up to this point—makes an implicit promise to the audience that the events of the episode will have repercussions in future episodes…and it’s a promise that the show actually does deliver on at the end of the next season!
One final observation: Thus far in the show’s run, way too many episodes (even some of the decent ones) have suffered from anticlimactic and often deeply unsatisfying resolutions. One way of looking at this episode is that it kind of makes a virtue of this recurring weakness; it puts the Enterprise in a situation that is so high-stakes, and so far beyond its actual capabilities, that there’s no way it can possibly escape short of a deus ex machina—but that’s the whole point! And in so doing, the episode gives us action and excitement and space battles, while still staying true to TNG’s broader identity as a show that fundamentally isn’t about space battles. Since the situation with the Borg is brought about by the intervention of Q—and also because the real climax is internal (Picard’s willingness to ask Q for help)—the escape via a snap of Q’s fingers in the end isn’t a cheat. For the Enterprise to have proven Q wrong and dealt adequately with the Borg on their own, in fact, would have been the more anticlimactic and disappointing route for this episode to take. Instead, the story here is that Q sets events into motion that put the main characters through their paces and force them to face, basically, a no-win situation—and things run their course right up to the brink of disaster, until Picard grasps Q’s larger purpose and willingly surrenders in the battle of wills…whereupon Q extricates them from the mess and they go away the wiser for the experience. Clever.