TNG Deathmatch Episode 5: Where No One Has Gone Before vs Gambit, Part 2

Where No One Has Gone Before is probably the first episode of TNG since the pilot that’s genuinely watchable. It’s the one where the Traveller appears and accidentally zaps the crew thousands of light years across space into a realm where thought and reality intermingle, and it’s okay.

 

One thing that interests me watching the first season is how tetchy the crew seem. Given Roddenberry’s edict that interpersonal conflict was a no-no, these people manage to snipe at each other fairly regularly. In this episode, Riker expresses concern about the warp specialist, Kosinski, coming aboard to tinker with their engines. He notes that the specs Kosinski sent are basically gibberish, and instead of taking his XO’s concerns seriously, Picard basically says, “Fine, if you’re so worried, you can babysit this guy” with a hefty dose of irritation, and sends Riker off.

 

The episode is pretty well-constructed and consistent in tone, and actually manages to render the Enterprise’s trip as colourful and magical and genuinely eerie. The insecure, narcissistic Kosinski and the Traveller are both interesting characters and well-acted, Troi gets to be useful, and there are some nice character moments as the crew’s random daydreams start becoming reality, although the episode is inconsistent in that one person’s hallucinations are sometimes visible to others, and sometimes not (for instance, Yar can see Worf’s pet targ, but nobody else sees her cuddling the cat).

 

Actually, just as an aside, can I take a moment to mention how utterly horrifying the world is that Tasha grew up on? Not just poor, not just violent, but a world in which she had to be constantly on her guard against rape gangs. Not just rape, but actual roaming gangs of rapists. People who got together to go out raping, apparently so indiscriminately that she has to tell the cat to run away because "this place isn't safe at all" even for the cat. It is completely bizarre to hear the concept of rape gangs just dropped casually into a family show, and quite uncomfortable to realise that Tasha’s life before Starfleet involved regular occurrences of violent gang rape. I wish I could say that I thought that, had Tasha remained onboard, the writers and producers would have treated this aspect of her character with appropriate gravity, but I’d be kidding myself. It’s there to goose the audience, to titillate them; they even put Tasha in a bondage costume in her flashback. Not pleasant.

 

Anyway,  this is the episode where the Traveller teaches Picard that Wesley is the Mozart of Warp Drive and that he should be encouraged, and that’s…well, it is what it is. Gene Roddenberry wanted to live out his own Gary Stu fantasy and slapped his middle name on a misunderstood genius boy wonder, and poor Wil Wheaton had to endure the loathing that ensued. This episode at least treats Wesley with some dignity, even if the relationship between him and the Traveller really does seem creepy at times, as does Picard’s entreaty to the crew to send Care Bear hugs to the Traveller so they can get back home. Thankfully, the tone is kept dark and serious enough that the touchy-feeliness doesn’t capsize the episode completely (kudos to Rob Bowman, whose first episode as director I think this was). 

 

Meanwhile, back in the Gambit two-parter, we stifle a yawn and learn that Robin Curtis’ Romulan pirate Tallera is actually a Vulcan secret agent trying to prevent the pirates from assembling the psionic resonator, except she’s actually actually a Vulcan cultist who wants the resonator for herself so she can achieve world domination or some such nonsense. She turns the resonator on her fellow pirates and they are destroyed because if you’re really angry, the resonator amplifies your aggression and zaps you with it, so if you don’t want to die, just think happy thoughts instead. Poor Robin Curtis goes bug-eyed trying to sell the awesome power of this piece of junk, and the episode limps to its conclusion. As with a number of season seven episodes, Gambit has ideas that could have been done well - the violent psionic weapons of Vulcan's past, the crew having to go undercover - but it just feels like the writers were too tired and/or busy to do anything but slap together something serviceable. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than when Riker and Picard engineer a mutiny by somehow taking control of the Captain's torture device: there is no explanation of how they managed this, and it's obvious the writers had a moment where they all looked up from their laptops and sighed, "Look, it's Star Trek. We all know the answer is going to be that they modulated a frequency or changed the polarity or piggybacked on a subspace carrier wave - do we really have to bother actually typing it anymore?" If the writers couldn't bring themselves to write the usual technobabble and they knew the audience didn't need to hear it anymore, this is a show on its last legs for sure.

 

WINNER: Where No One Has Gone Before