TNG Deathmatch, Episode 2: The Naked Now vs Liaisons

The Naked Now is, famously, a straight copy of the original series’ Naked Time, in which an alien contaminant breaks down the crew’s emotional control. Souls are laid bare, Riley sings and takes over the ship, Sulu gets his top off. It's a great episode and it paints a lot of characters' inner lives in broad strokes: each character’s scene tells us something about them as individuals, even if that something is just “Sulu wants to be a Musketeer”.

 

It's a useful framework for economically introducing our characters, and though it's depressing that the writing staff were apparently so bereft of imagination that they couldn't think of a way to do that without ripping off TOS, at least they acknowledge the story's origins in-episode. However, in the TNG update, the contaminant basically gets everyone hammered, including Data, the android, which…okay, fanwank that plot point til you’re sore, people, if you’re so inclined. Hammered and horny: forget about any insights into our crew's personality. Geordi gets melancholy about his blindness, Wesley gets giddy with power, and everyone else just wants to screw, leading to the infamous scene where Tasha Yar seduces Data by dressing up as Lisa Stansfield and telling him about her tragic childhood on the Planet Of The Rape Gangs. (The sexual politics on display here are baffling, and it's unfortunate because this could have been a powerful scene, done right. Tasha expresses a desire for tenderness after her traumatic childhood, and that's not an unrealistic approach to the character. A woman who's been brutalised in the past seeking comfort with an emotionless, unthreatening man makes a lot of sense, but it's obvious that the writers had no idea of the emotional reality they'd tapped into, because they made the whole scene into a dick joke with underboob frosting.)

Anyway, Wesley gets drunk and takes over the ship and then saves it too. Basically, everything you’ve ever heard about this episode is true. It’s not even campy enough to be worth laughing at. It’s amazing that this was the second episode aired and anyone watched the third one.

 

It’s still, weirdly, about as good – or as poor – as season seven’s Liaisons. This is the one where a trio of bland aliens in unflattering jumpsuits arrive on the Enterprise for a meet-and-greet. One of them flies off with Picard in a shuttle, which promptly crashes, marooning them on an inhospitable planet, where Picard is “rescued” by a young woman called Anna, who has survived there alone for years after her own ship crashed there. The other two stay on the ship and behave wackily, one pigging out on junk food, the other pecking Worf’s head until he snaps and hits the guy. 

No prizes for guessing that the ambassadors are playing every alien race’s favourite game of “messing about with the crew to try to learn more about this thing we humans call emotion / captivity / love / kissing / imagination / fill in the blank”. At this point, you'd think the crew would be wise to these shenanigans; aren't there classes at the Academy covering the kind of weird alien behaviours graduates should expect?

 

The shipboard scenes are the only ones that have any kind of entertainment value, as Worf tries to be on his best behaviour even under constant provocation, and Troi – well, Troi gets sick of chocolate, basically, but it’s all harmless enough. (Bonus point: I do love the moment where Troi and her Ambassador share chocolate while watching Worf and his Ambassador finally beat each other up. It should have been popcorn, really.)

 

The planetside developments manage to be creepy, comical and boring all at the same time. It’s depressingly guessable early on that Anna is the third ambassador in disguise, playing the same weird game as his two comrades back on the ship: roleplaying to try to find out something about human behaviour. Apparently there really was an Anna, once, who really did rescue a stranded traveller, and wrote in her diary about their falling in love in extremis, so the ambassador decided to replicate the scenario. This makes Liaisons another entry in the "fake alien scenario based on a book" category, I think, although I would have much preferred a comedic take that hinged on the discovery of a terrible romance novel as the source of the subterfuge. At least then we could have had a decent laugh. Possibly. TNG doesn't have a great track record for comedy, I know. 

I also know that I'm here complaining that Naked Now was a serious concept wasted on goofy humour, and complaining the reverse is true for Liaisons. Maybe if they had done this as comedy, I'd be annoyed at how it exploits a horrific scenario for giggles. As drama, though, it's inert.

This “Anna” is supposed to have limited language skills due to her isolation, but her behaviour isn't so much "a little bit rusty in the conversation department" as it is childlike and inappropriate. She comes across from the start as an alien inexpertly imitating a human, not a damaged human being as she's supposed to be, so it's impossible to take the drama seriously. When she repeatedly lunges at Picard, kissing him and commanding him, “Love me! You should love me now!” as he shouts at her to stop – it’s honestly uncomfortable. I think it's supposed to be tragic, maybe...? Hard to tell. It falls short of that and lands squarely in "I'm covering my eyes out of embarrassment for all involved".

 

When the final reveal comes that Anna was the ambassador all along, it just seems icky. He sexually assaulted Picard and kept him prisoner in order to find out about this thing humans call love? It's horrible. It's also one of the flimsiest motivations for weird alien behaviour in the whole series, transparently a case where the writers had "Picard crashlands and is rescued by a woman who is not what she seems" on a post-it note, and just cobbled the script together out of desperation. For only the second episode in the season to be so threadbare, that’s a problem.

 

WINNER: Liaisons, I guess, if only in the sense that “if you held a gun to my head and forced me to watch one of these again, it would be that one”.