Power Play

It’s business as usual on the Enterprise until Troi, Data and O’Brien start taking hostages in Ten Forward. Could it be the “ghosts” of a long lost star ship crew influencing their actions? Find out when we put Power Play into the Mission Log. True story: my dad loved to inhabit his local bar. To the point that, I think, the second time he ever saw my newborn first son…was when we took him (briefly) into the bar for my dad’s birthday party. shakes head Not a moment I’m proud of. I kinda wanted him to see what he was missing outside the bar. We left about ten minutes in because we’d inhaled enough smoke. lol, I remember some TNG book had a ship’s lounge as “Shuttle Bay 4”- when in fact the ship only had 3 shuttle bays…. Time for the syndication synopsis shindig: Picard is shocked! SHOCKED, I tell you! And, technically, it’s not an unexplained overthrow of the bridge. It’s an unexplained overthrow of a BAR. It’s kind of like Roadhouse, but in space (c’mon, you know someone, somewhere has pitched that idea – “It’s like Ishtar! IN SPACE!”). I think you hit all the big points: Entertaining/Spooky — check; has no real substance — check; ship’s controls accessible from a bar — check. I enjoy this one for the atmosphere and pacing and the acting; I just wish it had a theme/message/moral/meaning I could grok. Ah well. Plenty o’ preachin’ next week in Ethics. I can control my router and tv with my phone over the internet. They probably just installed the Bridge app on the 10 Forward computer. yeah…the lack of video footage, body armor even classic guns w gun powder sometimes really would be more useful sometimes than phasers. The tech will obviously be different in the future, but I think some perennial classics will endure. The great advances, we probably haven’t even considered… I can appreciate that the “[insert crew member here] gets taken over and behaves wildly out of character” stories give the cast something to sink their teeth into, but whether it’s unnerving (like this episode) or deeply touching (like, say, the next-to-last episode of the season being covered right now), the narrative reset button is always hit at about 42 minutes, leaving us a few moments to ponder, reflect, talk about how awesome we are in the future, aaaaaaaand executive producer credits. There really isn’t that much more internal continuity than there is in TOS for much of TNG’s run. And that bugs me, because these people get taken over a LOT. They get surgically altered and forced to do the bidding of the Borg, they get forced to act violently against their crewmates, they live an entire life and watch a world die in the space of minutes (whoops, spoilers!)…but hey, let’s get back to talking about socks. It’s the degree of inconsequential-ness that really bugs me about TNG, especially knowing that the franchise does better with that angle in its later iterations. I’m not asking for a soap opera where we’re traumatized about stuff for months, nor am I asking for “the Farscape effect” (not slamming the show, which I loved, but its story arcs became so “inside baseball” that they were impenetrable to anyone casually trying to jump in during later seasons), or you wind up handing about five minutes of a given episode over to flashback montages, a la Babylon 5 or Buffy (or you have to do a “catch-up” special, like they just had recently with The Walking Dead). I’ve gone into quite a bit of detail in the past as to why these things weren’t done – there was no guarantee that nightly strip-syndicated shows would arrive/air in the correct order – so TNG was far from the only show that falls under the “should have been serialized, but wasn’t” banner. But one wonders about how magnificently robust 24th century Starfleet’s mental health infrastructure is that everyone seems to frequently get over these presumably traumatic incidents without any further fallout. Because without any follow-up, you have to assume that this is what’s going on between episodes –