When it comes to television, movies, even theater, I maintain a rather great level of “suspension of disbelief” … rather, I grant said works a great deal of leeway, perhaps something appropriate when it comes to the motion of a starship. “The Big Goodbye” strained credulity for both me and Susie, but perhaps for different reasons.
The “plot,” such as it is, can be summarized relatively briefly. Picard has to take up the early stages of negotiations or such with a MacGuffin race of insectoids who take protocol and pronunciation very seriously. A previous Federation encounter with them did not go well, and Picard is justifiably stressed. In the lead up to their encounter, he decides to take a “break” on the Holodeck by living out a Dixon Hill story (although this is the first time Hill is mentioned exlicitly, the fasciation with private detectives does take us back to our previous episode with the dog and lizard people, “Lonely Among Us”). After a first taste and some raving to the crew, he returns, the insectoids scan the ship, causing computer malfunctions, and Picard and some flunkies are trapped in a murderois noir on a Holodeck where safety controls have been disabled. It’s a race against time to get Picard & Co. out alive and in time to pronounce those pesky alien words.
And the job is done. The end.
The two “stories” have nothing to do with each other except insofar as “A,” the alien encounter, f**ks up the Holodeck, and Picard being trapped in “B” makes the resolution of “A” a problematic affair. Thematically, though, there is nothing obvious to connect them, and “B’s” only causal connection to “A” is that the stress of “A” leads Picard to “B” and the holodeck.
I have a tendency to like formalistically perfect scripting and plotting that thematically unifies disparate elements. In a sense this means I like Wagner’s “Gesamtkunstwerk” notion. It means I like ambitious works with multiple layers, some of them “meta.” I tend to like economy of images and words, situations where things can gain “extra value” by having multiple meanings and those things without meaning are left aside. It leaves me with a weakness for pulp and other popular, time-and-budget-constrained works that can’t be overly wasteful, a weakness for low-budget indie productions that likewise have to use what they have, and a disdain for overly extravagant, bloated productions (see: Michael Bay). But it also means I go looking for meaning where it may not be, and also I can become lazy and fall into the trap of sulking in marathons of formulaic drivel that in some way feeds the addiction center of my meaning-seeking mind.
That’s why, to me, the somewhat anti-formulaic narratives that W. Herzog has produced (we recently watched ‘Stroszek,’ which brought this on) or even the narratively minimal but visually rich films of T. Malick are so engrossing. They’re another kind of trap, of course … they meaninfully eschew traditional meaning-making … that is, that they go a different route is not arbitrary but intentional, and that level of intention provides another hook for seeking semantic sustenance.
And that’s why early TNG is, in a way, maddening. I want the unrelatedness of the so-called “A” and “B” stories (even if I reversed which one is A and which is B in this episode …) to, in itself, be a matter of meaning. I want the nearly systematic unrelatedness of such stories over the course of this run so far to be a commentary on the arbitrariness of life or, at least, of story-telling. The insectoids play no role here. The cobra and dog people were irrelevant. The plague in “Hide and Q” could have been anything, and the plague in “Code of Honor” was likewise mere filler. The generic danger the Enterprise finds itself in in “The Naked Now” when everyone is ‘drunk’? A similar plot MacGuffin. While awkward, stories like “Haven” and “Justice” seem, for all their faults, to be the strongest, perhaps “Haven” the most, because there is some sort of “rationale” that ends up linking the two plot threads in a (admittedly B.S. but also) not entirely obvious way. Or you have “The Battle,” in which the two stories (Picard’s headache, the Ferengi and their ‘gift’) end up being the same story … this is, to me at least, formally more satisfying … it somehow displays (albeit minimal) craftsmanship.
But back to “The Big Goodbye.”
The two things I most liked about this episode are also the least plot-related … they’re just insane character moments. First the second: data’s comic relief role almost overpowering and derailing whatever he’s in. His voice and mannerisms show Spiner being quite aware of tone even, or especially, when his character, Data, is so unaware of it. And earlier, after his first visit to the Holodeck, Picard returns and raves about it and his enthusiasm is outright manic. Its reality intrigues him … or, rather, the depth of the illusion. Stewart just seems to be having fun in this scene … in contrast, his quieter scenes in the noir, even the hammiest, come across as rote, by-the-book contract fulfillment.
And then our credulity issues: there is the obvious-enough plot problem that given Data’s speed and strength, the standoff in the Holodeck should or could have been ‘resolved’ sooner, even if it would not have taken care of our token injured redshirt. Economy of characters? Not really. The only use of the redshirt is that the threat that he might actually die was real, whereas had Crusher been shot we could have been sure of her making it through the episode. At the same time: so what? Redshirt exist so they can be killed, at the same time because they are immaterial we do not feel anything for them.
