TNG Flashback: 11001001

Of all the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "11001001" has both one of the most memorable and forgettable titles of all. And that's rather fitting, as the episode itself is mostly forgettable, save for a few truly memorable elements.

The Enterprise docks at a starbase where a group of Bynars -- a species of aliens who have a deep interconnectedness with computers -- will be upgrading several key systems. The Bynars fake an accident which appears to threaten the ship's destruction, then steal the Enterprise after everyone evacuates. Commander Riker and Captain Picard, still aboard and caught up in a holodeck fantasy the former created, and now are the only people in a position to retake the ship.

I think what really makes the episode so largely forgettable is that there's never any real jeopardy anywhere in the episode. The ship's antimatter breach is a ruse. The Bynars aren't really trying to steal the ship for good; they just want to borrow its computer storage to use as a backup for reformatting their homeworld's supercomputer. Even when Picard and Riker set the Enterprise's auto-destruct (for the possibility that they won't retake the ship), they turn it off again with nearly two minutes to spare.

The pacing of the episode is a bit slow in places too. The teaser is a rather lengthy sequence showing the Enterprise docking (though that does look gorgeous on Blu-ray), and the Bynars coming aboard through several corridors and airlocks. The first act opens with Riker wandering bored around the ship, bumping into other main characters and finding out what they're doing with their spare time. And the key sequence in which Riker first creates his holodeck dream-girl, Minuet, is loosely edited; there are large pauses between wide shots of the changing scenario and close-ups of Riker's reaction.

Nevertheless, this is a big character episode for Riker. He acknowledges at the end of the episode that he fell in love with Minuet (even with wet blanket Picard there with him most of the time). It's a relationship that actually gets referenced again several seasons later. And the episode wisely devotes a lot of time and space to interactions between Riker and Minuet, taking the best shot it can at making the audience believe their love. Jonathan Frakes certainly sells it, as does guest star Carolyn McCormick. And yet I still have some reservations. And I think they come down to this: if this really is Riker's ideal woman, there are some mixed messages about what that might be saying about him.

On the surface, Minuet is quite strong. She's completely self aware, the first holographic character who is a true creation and not a REcreation. Riker can talk to her about real world considerations beyond the confines of her jazz dive reality. But he and Picard both spend a lot of time marveling at how real she is, to a degree that they're saying some things right to her face that a real person would have to start taking offense to. Of course, she doesn't because the Bynars have programmed Minuet to distract Riker (and Picard) and keep them in the holodeck as long as possible. But my point is: this is what Riker responds to -- a woman who engages in witty repartee on the surface, but is ultimately a submissive doormat when the chips are down. She's also relatively emotionless, or so restrained in her emotions as to appear nearly so. When she pleads with Riker in the final act to help the Bynars, I do believe what she's saying, but she does it in such a dispassionate way. Or in a tone that I don't think comports with the prospect of global genocide, anyway.

The Bynars are an interesting idea, that's for sure. They do steal an original series gimmick of pitch-shifted speech to make male voices come from slightly feminine (but largely androgynous) characters, but there's more going on to them than that gimmick. With their tandem speech patterns, and their black-and-white binary thought processes, they feel to me like the series' best attempt so far at creating an actual alien culture, as opposed to just a "society that planet-wide is like this one place and time in Earth history."

Composer Ron Jones serves up another great score here. There's an ethereal, slightly spooky theme for the Bynars. Crisp militaristic tones play when the Enterprise is leaving spacedock, and a bold statement of Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek theme greets its return. There's also the jazz stylings that play in Riker's holodeck scenario. Great music all around.

Other observations:

• There's some unintentional humor in the opening captain's log, when Picard talks about the upgrades the ship is about to receive, "including the holodeck, with which we've had some problems." That's putting it lightly. (Though the callback to the malfunctions of "The Big Goodbye," mentioned specifically later in the episode, are a nice bit of continuity.)

• While the ship is in spacedock, Wesley is left in command of the bridge. Obviously, he doesn't really have any responsibilities beyond just being there, but I wish that a bigger moment had been made of Wesley actually getting command. I'm sure in his mind, it was the biggest thing to have happened in his life, ever.

• Riker has wised up since "Datalore." There, he was willing to trust a strange android found on a remote dead world just because it happened to look like Data. Here, he's skeptical of aliens endorsed by Starfleet to perform ship maintenance in one of their own spacedocks. (But hey, he's right.)

• There are several fun, lighter moments with some of the characters. We get Worf's hilarious philosophy: "If winning is not important, then Commander, why keep score?" There's also Geordi and Data's exploration in creativity, which Riker dubs "a blind man teaching an android how to paint." Picard has a nice moment sitting back at the conn station for the first time in years. But my favorite side moment in the episode is actually a heavier one, when Data beats himself up a bit (in a non-emotional way, of course) about not being on the bridge during the crisis when he is in fact capable of being on-duty indefinitely, without break.

• There's a big hole in the Bynars' plan here. They keep Riker aboard the ship so he can reboot the computer. But at the end of the episode, because Bynars always work in pairs, both he and Picard are required to unlock their computer file. Minuet even says point blank during the episode that Picard being there too was "fortunate happenstance," so basically their whole planet could have died but for dumb luck.

• Speaking of Picard being there, shouldn't there be a protocol about barging into someone else's holodeck scenario? Riker could have been doing anything in there. In fact, he was in the midst of a deep kiss at the time, and one can imagine where things might have progressed if Picard had arrived a few minutes later.

• The doe-eyed extras in this episode seem to feel no urgency in responding to Data's evacuation order.

• At different points in this episode, the Enterprise computer voice switches between the usual female voice (provided by Majel Barrett) and a random male voice. I wonder why?

• At the end of the episode, Minuet has inexplicably disappeared. Even if you accept that she was purely something special the Bynars cooked up, couldn't Riker have gotten them to copy the program for him? (The real answer, of course, is that we certainly didn't want a recurring love interest for Riker on the show, holographic or otherwise.)

Much of me likes this episode, despite the flaws it shows when you start to pick at it. All told, though, I'd give it a B-. It's not really an "essential" episode of the show, though it's not too bad either.