The Inner Light (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑)

Many fans, myself included, rank “The Inner Light” at or near the very top of their personal lists of overall best TNG episodes. This is an absolute masterpiece that puts the always-captivating Jean-Luc Picard through a completely mind-blowing experience. It’s both an imaginative and fascinating piece of sci-fi and a deeply moving character story, and the experiences that it puts our captain through are rich with thought-provoking and relatable metaphorical significance. Personally, I think it ranks as one of my two all-time favorite episodes of the series.

So you wake up one day and find yourself, somehow, somewhere else–in an unfamiliar place, in a whole other life, with no explanation at all. At first, naturally, you’re indignant, distrustful, rebellious; this is not your life! What the hell!? You just want to go home. But everyone around you acts as though you entirely belong there and everything is normal; you have friends, and even a spouse. There’s a faint nod here toward that experience that some people have of coming to feel like they have drifted through their lives and suddenly don’t recognize where they’ve ended up (“This is not my beautiful wife!”); it’s not dwelt on (and I’m glad), but it’s one of several metaphors present in the episode. But days pass, and then months, and finally years. You still have literally no memories from “this” life prior to that day when you awoke in it, and the knowledge and memory of who you were for decades of life prior to that day continue to define you—but even so, how long can you go on clinging to that, in the face of the undeniable reality of your present life? What a mind-blowing scenario! We don’t quite learn exactly how Jean-Luc/Kamin processes all of this, even in the fascinating scene where he talks to his wife about it at the five-year mark. Does he suspect that he’s losing his mind? Is the idea that his previous life was some kind of ultra-intense hallucination at all plausible to him? Does the immediacy and normalcy of the here and now simply push these questions out of his mind much of the time? I’m reminded here of that line from The Truman Show: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.” In any case, we see him make a decision to commit to the present—to live this life, whatever he may still feel deep down about his other one—and it both feels unthinkable and makes total sense, at the same time. It’s also just a really emotionally gripping scene. On top of trying to put myself in Picard’s head, I suddenly find myself seeing the situation from Eline’s perspective. Five years ago, her husband woke up believing he was some other person, and she has never quite gotten “back” the person she fell in love with and married. Now, finally, he is voicing a desire to be that person. She has yearned for this, but perhaps stopped really hoping that it would ever happen. This, also, is fertile ground for real-life analogues, for anyone who wants to take it there. The moment is wonderfully acted, too, and just reduces me to tears.

Of course, by continually jumping forward in time, the episode challenges us to keep up in the space of minutes with adjustments to his new life that Picard/Kamin makes over the course of years. One might imagine this resulting in an episode that feels rushed, but it doesn’t—except, perhaps, in a way that gives rise to yet another metaphor, as his life rushes by all too fast, making him realize that he doesn’t have the luxury of clinging to things that are no more. This point is driven home in another tear-inducing scene where we see the young woman that Picard/Kamin’s daughter has (suddenly, from our perspective) become, and he urges her to “make now always the most precious time.” It’s actually sort of remarkable how well this all works; we don’t get very much time to get to know Meribor at any of the ages that we see her at, and the same is true for Kamin’s friend Batai, yet I come to care a lot about both of them (and what they mean to Kamin) by the end of the episode.

Another intriguing angle that gets some play here is the question of who a person becomes when forcibly directed along a life path that they would not have chosen, and what this means for any of us as we reflect upon roads not taken in our own lives. Picard, for instance, famously is not comfortable with children, and even comments (as Kamin) that he had never felt his life to be incomplete without children of his own—yet he now can no longer imagine life without them. We make choices in life, and we may be happy or unhappy with them, but despite what we may imagine, we can never really know how things would have turned out had we chosen differently…unless, of course, we’re Jean-Luc Picard, and we get to live out a whole alternate life scenario in our heads and find out! Also in this vein, the whole thread of Picard-as-Kamin learning to play the flute (when we have never before known Picard to have any interest in being a musician) is cool…and, obviously, adds a lot of emotional heft, between the evocative song that he plays and his ending up with the flute as a memento of the whole experience once he’s back in his “real” life. Then, too, there are moments in “The Inner Light” that feel like they are in dialogue with the episode “Conundrum,” wherein all the main characters remained reassuringly themselves despite losing their memories. Here, Picard observes five years into his life as Kamin that in some ways, he’s still living like Jean-Luc Picard—but he makes this a self-criticism, not a self-affirmation. Even though he didn’t really choose this life, he’s in it; he has a wife who supports him and needs things from him; his circumstances call for him to grow and change. But he’s stuck in the rut of being the solitary explorer that he was in his other life. This is just one side of the coin, though; the episode is not saying that he shouldn’t be true to himself, as we see in that wonderful scene with his daughter that I already mentioned. Meribor, always her father’s daughter according to Eline, has matured into a rational and inquisitive seeker of knowledge, and when she reminds her father that he has raised her “to pursue the truth, no matter how painful it is,” we could not wish for a clearer or more meaningful assurance that Kamin is still Jean-Luc Picard (and that he has held firm through the years, even in his radically changed circumstances, to “the first duty of every Starfleet officer”). If the episode intends to suggest that growing and changing in response to changed circumstances needn’t imply sacrificing or betraying our fundamental core values, I’d say that it succeeds brilliantly.

