The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly …
There is a great deal of absurdity in “Haven” and a great number of undeveloped or underdeveloped themes. That, however, as I’ll explain, is an unfair critique on my part. The good, the bad, and the ugly … this episode is mostly “the Ugly.”
“Hey Wes, not bad.”—Geordi, Hide and Q
Does nobody read subtext?
But on to the episode …
“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.
Wesley maintains his sweater this week.
And we almost get to kill him.
This is the ‘famous’ Wesley-gets-the-death-penalty-for-falling-in-flowers episode. It’s the paradise-planet-with-a-secret episode. It’s the planet-of-the-blonds episode. It’s an episode I actually like a lot. And while it’s silly, I found it less silly than I used to.
‘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 Traveler!
Susie and I were watching the utter genius that is ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘ (1978) and who should show up as ‘Brute’ but Carel Struycken? And I thought of ST:TNG … and for a moment I confused him with the Traveler … then I remembered, he was Troi’s mother’s luggage lifter, so to speak.
But I digress.
In ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ the Ferengi were introduced—a new TNG race/villain, perhaps to replace the overused Klingons and Romulans—in passing and made to sound both threatening and mysterious.
In ‘The Last Outpost’ we are set up to encounter them in media res, but the episode, like the last couple, has too many ideas to fully explore in one episode.
And that’s without evening mentioning how silly the Ferengi are when we finally meet them.
… only a few episodes in and while we haven’t yet had the Space Irish™, we’ve had Data hooking up with Yar and, now, arguably one of the greatest misfires in the series … the Space-Untrustworthy-Primitive-Africans™.
Before I continue let me note two things: [1] this is certainly one of the worst ST (not just TNG) episodes ever, but [2] it’s actually somewhat ‘smart’.
A day later, another episode—this time a normal length one—of ST:TNG, this time ‘The Naked Now,’ episode ‘3’, given that ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ comprised one and two.
In the summer Susie and I decided—perhaps over a beer or two [I do not recall]—, as we were (are!) both Trekkies of sorts, to work our way through seven seasons of ‘The Next Generation.’
We went boldly.
