“As you hew-mons say, ‘I’m all ears’.”
—Kazago the Ferengi, conferring with Riker
The problem with “The Battle” is similar to the problem with “The Last Outpost” (our first Ferengi encounter) and “Lonely Among Us” … the audience is considerably more clued in than the characters, yet the story is, to a great extent, about characters figuring these “things” out. And the dramatic tension in the story arises from characters not knowing these things.
Here dramatic tension conflicts with dramatic irony. TNG does not—does not yet?—trust its viewers to figure things out. Few shows do, one must admit. ‘LOST’ famously played with and played off audience ignorance … or at least keeping people in the dark. Currently ‘Fringe’ works somewhat similarly. Sure, the viewer sees/knows some things before the characters, but we’re not so far ahead that we’re waiting for our protagonists to catch up or catch on. And then there are the CSI/L&O/House shows … mildly forensic-y shows where not the logical relationship of episode plot items but, rather, formula and necessity lead to predictability. In a L&O or, for example, ‘Castle’ we have an economy of guest stars rule that applies … unless the guest star is a late ‘victim’ in the episode, he or she is either the killer or closely tied to the killer. Or we have ‘thematic irony formulas,’ as we’ve seen in ‘House,’ for example. If the patient is a really hot runway model, ‘she’ is actually a ‘he.’ And if daddy dearest is her manager, daddy dearest is also her rapist. We figure things out not because of epistemology or even metaphysics more broadly, but by way of meta-metaphysics, by way of narrative conventions ‘outside’ the stories themselves.
If you want all this to work in any non-obvious sort of way it helps to break the so-called fourth wall. Hang lampshades if you must. Think of Puss in Boots … no, I mean Ludwig Tieck‘s rather awesome early Romantic German stage play, “Der gestiefelte Kater” (the booted cat … the cat wearing boots …), in which there is an audience watching a play on stage … but I digress.
Once again TNG gave us obvious things …
- Ferengi we should not trust
- Untrustworthy Ferengi behaving more untrustworthy than usual
- And Picard & Co. trusting them
- Picard’s inexplicable headache that just happens to coincide with this meeting with the Ferengi
- A Ferengi captain, by the way, who mentions that nine years earlier Picard had destroyed a Ferengi ship and now he wants to give Picard a gift …
Really?
Oh, and visual cues, such as seeing the strange orb in Picard’s belongings on the Stargazer. Or even once the fake logs show up no sense of urgency … or sense that this might, in the words of Admiral Akbar … be a TRAP!
Hell, for an extra level of some sort of meta, the suspicious behavior by almost all involved (except, perhaps the Ferengi, who are behaving according to character) should lead us, the viewers, to perhaps expect some further twist … that they knew it was a trap all along, that—jumping ahead through several quadrants, several franchise expansions, and many unwatched episodes—something was to this episode on the Enterprise what Picard’s memories were to the Stargazer … that this episode was not as it appeared, at the least.
But this episode also contains many small pleasures. “Headache, headache … surely know what a headache is,” Picard tells Crusher toward the beginning. This is a Picard-centric episode … even better, this is a “let Patrick Stewart loose” episode. He acts with his eyes … they roll, he blinks, he opens wide, they crease and almost weep. He makes the most of lame expository and other dialog. He has more facial expressions than the rest of the crew combined. Then he commands the Stargazer alone and jumps around the stage acting out his one-man show.
We also get “the Picard maneuver” (take that, Kirk, and your Kobayashi Maru) and Riker conducting several first-officer-to-first-officer dialogs, and (bad) puns … what’s not to like?
Links:
- The Battle (Wikipedia)
- The Battle (Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki)
- The Battle, et. al. (A.V. Club)
