TNG Deathmatch Episode 23: We’ll Always Have Paris vs Emergence

I have very little to say about We'll Always Have Paris. I've rarely rewatched it, and whenever I try I'm overcome with secondhand embarrassment due to the syrupy "romance", but here goes: 

The Enterprise encounters a strange phenomenon that affects time, causing them to relive events or run into their selves from a few moments in the future. The temporal snafu is the result of the experiments of a Dr Manheim, whose wife Jenice is an ex-girlfriend of Picard's, one he stood up many years ago. She is played by Michelle Phillips, formerly of The Mamas And The Papas, she wears a shiny backless jumpsuit, and she is pretty insipid. (It's hard to accept that Picard has carried a torch for someone for twenty-odd years when she barely holds the attention for forty-four minutes. It's also irritating that she has to be the wife of a scientist, instead of the scientist herself, but a shiny backless lab coat would have been impractical.) 

There's a strobe light, Data uses a contraction, this fixes time, and the episode is over, and the next time Picard gets romantic it'll be with Vash and we'll all be much happier.

Emergence feels a little bit like deja vu all over again. Like Phantasms and Dark Page, the crew must explore a mental landscape made manifest; like Masks, the ship itself is affected by an alien intelligence and begins to change, and the crew risks losing control of it altogether. Like all of those episodes, it's fatally afflicted with either a lack of imagination or a lack of funds resulting in a very pedestrian realisation of its ideas.

In Emergence, the holodeck starts acting screwy, followed by the rest of the ship. The crew deduces that the ship itself might be becoming sentient, although it turns out that it's been infested with an alien life-form that is using the ship as a vessel for its own intelligence and needs to get to a particular patch of space to feed on a particular type of particle or radiation or something. (In case you couldn't tell, I find this episode boring.) 

Since the holodeck appears to be functioning as the ship's imagination, the crew goes into it to try to figure out what the alien intelligence wants, and naturally we get the usual lumpen symbolism that's too literal, too concrete, too obviously code to be interesting. I am profoundly weary of watching the crew interpret dream symbols. It's rarely compelling and it feels like a cop-out, a way to avoid writing a real investigation and its attendant technobabble.

There's a train (which represents the ship) and an engine (which represents....the engine) and they're heading to a city (which represents the nebula they want to get to) to eat a good meal (which represents the radiation in the nebula that they need for sustenance) and there's a knight and a gangster and a yokel and a flapper girl and Mayor Johnson from Blazing Saddles (also Santa Claus, also the Big Lebowski) and they represent the fact that it was cheaper to reuse existing costumes from some central warehouse than it was to design something new.

Troi gets to utter the immortal line, "That brick might be an important clue", and I honestly have no idea if this episode is supposed to be serious or comedic. It's silly, but only enough to be embarrassing, not funny; if it's supposed to be dramatic, it fails. It's completely inert. 

The idea that the ship might become sentient seems laughable, although if we accept that Data is sentient, there's no reason why a computer as complex as the Enterprise's couldn't be. The series has dealt with the rights of artificial life forms before (Measure Of A Man, Evolution, The Offspring, The Quality Of Life) so to do that again with the ship itself would both be a logical step forward and a retread of old material. I'm kind of glad they didn't rehash the argument again, but there's not much else here of interest: Emergence just feels like nobody had any enthusiasm for this idea, either to treat it seriously, or make the situation convincingly perilous, or just to commit to the whimsy and have fun.

WINNER: Emergence, if only because I'm not watching Paris again