“Captain’s Holiday” may have disappointed me on this latest rewatch, but “Tin Man” is one that I’ve never much cared for. It strikes me as a bit of a hodgepodge of half-formed ideas, none executed very well, and it focuses on a guest character whom I’ve always found hard to tolerate. The overall “feel” of the episode, too, just seems out of place in TNG’s third season; it feels like a second-season holdover of sorts (and not from the better side of second season, either) that got rescued from the scrap heap, polished off a bit, and thrown together to fill a slot a year later. (I have no knowledge suggesting that anything of the sort is actually the case, mind you; it’s just the impression that the episode conveys to me.) Actually, that may even be charitable; the episode’s reliance on a somewhat cheesy-sounding score that tries to create a general sense of wonder to cover for its lack of much of a plot calls to mind the dark days of season one to some extent. Apart from Picard agreeing to beam Tam over to the alien, what actions do the regular characters really take here to drive the plot or resolve the crisis? But, sticking with my main sense of it as a second season throwback: Picard, at one point, even declares a situation to be “grand”—a verbal habit of his throughout season two that, to my memory, was entirely dropped as of this season, with the sole exception of this one leftover instance.
Tam Elbrun is certainly a “second season” sort of character: more a sort of one-note concept that a fully fleshed out human being, overhyped, implausibly unstable, and off-putting from his first moments onscreen. (One is uncomfortably reminded of the likes of Riva, or even Ira Graves.) I don’t consider myself a particularly savvy critic of acting, but this is a case where I think both the writing and the performance are pretty bad. The episode wants us to empathize with Tam, but the self-pitying, unstable, manic energy that he exudes makes this very difficult, and it also doesn’t help that he constantly interrupts people (either to say exactly what they were going to say, because telepath!, or just because their trivial concerns bore him and he thinks that whatever he has to say is much more important). There is the outlines of something worthwhile in his connection to Troi and her empathy for him, but it’s not nearly enough to offset all the bad.
Maybe it’s just because so little about this episode works for me in its own right, but I find that numerous aspects of “Tin Man” feel recycled from previous episodes—or, in a couple of cases, actually prefigure elements that will be used to better effect in future episodes. When Tam and Data explore the interior of Tin Man (and even, to some extent, at other moments when Tam is over-emoting about the alien’s loneliness and grief), I’m reminded of Troi in “Encounter at Farpoint,” down inside the station-creature. The disappointing, throwaway involvement of Romulans as a way to try to add tension to an episode that’s mainly about something else calls “Contagion” to mind. Hell—the notion of Tam and the alien “merging” with each other, and finding peace and purpose in the merging, contains definite shades of Star Trek: The Motion Picture! Meanwhile, the giant space-dwelling organic life form idea would be used to better effect in season four’s “Galaxy’s Child,” and Riker’s hostility toward a guest character who is notorious for having played a role in a disaster that resulted in deaths prefigures season five’s “Ensign Ro” (but here, goes pretty much nowhere and receives no resolution).
The episode’s strongest element is its attempt to forge something of a connection betwen Tam Elbrun and Data. There’s a thematic thread about being “different” and searching for a place to belong, and a corollarly bit about purpose, that both have some merit. When Tam observes early on that Troi has found her place, I actually buy, for a moment, that these two have a history in which this topic figured prominently—and when Data tells Troi at the end that he has realized that the Enterprise is where he “belongs”…aw, I don’t think the moment is entirely earned, really, but it still gets me, somewhat in spite of myself. Data and Tam’s conversation about the purpose of existence works rather less well, both because it just isn’t wrtten terribly well and because Data had a more self-assured (but still very plausible) take on this same question just a few episodes back when it was asked by his daughter. But still, this was at least the episode trying for depth and relevance in a way that I respect. These efforts, in fact, are probably what keep “Tin Man” from landing in the one-star category for me.
Overall, this is probably my second-least-favorite episode of season three so far (after “The Price”), and maybe my third-least-favorite overall (although I reserve final judgement on the remaining episodes of the season until I actually re-watch them and write my reviews).
(Postsript: Holy crap! I just realized that Tam Elbrun is also the mayor in season three of Buffy The Vampire Slayer!)