What a comedown from the previous episode! Here, once again, we return to structureless, filler-packed plotting, clunky exposition, painfully telegraphed foreshadowing, one-dimensional characterization, and a lame storyline that has no point and resolves itself without much help from any of the main characters. Plus, this episode represents both the debut of “mad admiral syndrome” and the first instance of what will become a too-frequently-recurring plot crutch over the course of the series: a situation in which some diplomatic crisis or other supposedly can only be resolved by one particular negotiator (who almost always turns out to be hiding something, or otherwise fails to live up to his reputation in some often egregious way). Moreover, and perhaps most damningly of all for the entertainment value of the episode, it suffers from the major weakness of revolving entirely around an uninteresting guest star, while doing nothing with any of the regular characters.
From virtually the first moment that he appears onscreen, the character of Admiral Jameson is both uninteresting and unlikable. When Picard asks for his take on why Karnas can’t resolve the hostage situation on his own, he babbles a bunch of exposition instead of actually offering an answer, and once he beams on board, he immediately alienates everyone (including the audience) by throwing his weight around asserting that he, not Picard, will be in charge of the mission. The latter is totally unnecessary (he’s an admiral; of course his authority trumps the captain’s!), and only serves to make him seem like a jerk and the episode seem like it’s trying too hard to generate tension. As the plot (sort of) thickens, moreover, the admiral continues to be portrayed as total dick (both to the main characters and to his wife). Thus, when the “revelation” finally comes about how his famed diplomatic success of 45 years ago actually consisted of him having done something abominably unscrupulous, it completely fails to be surprising in any way, and the audience has no reason to care. If you want the revelation of a character’s deep, dark secret to have any impact, you can’t have that character be an unlikable dick from minute one! Build up a hero—someone whom the audience wants to like—and then take him down, if that’s the story you want to tell. Or, to put it another way: write three-dimensional characters, not one-dimensional ones!
The planetary leader, Karnas, doesn’t fare a whole lot better as a character, I should note. The episode tries to pull a switcharoo whereby he is initially presented as a good guy who’s desperate, powerless, and in need of help, but is then later revealed to be the villain of the piece—yet he comes across as threatening and inconsistent from his first appearance (in the taped message that he sends to Starfleet). He actually seems to slip up and all but admit that he’s really the one who has taken hostages, in that he can’t keep his story straight as to whether the “terrorists” are the ones insisting that they will only speak to Jameson or whether he himself has judged that only Jameson “has the skills” to resolve the situation. Smooth move! By the end, of course, he devolves into an impotently threatening whiner who seems to think that he can point lethal weapons at Starfleet brass and threaten to kill them if they don’t give him what he wants, without suffering any consequences as a result. And what’s worse, he appears to be right! At the end of the episode, Picard sums up the situation as though everything’s been resolved happily, and the Enterprise warps out of the system with there being, apparently, no political or diplomatic ramifications to this planet’s leader having seized Federation hostages as part of a half-cocked revenge gambit!
As for the whole de-aging admiral storyline—well, frankly, it’s just a sheer travesty. Again, the admiral’s rash actions and their consequences have no emotional impact, since we don’t care about him at all. The terrible “old man” makeup and woefully inadequate acting don’t help, either, nor the super-cheesy gimmick of continually shrouding the admiral in convenient shadows so as to make melodramatic revelations of his latest de-aging progress. The episode makes some effort to create emotional investment by showing us the admiral’s wife’s reactions to the whole thing, but she’s way too much of a clueless and spineless helpmate (whose anger at her husband’s bullshit scarcely scratches the surface of her instinctively loving and supporting submissiveness) for this to really work at all. Also, how weird is it to beam her (an elderly civilian) down to Karnas’s office in the midst of a scene in which the latter has just been threatening to murder everyone who is already down there, just because her husband’s self-inflicted medical condition is (predictably) deteriorating? For that matter, Picard’s decisions throughout the latter half of the episode seem deeply questionable; he clearly perceives that the admiral is a nut case, but his solutions consist merely of insisting on accompanying him while allowing him to do whatever crazy thing he wants to do (and Riker’s expected and usual objection to the captain beaming down into dangerous situations is conveniently ignored). What, exactly, is Picard’s intent when they beam down to Karnas’s office near the end, after all? Was what ends up happening—Karnas relenting after watching the wreckage of the admiral die in front of him—actually the plan?
This one is a total waste.