Time’s Arrow: Part I (⭑⭑⭑)

I have so many mixed feelings about this episode that it’s hard to know where to begin. It strikes me as fundamentally ill-conceived on some levels, and most of its plot doesn’t really work for me; also, there are quite a few really great character moments (especially in the first half or so), and Data in 1893 San Francisco is really a lot of fun. In all honesty, I thoroughly enjoyed re-watching this one prior to writing this review, and part of me would really like to rate it higher than I am doing. But too many things annoy me about it, and overall, alas, it just really doesn’t hold up well enough.

In a way, the heights that TNG hit with “The Best of Both Worlds” (and, to a lesser extent, also with “Redemption”) cursed the show when it came to future season finales, establishing a precedent that the writers seemingly felt compelled to try to live up to (with, to be fair, many fans probably expecting nothing less). I mean, I don’t imagine that anyone actually thought the show needed to match (much less top) BOBW in each subsequent year, but it does seem like the idea of ending each season with a cliffhanger (“part one” of an ambitious two-part episode) became de rigueur in a way that served the later seasons poorly. (Apparently the writers initially intended not to end season five with a cliffhanger, but changed their minds because Deep Space 9 was in the works and they didn’t want to give the impression that TNG was fading out to make way for the new show. This bit of background info, however, doesn’t really change my impressions about season-ending cliffhangers having come to feel obligatory very much.) Also, one senses that since the first half of BOBW left Picard’s future on the show uncertain, there was a felt need to pick another character to similarly isolate and jeopardize in each subsequent finale (Worf in “Redemption,” and then Data in “Time’s Arrow”). But whereas “Redemption” emerged organically from story and character threads that the show had been laying down for over a year prior to its making (as, for that matter, did BOBW, in some ways), “Time’s Arrow” has always felt rather more…perfunctory. Not only does it come across as though someone merely thought “Well, it’s the season finale, so…let’s make it look like we’re killing off Data!”, but also (and more on this shortly), too many aspects of the episode’s plot feel sort of forced and rote. I’m too aware, as I watch, of the writers manipulating events to get us where they want us, instead of feeling like story logic or character choices logically or inevitably lead us there. (And this is especially disappointing, I might add, for a story involving time travel and a discussion about “cheating fate.”)

And yet… Data’s head (!) being discovered in an excavation beneath San Francisco, having apparently been there for 500 years, is undeniably a compelling story hook, and watching all the characters react to its implications (that Data will somehow travel back in time and die on Earth in the late 19th century) is moving and wonderful in all the ways that one would have expected. This is the kind of thing that TNG absolutely knew how to knock out of the park by this point in its running, and that it was able to do all the more effectively by dint of the considerable history built up between its characters over the course of five seasons. Data, of course, is as dispassionate and matter-of-fact about the whole matter as he is about anything else, to the consternation of everyone else (even though, of course, they know better than to expect him to be otherwise). I love the moment when he rationally points out that there’s nothing that can be done to prevent his severed head from ending up where it will: “It has occurred. It will occur.” I love Geordi playing the concerned friend and asking Data if he wants to “talk about it,” and Data recognizing that what’s really behind this is that Geordi needs to talk about it. I love Riker doing his signature sublimated, understated anger thing, and Troi naming it for what it is, and him first reflexively denying that he’s irrationally angry, but then acknowledging and interrogating it. I love to death Troi imitating Data while repeating his “definition of friendship” (a callback to dialogue from season four’s “Legacy” that we are left to infer him having repeated to Troi at some point since). And then, when Riker subsequently says the same words to Data, only to have the android respond in human terms with “I am fond of you as well”? This is an absolutely priceless , laugh-and-cry-at-the-same-time sort of moment, easily counting among a small handful of my very favorite bits of this sort from the entire series. The themes of the unemotional android eliciting strong feelings from others, and of Data becoming gradually “more human,” are ones that the show has visited time and again, but these scenes manage to dramatize those ideas in new and especially affecting ways. So, throughout these early scenes, “Time’s Arrow Part I” feels like an easy four-star episode, and when I describe it as feeling “rote” or “perfunctory” in certain respects, that criticism very much needs to be balanced against how I feel about these truly awesome character moments.

