TNG Deathmatch Episode 15: Too Short A Season vs Lower Decks

Both these episodes focus on characters other than the regular crew, with varying results. In Too Short A Season, the story focuses on visiting Admiral Mark Jameson; Lower Decks is a Very Special Episode focusing on junior personnel. It’s also one of my favourite episodes ever.

But first! Too Short A Season feels like one of the episodes written before the actors were cast, since they're barely involved in it. The story revolves around the guest stars and the regular crew watches what happens. Admiral Mark Jameson is an elderly man in a cumbersome wheelchair, a Federation negotiator who has been requested by his old acquaintance, Karnas, to mediate a dispute. Long story short, Karnas has lied – he has a grudge against Jameson and is luring him in so he can exact revenge. Jameson, meanwhile, doesn’t want to turn up wizened and infirm, so he’s necked a bottle of illegal youth serum (or something). He gets younger and younger until the stuff damages his system and kills him.

The episode is supposed to be a parable about personal responsibility. Karnas' beef with Jameson is that, forty years earlier, Jameson gave Karnas the weapons he needed to fight his civil war - and gave the same weapons to the other side, expecting that both sides would be forced to the negotiating table rather than toward mutual annihilation. He failed, and Karnas holds him responsible for the decades of slaughter that followed. Karnas, of course (as is pointed out in-episode) could have spent the intervening years working for peace himself instead of just nursing his grudge, and as the episode ends and the makeup department peel off the remnants of Jameson's old face, we all reflect on the folly of wasting one's life by seeking easy answers and/or vengeance.

It's an interesting concept, but this is TNG and so naturally instead of exploring that concept and mining it for drama, we spend about three quarters of the episode busying ourselves with the mystery of Jameson's reverse ageing - and it's not really a mystery, because we've seen a lot more sci-fi than the crew so we can guess what's happening pretty early on.

 

The episode’s only interest, really, is in the reaction of Jameson’s wife: an elderly woman, though in much better health than her husband, she is affronted and hurt by his decision to take such drastic action without consulting her, without considering the affect it would have on her life. He even bought enough of the drug for both of them without asking her if she wanted it – and then he selfishly took her portion anyway. It’s nice that the episode actually acknowledges that she would have her own perspective on aging, instead of just assuming that a woman would automatically want to become younger. Anne Jameson is horrified by what he planned for her, and by what he’s done to himself. She's lived her life and is happy with who she is, and he's unilaterally decided to take it all away from her.

 

Sadly, the episode hinges on the character of Jameson, played by a young actor under ten pounds of latex wrinkles. The makeup is awful. There’s not a moment in the thing where you believe that Jameson is actually an old man, no matter how much the actor tries. When he finally, magically becomes young, it seems like a cop-out that he should just die – I always kind of wish for a more Twilight Zoney, Roald Dahley ending, where he just keeps getting younger and younger, and ends up as a toddler with his wife leading him to the transporter pad, and Crusher notes that it won’t be long til his DNA reverts to a state where it’s nonviable outside of the womb, and he’ll basically cease to exist…It would have been ridiculous, but I’d appreciate that they committed to the absurd concept.

 

Lower Decks has no absurd sci-fi concept. Its premise is simple: in the seventh season, it’s about time we had a story focusing on someone other than the bridge crew. It’s wonderful. It’s a shame to consider how much TNG might have been enriched by widening its scope earlier – Deep Space Nine uncovered a goldmine by allowing one-off characters to become recurring guest stars, why couldn’t TNG have done the same? It had some success with Guinan and Ro, but more could have been done.

 

So we get to spend the episode with Alyssa Ogawa, Sito Jaxa, Taurik and Sam Lavelle, junior officers all, as well as Ben, a civilian waiter in Ten Forward. Only Ogawa and Jaxa have appeared before, and only Ogawa will ever appear again, and that’s a shame; these are good characters.

 

Lavelle, with his John Barrowman grin and overeager ambition, could have been an irritant but is given shades of insecurity and empathy. He gets up Riker’s nose (Riker being a dick, again; I love it) and Troi points out that, basically, Riker and Lavelle are a lot alike and Riker should go easy on him. (Riker is, after all, the kind of guy who once attempted to chat up Vash with the words “Eternity never looked so lovely”: he has absolutely no room to take the piss out of Lavelle for his inept social climbing.) This is part of the value of extending the cast: we show character in how we interact with other people, and the more people we interact with, the more we show of ourselves. 

(One scene I enjoy shows Crusher and Troi wondering whether Ogawa's boyfriend is cheating on her because Crusher saw him with another woman, and Troi, a professional psychologist, the ship's counsellor with responsibility for all the people involved in this potentially damaging situation, just says "Yes, tell her, better to hurt her now rather than have her find out later". I guess when Troi clocks out, she really can't be arsed anymore with the softly-softly approach. Maybe address it with the boyfriend first? Maybe check if Crusher was overreacting? Maybe just mind your own business? Nope, just go steaming in. Thankfully, the later news that her boyfriend has in fact proposed to Alyssa reassures Crusher, because nobody could possibly propose to their girlfriend if they were being unfaithful.)

 

It's an especially good showing for Worf, who spends most other TNG episodes having his every suggestion shot down by his peers. In Lower Decks, he functions as a mentor to Sito, and a good friend. He’s intuitive, supportive, even subtle as he tries to guide her to stand up to Picard. It actually makes sense for once for him to be in authority, and he certainly does a better job guiding Sito than Riker does with Lavelle. (Or, indeed, as Worf does with his own child.)

 

Sito Jaxa previously appeared in The First Duty as a classmate of Wesley’s, disgraced along with him for pulling a stunt that got a fellow student killed. In Lower Decks, she is berated by Picard for that stunt as a test of her ability to withstand abuse: she's Bajoran, and he needs her to volunteer to assist in returning a Cardassian informant to his home. It's unclear why they need an actual Bajoran to do this, when they could just slap a fake nose on an experienced human main character like they do every other time. 

I should say, it's unclear in-episode. In reality, she has to be there for the same reason that one random black crewman takes Wesley's place for a single scene in Where Silence Has Lease: to get deaded.

I shouldn't be flippant, as it's actually genuinely moving, but yeah, if Riker had gone on that shuttle, he'd have made it back. Poor Sito. It's a genuine shame we never got to see Taurik or Lavelle again, but they were fortunate to have their sole appearance be such a great one. 

 

WINNER: Lower Decks