The Loss (⭑⭑⭑)

“The Loss” is a little-loved and admittedly fairly mediocre episode for which I nevertheless have always had a bit of a soft spot. It suffers both from Marina Sirtis’s limitations as an actor and from what I might call some poorly calibrated characterization choices, as well as simply some lazy shortcuts in the writing. But there is also some deftness in the various parallels drawn between Troi and her therapy client, Troi and Guinan, and Troi and the two-dimensional beings. Also, both the two-dimensional beings and the cosmic string are sci-fi concepts that captured my imagination as a teenager, and that I continue to see as perfectly serviceable story elements even now.

Never one of the show’s better characters, Troi is, at best, only very occasionally compelling. There are multiple reason for this, I think, ranging from the sexism that both compelled the writers to present her primarily as a sex object and mostly prevented them from finding interesting things to do with her as a character, to the way that her empathic powers almost never actually seem very useful, to the fact that we just as rarely see her actually functioning as an effective counselor. One thing that I have always enjoyed about this episode is that we actually do get to see her being a straight-up counselor, for once. There was even a time, in my youth, when this episode played a role (among other influences) in making me consider pursuing a career as a counselor (a path that I didn’t end up following, however). On the other hand, it’s fair to acknowledge here that the consistently disappointing portrayal of Troi’s empathic awareness throughout the series really hurts this episode; her loss of this ability would have a lot more dramatic impact if it had ever seemed like a real thing to begin with. Still, I give credit for it having been a genuinely worthwhile premise, and for this being a Troi-focused episode that for once doesn’t revolve around an uninspired (if not outright cringe-inducing) romance of the week.

Unfortunately, while I get that part of the point of this episode is to show Troi struggling to cope with her “loss,” it does so in a way that makes her even more unappealing a character than usual. From the first scene in sickbay when Dr. Crusher scans her brain and starts diagnosing the problem, she displays no self-awareness at all. In the next scene, where RIker visits her and asks if she wants to talk, she goes straight into wounded, everyone-is-treating-me-differently mode, even though no one has actually done anything to occasion this response. It’s ironic, too, because—how often, in the past, have we seen Troi pressing other characters to talk about their feelings when they clearly didn’t want to, in far more pushy ways than anything that others do to her in this episode? Yet the episode doesn’t really seem to be going for this idea in any way, or lead to any lessons learned for Troi about sometimes just giving others space to process things at their own pace. I do appreciate Riker’s insight about how Troi can be a bit “aristocratic,” but even this feels little tossed-in, and doesn’t really lead anywhere in terms of a character arc for the counselor. And, of course, abruptly quitting her job seems like an awfully hasty and extreme reaction to the situation, again showing a distressing lack of self-awareness (especially for a character who is a mental health professional, and thus ought to have some kind of a handle on analyzing her own emotional responses to loss and stress).

But the way that the episode is partially structured around a series of therapy sessions between Troi and a client who recently lost her husband, and the parallels that emerge between client and therapist, work for me. The client illustrates that denial and emotional repression can take different forms, from her initial “I’m fine, I didn’t let the loss slow me down” attitude, to her later “okay, I guess I was repressing, but then I cried all night and let it out, so now I’m fine.” Troi’s trajectory is different in that after recognizing that her initial attitude paralleled her client’s denial, she swings all the way to utterly catastrophizing the situation, quitting her job and pushing everyone away. She doesn’t falsely convince herself that she has “dealt with it,” but neither does she actually start dealing with it. In fact, she uses her inability to empathically read her client as evidence that she’s now unqualified to do her job, rather than trusting her obviously correct psychological analysis in the face of the client’s denial. Even when the client appears a third time to tell her that she was right after all, she persists in doubting herself. On one hand, I would like my supposedly competent, professional fictional characters to display more self-awareness than Troi does—but on the other hand, I do find much of this psychology pretty plausible and even relatable.

The scene between Troi and Guinan works for me, too. Guinan can also be a mixed bag of a character at times; she typically displays more insight, and is often better at drawing others out, than Counselor Troi herself, but in their effort to portray her as “enigmatic and wise,” the writers sometimes err by pushing her into territory better characterized as “cryptic and smug.” Here, the writers explicitly highlight the fact that she can often seem like a better counselor than the counselor, pushing Troi to make the case for why that appearance doesn’t necessarily reflect reality—which is both a helpful exercise for Troi and a means of addressing a potential criticism of the show. At the same time, the ploy with which Guinan comes at Troi, while well-conceived and even clever, is also pretty transparent—so, thankfully, the writing doesn’t try to present her as all enigmatic. Instead, Troi (for once demonstrating some self-awareness) sees her coming, and actually calls her on it. It doesn’t change the fact that Guinan is right in the point that she’s making, but it avoids presenting her as mysteriously wise on a level beyond ordinary mortals in the making of it.

Finally, I just flat-out find the two-dimensional beings…cool. Not brilliant or amazing, and the storyline about the Enterprise getting caught in their wake and dragged toward a cosmic sting is nothing more than a fairly low-key sci-fi jeopardy plot, but still…I just like it. Some viewers seem to find Troi’s analogy between the beings and her own sense of two-dimensionality in the absence of her empathic awareness (or between them and everyone else, who seem like “surface projections with no depth” to her in her current state) obvious or hokey, but to me, that just seems like critical posturing—making a show of being all jaded and too-cool-for-the-show. For me, the beings work perfectly well as a sci-fi metaphor for Troi’s experience, and the scene in which she inverts previous assumptions about their obliviousness and theorizes that they may be heading toward the cosmic string on purpose is also effective. The episode doesn’t belabor it, but this too functions as a metaphor; it’s not just that Troi manages to be helpful despite her disability, but also that the beings turn out be adapted to their two-dimensionality in a way that she could learn from.

I don’t know… I feel like most fans would more readily accept a story with content like this if it revolved around one of the other characters. And sure, the fact that Troi isn’t a very well-realized character overall does hurt this episode, as does the fact that Sirtis is almost never convincing when trying to play “emotional and distraught.” The fairly arbitrary nature of Troi’s loss of her ability (rather lamely “explained” via a single line in the final scene), the failure of anyone to anticipate the likelihood that she would get it back once the ship freed itself, and the lack of any real arc or concrete takeaway for Troi all work against the episode, too. Interestingly, according to both Larry Nemecek’s TNG Companion and Memory Alpha, the writers considered leaving Troi without her empathic awareness permanently. In retrospect, I have to wonder why they didn’t go this route; they clearly never figured out how to portray her ability very effectively, and all too often ran into plot problems where it ought to have made things too easy to resolve (forcing the writers to choose between spiriting her away, incapacitating her somehow, or just lamely ignoring the issue). Didn’t this episode offer the perfect opportunity to ditch a problematic narrative element in a way that would have both given the episode more heft and potentially deepened Troi as a character going forward? Alas.

Still, as I’ve said, I seem to find more to enjoy in this one that a lot of others do. Besides—if nothing else, “The Loss” would be memorable for the fun throw-away moment in which Data surprises Riker by not “calculating a lengthy time interval to the nearest second,” because (he explains) he has noticed “a certain level of impatience” whenever he does so!