Unfortunately, things start to fall apart for me once the Enterprise arrives as Devidia II. To begin with, it has never sat right with me that an investigation prompted by the recent discovery of evidence that aliens time-traveled to earth’s past ends up finding that the time from which the said aliens were time-traveling just happens to be…right now. Yes, granted, it’s a necessary conceit for there to be a story featuring our heroes doing something about the situation (and Data ending up in the 19th century), but it feels way too convenient. The aliens could have been traveling to old Earth from the 23rd century, or the 37th century, or, hell, even from the 24th but, like, not until five years from now—but instead, humans just happen to discover 500-year-old archeological evidence of alien time-travel interference at the exact right time to catch the aliens in the act? Here’s the first piece of what I mean in saying that the plot feels artificially manipulated to get us to a destination. Then, we have the whole debate about Data accompanying the away team down to the planet. This is tricky to parse, because on the one hand, it’s hard not to sympathize with Picard’s impulse to keep Data safely aboard the Enterprise; after all, a temporal anomaly has been detected planetside, and they’re facing the prospect of Data being transported back in time and dying there, and presumably that can’t happen if they just keep him away from the damn anomaly. But Data’s earlier observation that it will necessarily happen (his head having been found is irrefutable evidence of this) remains valid, and makes a mess of things. Time travel stories always struggle in dealing with situations in which foreknowledge ought to enable characters to prevent a bad thing from happening, yet the story is committed to a “whatever happened, happened” model of time travel (to borrow a phrase from a later TV show). The catch-22 here is that it seems both irrational for Picard to believe that Data’s fate can potentially be avoided, and very stupid for him to go ahead and send Data down to the planet. The story would work much better if Data’s fate befell him as a result of events that didn’t seem obviously likely to have that result. Also, on a character level… While I’m totally fine with Picard being a little irrational as he tries to cope with the Data’s-head-found-in-the-past situation, I’m less comfortable with him consciously and openly embracing that irrationality when Data calls it out. That, to me, is not who Picard is. And then, the plot machinations deployed to get Data down to the planet despite Picard’s reluctance to send him there are (frankly) total nonsense. The whole bit about the aliens being “out of temporal phase” by a fraction of a second with our characters makes exactly zero sense to me, and the fact that the only instrument with the required degree of precision to adjust our characters “into phase” with them happens to reside in Data’s brain is another of those too-convenient plot contrivances. Also, later in the episode, Geordi manages to MacGyver an adequate substitute after Data has disappeared through the time portal. If they were really so worried about keeping Data safe, why didn’t they just do that in the first place? (Plus, the portrayal of the temporal syncing business is ripe for nitpicking. Dialog claims that even being out of sync by a millisecond would be enough to render the aliens invisible, but our characters don’t actually become invisible to each other until the exact aimed-for “.004” variance is achieved. And why is it only the people and technology present that are subject to being out of sync, while the physical environs (the cavern) somehow transcend the “out-of-phase-ness”? And why does the color of the lighting change when you sync up with the aliens? And why does communicating via a time delay work? None of this makes any sense at all.) And finally, we have still more plot maneuvering to get Picard to accompany the eventual away team at the end of the episode. If Guinan has to step in and tell him to go in order to ensure that her personal history plays out “correctly,” doesn’t that mean that Data’s perspective about the inevitability of events is actually completely wrong? Plus, from a storytelling perspective, Guinan’s heavy-handed “hinting” to Picard about him having to go or they’ll never meet goes way beyond foreshadowing, and feels more like spoiling. Also, how does Picard know that it’s fine for him to ignore Guinan at first, but crucial for him to join the away team at the end of the episode? And why doesn’t Riker maintain his objection more stubbornly? And then…does Picard know/suspect, when he beams down, that he and the rest of the away team are going to end up going through a time portal and find themselves in 19th-century San Francisco? If not, then a) he’s pretty dumb, since Guinan’s hinting all but gives this away, and b) his ordering Worf back to the ship has no apparent purpose, and c) I have to wonder why, as soon as they all phase-shift, he and everyone else pretty much head straight for the portal. But if he does know—if going back to old Earth was actually the plan—then shouldn’t they have, like, prepared for it a bit? Like, at a minimum, changed out of their Starfleet uniforms and into period attire?

So, yeah…lots of huge plot contrivances and oversights here, adding up to a story that I can’t really suspend my disbelief about, or fully emotionally invest in, which is very disappointing. But meanwhile, Data’s adventures in the 1890s are, I have to admit, quite entertaining. This part of the episode is not without its negatives, either, but here they tend to be outweighed, for me, by the fun elements. The panhandling ’49er whom Data encounters shortly after arriving, for instance, occupies a sweet spot between existing merely as a bit of random background color and turning out to be someone either famous or somehow important to the plot; his scene with Data is entertaining and does help to establish the setting, and then we later see a more vulnerable version of him being targeted by the time-traveling aliens in a moment that feels appropriately dark and adds some nice pathos. The earnest bellboy whom part two will reveal to actually be a young Jack London represents the writers getting a bit more self-indulgent, but remains a fun character. Data bootstrapping himself into a comfortable position by taking a group of card sharks for all they have in a game of poker is super-fun, even if it also raises questions about why he’s suddenly, in this situation, an amazing poker player, despite being routinely beaten by Riker back on the Enterprise. And his calmly going about the business of cobbling together a tech gizmo and investigating the alien threat is just kind of cool. His discovery of Guinan in this place and time would work better, for me, if the episode hadn’t already telegraphed it, but this, too, is nevertheless good stuff, giving us a fun chance to a see a younger Guinan—one who doesn’t have all the answers or even know what’s going on, but who nevertheless takes Data’s story about being from a future where they serve on a starship together totally in stride. And then, finally, we have Mark Twain, whose depiction in this (pair of) episode(s) is loved by some, hated by others, and kind of a bit of both by me. The voice is extremely grating and the acting is too over the top, but the writing mostly works for me. His monologue about humanity and its place in the cosmos (with wry asides from Guinan) is good, and totally feels like it belongs in a Star Trek episode, and I enjoy it despite the excesses of its delivery. Still, I do find myself wanting a little more. His thoughts resonate with general Trekkian subject matter and themes, but it would nice, I feel, if they had a more specific purpose rooted in the actual episode in which they appear. Outside of this speech, “Time’s Arrow” is not really “about” humanity’s place in the cosmos in any particularly significant way. (One could try to read between the lines and make something of the juxtaposition between the kind of humanocentric hubris of which Twain accuses Alfred Russel Wallace and the plot premise of aliens from the future preying on the humans of this era, but the episode just doesn’t seem interested in the latter on a thematic level at all.)

So overall, I guess what we have here is an enjoyable, implausible, poorly constructed mess of an episode that includes some not-to-be-missed character moments that, to some degree, one wishes were located in some other, better episode. It’s enough of a keeper to warrant three stars with no reservations, yet still has to be taken with a grain of salt (if that makes any sense?).