There are, I suppose, things to be said about the framing plot of the episode, as well as ruminations about choices made regarding the depiction of the Kataanian civilization. The shipboard scenes are fairly inconsequential, getting the job done of establishing that the alien probe has “locked onto” Picard in a way that the crew can’t immediately undo, but not containing much else at all. I guess they serve to ground things a bit, letting the audience know that yes, despite how things seem to Picard, he’s actually still himself and still aboard the Enterprise. But they’re minimal in a way that serves the episode; Picard’s experiences living out another life are the point, and the rest is details. One can quibble about believability, too, of course: this ancient, only barely spacefaring civilization has technology that can lock onto an alien brain and defeat the Enterprise‘s best efforts at severing the link? It doesn’t track…but I don’t really care. Then, there is also the perspective that what essentially happens in this episode is that Picard is mind-raped by alien technology in way that ought to wreak havoc with his identity and shake him to his very core, yet we are clearly meant to like the Kataanians, and Picard is back to his usual self in the next episode. The latter issue is just TNG’s episodic structure rearing its head yet again; the former is a valid point, but again, the episode is just too good for it to really bother me. Finally, I’ve always felt that various things about Kataan are decidedly odd. The settlement in which Kamin lives genuinely feels like a community, and I find myself caring about it as I watch, and there’s no comparison at all to the wildly half-assed portrayals of alien societies in TNG’s early years…but there are still several respects in which it doesn’t quite feel like a real place. For one, the technological level is hard to get a handle on. They have electricity, and some kind of communications technology, and they can launch a probe into space, yet Kamin’s occupation is essentially that of a blacksmith (“iron weaver”). Also there are no power lines or other modern infrastructure visible, and government beyond the level of the local village seems to operate on the basis of face-to-face meetings in the town square with an occasionally visiting “representative.” It doesn’t seem like we’re meant to understand that Kamin’s village is some kind of redneck backwater, either, though. I think the writers were going for an idyllic feel, yet wanted enough modern trappings to differentiate it from a “primitive society” scenario (and also justify the probe launch), but it does all feel a little weird when you stop to think about it at all. Here again, though, the episode is so powerful that it mostly just carries me along past these kinds of issues.

Everything that the episode has been comes to a head in the big mind-blowing moment when Kamin realizes that the probe that is being launched will find “him,” in the future (his past). Patrick Stewart sells the hell out of this in a true-to-form acting moment (the man truly knew how to do “profound, mind-expanding realization”). The curtain is raised, the “reality” of Kataan falls away, and our protagonist is validated in his old, deeply buried memories of being another person in another life—and yet, for the moment, he also remains Kamin. The wheel has come full circle from when he first woke up in this place. From a plot perspective, it seems like this revelation ought to have felt predictable, but (to me, at least) it never did/does; I’m just too immersed in Picard/Kamin’s journey for the denoument to come across as in any way obvious. And then, too, the idea of a civilization that knows it is facing its own demise, and can’t do anything to prevent this, taking solace by sending information about themselves—their story, in effect—out into the universe, in the hope that someone, somewhere, some-when will receive it and thus preserve something of them, is beautiful and tragic and moving (issues of mind rape aside). (I mean, can we maybe imagine that the interface between the probe and the human brain worked a little too well? That it was meant to function less intrusively, somehow? I dunno. Whatever.)

And then, bewilderingly, our hero finds himself waking up in a life that he left behind decades ago, and promptly learns that his entire subjective lifetime of being Kamin played out over a mere 25 minutes! You know, forget being a whole other person and living on an alien world and all that, and just imagine waking up one day to find yourself surrounded by people you knew intimately, say, 30 years ago, but haven’t seen since. Oh, except that they’re also all still the same age they were then, as are you—and to them, no time has passed! I think that, to make sense of the show going forward, we kind of have to assume that once the immediacy of the experience wears off, Picard comes to recall it more like a dream than like having literally lived out decades of another life. But still, in the moment…what a thing to try to assimilate! And yet, too, who hasn’t had moments when you think about some part of your life that you’ve kind of forgotten about or just not been attending to for a while, and you experience a sort of mental slippage, where a thing that you’ve unconsciously imagined to still be current in your life suddenly feels distant and less familiar? That project that you worked obsessively on for months, but then drifted away from without actually finishing; your favorite album that you suddenly realize you haven’t listened to in forever; a close friendship that you’ve allowed to fall away somewhat without noticing. When Picard wakes up on the bridge of the Enterprise, his whole life is like that. And yet, as usual with good sci-fi, I can relate this extraordinary experience to things I’ve felt in my own life.

What an amazing episode.