Remember Me (⭑⭑⭑⭑)

This is a delightful episode that I have always really liked. It’s also one of a depressingly tiny number of episodes with Dr. Crusher as the featured character, and it may be the only unambiguously good one. This is a travesty, both from the perspective of TNG shafting its female characters and because this episode, in my opinion, really does demonstrate her potential as a character (not to mention what Gates McFadden has to offer as an actress). Shine a spotlight on this mostly overlooked character, and what it reveals is a passionate, rational, self-aware person whose life is given meaning as much by the web of interpersonal relationships of which she is a part as by her own intellectual prowess—both of which, of course, the events of the episode call into question or threaten to take away from her. I really enjoy just watching the doctor make her way through the weirdness of everything that she experiences in this episode.

This is also one of my all-time favorite “weird shit happens” high-concept sci-fi TNG episodes. Admittedly, it dips somewhat into the well of the quasi-mystical, much as the first season’s “Where No One Has Gone Before” (to which, in a way, it is a sequel, since it involves the reappearance of the Traveler character from that episode) did—and as I discussed in my review of that episode, I have enduringly mixed feelings about TNG’s recurring interest in this “thoughts shaping reality” style of science fiction. In this instance, though, it’s mostly used to create a sort of cool what-if scenario, rather than in the service of overt mysticism (at least until the Traveler actually shows up, and he and Wesley start doing their thing). Our thoughts don’t literally shape reality, but what if subspace and warp fields and the technology to punch outside our space-time continuum were real, and the nature of a created “pocket universe” were determined by a person’s thoughts at the moment of its coming into existence? The outcome of this thought experiment is both a deliciously weird and eerie episode in which things just keep getting more and more bizarre for poor Beverly (yet the logic underlying all the weirdness makes satisfying sense once it becomes clear), and a sci-fi dramatization of the tragedy of our mortality and the inevitability of loss—of those we love, but also of our own faculties, as Beverly confronts (even though she ultimately rejects it) the possibility that she is losing her mind. Very cool.

Bringing these reflections down to earth…this episode is full of fun moments and memorable lines: Beverly’s monologue to Picard about the rest of the regulars after they have vanished; Picard behaving as though the Enterprise being crewed solely by himself and Dr. Crusher is perfectly natural, and her incredulous burst of laughter in reaction to this; Beverly catching the computer in a telling bit of illogic when it admits that she lacks the skills to carry out the Enterprise‘s mission alone; the chilling moment when Picard, too, finally vanishes, and a terrified Beverly repeats to herself, with grim determination, “I won’t forget.” But my very favorite, of course, is when she inquries of the computer “What is the nature of the universe?”, and the computer casually replies, “The universe is a spheroid region, seven hundred and five meters in diameter.” Running through all of this, too, is Beverly’s increasing conviction that “there is a physical, measurable phenomenon at work here,” and her very cool decision to put aside the possibility that she is losing her mind and just rationally work through the problem until she, alone in her bizarrely shrinking universe, can figure it out. Her earlier self-doubts are relatable, and reflect the humility that forces any sane person to recognize that when one’s own perceptions increasingly conflict with observable reality, the problem likely resides in oneself, not in literally everyone else. But her eventual self-assertion, her insistence on her own ability to puzzle out what’s going on (just as she would diagnose a patient by examining the symptoms), and the moment when she ultimately reverses her assessment and (correctly!) concludes that “if there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe” (!), are totally awesome.

If I’m going to be totally honest, I could do without the moment in which, as she has done in two or three previous episodes, the doctor starts to say something that she “has been meaning to say for some time” to the captain, but gets interrupted before she can get it out. This running gag never really worked for me. For one thing, it strikes me as a cop-out by the writers—a way to create the impression that there’s something meaningful and interesting to be said, without ever having to define what that thing actually is, since she always gets conveniently interrupted before she can spit it out. Also, the most obvious thing would be for it to concern her having deeper, possibly romantic, feelings for him…but this clearly isn’t it, because every time such questions come up explicitly between them (such as in “Allegiance,” or—a few seasons hence—in “Attached”), she shuts them down. So, enough already, say I; I would have preferred for this not to surface again here.

But apart from that and some ambivalence about the Traveler stuff, I have precious few complaints or even nits to pick about “Remember Me.” It’s another example of the “ordinary” but awesome episode (that is, an episode that is great without being an attention-grabbing standout like BOBW) on which my love of TNG fundamentally rests.