Susie’s complaint dealt with period-inappropriateness of most of the supposedly 40s-era costumes, makeup, etc. Did you see Crusher’s glasses? Just viewing the episode this caused me absolutely no problems; I skim over it, and I’m not actually qualified to evaluate most such costuming matters. But if I think about it, it is a problem, as the whole point of the simulation, the whole point of taking a certain “historian” along, of having Data regale the newspaper salesman with minutia, etc., was to bespeak the “authenticity” of the simulation(!) … and yet all said missteps did was highlight the shoddiness of the production crew. Did they not employ somebody to check these things? Did they simply not care? If I think about it, it takes me out of the experience …
… at the same time, it makes me think, again, of my desire for TNGs mistakes, miscues, narratives weaknesses and the like to be intentional … such as, what would it mean if we could recognize all the Enterprise’s historical information as being inaccurate? We might have the metacommentary along the lines of certain pulp sci-fi stories about how we misinterpret historical artifacts, giving us a false image of the past (if a future culture were to misinterpret us based on our Coke cans, iPods, etc., what does it say about our interpretation of ancient Roman or Greek or or or society?) Perhaps it might mark a “Matrix moment,” in which what we thought was the case—Star Trek as a kind of future-history extrapolated from our reality—is manifestly not, and instead we have a virtual world, an alternate timeline, a bubble universe … something! … as explanation. Or at the purely meta level we are made to realize that what we are watching is purely fiction and our suspension of disbelief is being made to be broken in some pop-Brechtian sense …
… none of these are the case, though.
They’re all true in a non-programmatic way, of course. Given limited information, the Enterprise and crew will frequently get facts about the past wrong and when they get new information or get involved in a time-travel story, they will act surprised. It is the case that although Star Trek is provided as a kind of future-history, it is merely fiction, and it cannot be extrapolated reliably or accurately from our world, so of course it does not correspond. Sure, it makes you wonder why 24th-century Federation officers filmed in 1987 are using 2010 and 2011 iPads … but that’s another topic. And of course it is all fiction, all staged, all imagination and play.
But if ‘you’ make a claim within a framework and then fail to live up to it, doesn’t that mean something? Isn’t that the whole point of a claim or promise or agreement in the first place?
And then my complaint … the Holodeck. First there is little story-internal reason for Picard to be so surprised and manic, as by now most of his crew has spent time on the Holodeck and it seems that at least for “training” purposes and the like, he has, too. We know of it from “Encounter and Farpoint” and also “Code of Honor,” so it is not new to audiences. The writers in these early episodes haven’t established the “rules” of the Holodeck very thorougly. In “Encounter at Farpoint” Wesley falls in holo-water, exits the Holodeck, and is still wet. Here Picard is kissed by his Femme MacGuffin and not only leave the Holodeck with holo-lipstick staining his face but it’s wiped off during a meeting with officiers. Holo-matter has, in these instances, been treated as permanent, yet the plot resolution of “The Big Goodbye” relies on it being impermanent … Redblock and Leech walk into an Enterprise hallway and dematerialize, thus leaving Picard & Co. free of their violence. In coming episodes the impermance of Holo-matter will even be a major plot point (see: Moriarty).
It’s perhaps relevant in a bizarre way that the next episode (scheduled for Thursday afternoon, question mark?), “Datalore,” will likewise ignore or abuse its own rules … this time, though, those that have been stated explicitly, whereas here there was no explicit holo-matter policy.
Other notes:
- Dixon Hill is a fictional fictional P.I. … that is, the fictional character was created for TNG. I find this interesting, as they use Sherlock Holmes directly, but they couldn’t find a cheap-to-license or public domain pulp character to abuse? On the other hand, it does allow Picard’s fantasy to be a mashup of all sorts of 40s-era noirs. Hi, Peter Lorre … I mean, Leech!
- Hey, it’s Mister … oh, wait, it’s the guy without a color, Joe Cabot, (Lawrence Tierney) from ‘Reservoir Dogs’. So here he is pre-‘Reseroir Dogs’, the thing I and many others know him from, but at the same time he was just playing the same old role he’d played for decades. I like to think that better writers would have made more of that … especially on a Holodeck.
- There’s really no good reason to use Wesley in this episode … except they’ve got the actor, so use him.
- Sure Riker was only “First Officer,” but why he didn’t learn or try to learn Picard’s “lines” as a backup I don’t know …
- The pseudo-noir on the Holodeck is just as discombobulated as the episode as a whole … we get our femme fatale, then she’s dead, we never really bother solving her mystery, never really deal with the MacGuffin Redblock wanted Hill to get for him, etc. … sure, I know it’s called a MacGuffin, but all they’re doing here is throwing as many noir-tropes as possible (dark, rain-drenched streets, crooks, police interrogation, damnsel in distress, somebody getting hit, somebody getting shot, P.I.’s office, a Maltese Falcon, erm, uh, I mean, a ‘thing’ … and so on) onto the screen and hoping something sticks.
- The plot is “The Maltese Falcon,” and the title is “The Big Sleep” meets “The Long Goodbye.”
- As Susie pointed out, whenever we see/use the Holodeck—in future posts I’ll lower-case it—it’s causing a problem. If it were really that unreliable, we’d question why anyone would use one. At the same time the “obvious” response is the only Holodeck stories we get—worth telling!—are those in which something goes wrong …
- Despite its costuming issues, the episode won an Emmy for its costumes!
- We never see our insectoid aliens … supposedly because of budget constraints. Early dialog and their strict adherence to protocol emphasizes their “otherness” … in particular, they’re described as a “hive mind.” If I were trying to tie “A” and “B” stories together, I would have enjoyed having Picard & Co. having to reason their way out of the simulation by interacting with a malfunctioning, faulty hive-mindish computer consciousness that found itself expressed only through the noir’s characters. This would have removed Wesley, Geordi, and technobabble nobody cared about and would have made the conflict resolution story-internal, in addition to thematically linking the two stories.
Links:
- The Big Goodbye (Wikipedia)
- The Big Goodbye (Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki)
- The Big Goodbye, et. al. (A.V. Club)
