TNG Deathmatch Episode 9: Hide And Q vs Force Of Nature

Force Of Nature is a strong contender for the most tonally dissonant episode of season seven. Like many episodes, it feels like it was brewed out of dregs, leftover ideas scraped up and served lukewarm.

 

To most people, this is the episode where Geordi and Data discuss the difficulties of cat training, because those scenes are the most memorable by far. The actual plot concerns the environmental impact of warp drive, and it’s incredibly hard to care because (a) the story itself is boring, with dull guest characters and a ton of technobabble, and (b) the damage done by high-speed warp has no impact on the rest of the series or on any subsequent series. A couple of times after this, I think, Picard mentions that they’ve been given permission to exceed warp speed limitations to respond to a crisis, but mostly the Trek universe ignores this episode altogether. The Enterprise, after all, travels at the speed of plot, so it matters very little to the viewer whether it’s going at warp one or five or five thousand.

It also struggles to make any impact as an allegory. Obviously, it's about the damage done to Earth by our dependence on cars, but the Enterprise is travelling in space, which is pretty enormous, and a dozen episodes can go by before we even see two starships onscreen at the same time. The idea that subspace is suffering from wear and tear because starships constantly traipse up and down the same bit of interstellar carpet is a bit of a non-starter - okay, one might say, then just drive a little to the left next time. Space is huge. There has to be enough room to drive without every starship going over the same route every single time. It's hard to get worked up about a problem with such an obvious solution. Even in the episode, they have to illustrate the problem using a very particular portion of space that is so hazardous people are forced to use only one particular "corridor" to travel through it.

Whenever Trek does an allegory for a current-day problem, it tends to use an alien planet to illustrate it. It allows the writers to craft the allegory in a self-contained way, so that the aliens can represent our venal, creepy, stupid modern-day selves. It also means that the implications won't need to be addressed every week thereafter. It's a brave idea to force the Federation to change in this way, but it's done so easily that it has no dramatic weight, so they really needn't have bothered. "How can we fix this thing? Oh, we'll go a bit slower. Except when it's important. Problem solved." And thus the episode deflates, and is forgotten. 

 

I literally have nothing else I can say about this episode, except that spending a month with tuna in your blouse is a disgusting concept. I’d rather just deal with a bad cat, thanks.

 

Hide And Q is another season one episode famous for certain moments, principally Wesley getting a bayonet through the back. Q revisits the Enterprise and abducts the bridge crew, minus Picard, and takes them to his Napoleonic battle tent on a planet with a green sky and twin moons (hilariously, the setting is presented as evidence of Q’s wild imagination – two moons, no way!!!). He involves them in a stupid game, though he really has no interest in it, his real intention being to tempt Riker to join the continuum.

 

It’s a front-heavy episode: it spends a lot more time explaining the mechanics of Q’s game than anything else, only to abandon them. It sends Tasha to a “penalty box” – is this a misunderstood football reference? – and she cries a bit and has a tantrum and hits on Picard – were they trying to engineer a romance between those two? The crew bluff their way through describing the enemy on the planet because the “animal things” were “aesthetically displeasing”, and I think it's supposed to be funny.

 

All this adds up to nothing, a bit of manufactured peril to put Riker in a position to use the power of the Q to save his friends. Really, they could have just skipped straight to the scene where Q gives Riker the power instead of wasting time on all the penalty-box and musket bollocks. We could have had the whole episode devoted to Riker's growing sense of power, his wariness, his gradual seduction. As it is, the actual moral dilemma, the power corrupting Riker absolutely, is rushed when it should have been the meat of the episode. Riker agrees not to use his power, then immediately gets pissy and regrets it when they find a dead kid in a mining accident, then decides he wants to give his friends gifts before he disappears with Q, having apparently decided between scenes that he has no other choice.

 

In a nice scene, all his friends refuse their gifts. Wesley elects to go through puberty naturally rather than leapfrog into (blonde) adulthood (seriously, why’s he blonde?). Geordi, quite movingly, begs Riker to make him blind again because he doesn’t want to have to thank Q for his sight. Data refuses to be turned into a human because it would be an illusion. Worf is given a hissing Klingon playmate but rejects her. Strangely, he does so because “she is from a world now alien to me”, though the next decade-plus in The Story Of Worf makes him seem obsessed with affirming his Klingon-ness. A kid who forced his human mother to make rokeg blood pie, fantasises about a traditional Klingon wedding, and generally carries on like the Klingon equivalent of a British expat ordering Newky Brown in a pub in L.A. is not one who feels his origins are "alien" to him. Interesting that none of the women are gifted their fantasies, perhaps because the writers were clueless about the inner lives of these characters. Honestly, it's kind of a relief they didn't try. It could only have been disastrous.

 

Anyway, Riker confesses he feels a fool, Picard agrees, and Q – having lost a bet with Picard in which he agreed to stay out of humanity’s path thereafter – is sent away forever, never to return. Never.

Never.

 

WINNER: Hide And Q