‘Lonely Among Us’ begins what kind of becomes a trend in TNG episodes … useless ‘B-stories’. Let’s take our cobra-people vs. our long-snouted-dog-people, for example: we begin the episode with them, we check in on them throughout the episode, their presense provides a ‘deadline’ of sorts for the Enterprise on its current mission, and there seems, even, to be an attempt to incorporate them into the main plot … they become ‘suspects’ of sorts.
But this does not work at all.
The audience has a more-or-less omniscent perspective here and already knows that neither the cobras nor the dogs are responsible; we know it has to do with the blue energy cloud we passed through; we know Worf, Crusher and, eventually, Picard are ‘possessed’ by this thing.
There is not much to salvage here, though a legacy is born: Data and Sherlock Holmes. Earlier in the episode Picard inspires Data with talk of private investigators, and in addition to the Holmes quotes, the pipe, and so on, with talk of PIs it’s hard not to think, too, of Picard’s interest in Dixon Hill.
Also: we have Wesley’s sweater-of-the-week.
When reviewing what or how good something is, what it actually is and actually does have to be the criteria, I suppose. The acting here is not inspring, the writing is pretty atrocious and you feel for the actors, the special effects and costumes are comical rather than convincing, and the plotting is plodding rather than propulsive. But I am still more intrigued by flawed rather than perfect works, works where I can see room for improvement or “what if …?” moments. And then I am interested, going a step or two beyond that, to reimagining an episode or work not as what is is but what it could be … or even should be.
If what is interesting in this episode is Picard being possessed and, in conjunction with the entity, choosing to leave the Enterprise in order to ‘explore’ the universe, then that had to be emphasized earlier in the episode. We could have a carry-over effect from “Where No One Has Gone Before”—while millions of light years away they contemplated staying and exploring, and then he saw his grandmother or whoever it was and asked her about what was ‘beyond’—, but more importantly would show rather than tell all this by not so much immersing but submerging Picard in drab, day-to-day drudgery and politics, such as the cobras vs. the dogs, bureaucracy, dimplomacy, etc. Wesley is his soulmate in terms of curiosity on the ship, and Wesley, too, shows moments of wanting to explore, wanting to know more, moments during which he is, mostly, shot down by others on the ship—his mother’s on-again, off-again (possessed vs. not possessed) interest in his studies, Geordi being more interested in mere results than why something worked—, and this parallels our idealized image of Picard nicely, the Picard from ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ who won’t back down and who insists on seeing how fast the ship will go, who challenges Q, etc. And we have Worf, who has to learn more—but who isn’t so sure he’s interested in it—because Picard wants his officers always bettering themselves. We have the Picard who likes private investigators and mysteries (but who is bored by the cobras, dogs, and their petty fighting). With those sorts of touches emphasized and planted throughout Picard’s ‘decision’ to leave with the alien entity would have made sense … but, as written, it does not.
Or we have the ‘central mystery’ of the episode … who or what is at work here? When Singh the engineer is found dead, when computer systems are malfunctioning, the conclusion is that there is a sabateur aboard, and crew and guests are quickly eliminated from the list of suspects, leading Data to cite Holmes and indicate that something improbable but possible was at work. But for the viewer there was no ‘mystery,’ as we saw the ship fly through the energy cloud, we saw Worf get zapped, and we saw the blue charge transfer from character to character. But what if almost all of those ‘actions’ had occurred off-screen, between the panels (in comic book speak), so to speak? What if we merely saw results … characters acting ‘out of character’? What if we could have developed an atmosphere of paranoia, of fear, of suspicion? Of main characters who still do not know each other well (thus leading the mutiny talk later to be ominous), of competing alien races who are obviously up to no good, of even that energy cloud.
I like to think that either of those approaches, or a couple other that come to mind, would have been better in almost every way.
In his review of the episode, Wil Wheaton takes us back to an encounter of sorts with one of the writers:
I can clearly and painfully recall something that happened right around the time we filmed it: D.C. Fontana, who wrote this episode and is presumably responsible for all the lame dialogue I had to deliver in it, was part of a panel at a convention in 1987 called “Solving the Wesley Problem.” The whole thing was focused on attacking me and my character, and lamenting the fact that there was a damn kid on the Enterprise. Patrick Stewart called me from the show and encouraged me to come to the convention and speak on my own behalf, which I did with some success. That panel and the audience’s comments really hurt me when I was a 15 year-old kid, but while I watched this episode as a 34 year-old man, I had this crazy idea: Maybe instead of sitting on this panel and trashing me, D.C Fontana could have written intelligent dialogue for me and helped solve the “Wesley problem” herself.
Links:
- Lonely Among Us (Wikipedia)
- Lonely Among Us (Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki)
- Lonely Among Us (Wil Wheaton’s review)
- Lonely Among Us, et. al. (A.V. Club)
