TNG Flashback: The Arsenal of Freedom

Merry Christmas, readers! I usually take a day off each year for the holiday, but this year I find myself with a nice backlog of already-written posts. So today will be business as usual with another Star Trek review.

In terms of delivering action-adventure, no episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season was more ambitious than "The Arsenal of Freedom."

Responding to the disappearance of a Starfleet ship, the Enterprise visits Minos, a once-thriving planet of arms dealers that's now completely uninhabited. An away team beams down to encounter a sophisticated military drone system that learns and improves after each defeat, and is responsible for wiping out the entire population. Separated in two groups, threatened by the drone and by serious injury, the team must survive as the Enterprise itself deals with an orbital version of the same deadly drone.

It's surprising that the series would attempt something with so much action in it, because most of what you see on the screen indicates that the budget was probably too thin at this point in the season to really do it full justice. A lot of the material does actually work, but it does so in spite of the limitations. The planet set, for example, is an attempt to present something different, loaded with vegetation and rocks... but it comes across looking rather fake, despite the money spent on it. And as for the alien drone weapon itself? Visual effects supervisor Dan Curry was forced to be resourceful on the cheap, and built it out of a L'Eggs pantyhose egg, a shampoo bottle. and some gold spray paint.

Equally ambitious is how many different subplots the episode tries to juggle. Three storylines cover Geordi in command of the Enterprise; Riker, Data, and Tasha fighting against the drones on the surface; and Picard with an injured Dr. Crusher in a subterranean cavern.

It's that last element that comes off best, but it's also the one that changed most from its original conception. From what I've read, writer Robert Lewin conceived of this episode to put Crusher and Picard in a situation where, with him threatened by a serious injury, she would confess her romantic interest in him. This was reportedly nixed by Gene Roddenberry himself; Lewin, who felt that Roddenberry had no interest in pursuing character development on the series, decided to leave soon after.

With the romantic element excised, director Les Landau helped to salvage something of the story. This was his first of many directing assignments on The Next Generation (as well as Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise), after he proved himself by stepping in to replace the fired, racist director of "Code of Honor." He apparently suggested for this episode the "fish out of water" element of having Crusher be the injured character, and Picard the one forced to care for her. I think he even fought to put a tiny hint of the intended romance in the finished product as well; in a scene where Picard observes there must be a few things he doesn't know about the doctor, she responds with a very knowing (and telling) "quite a few."

Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden do an excellent job with these scenes, Picard doing everything he can to keep Crusher active and engaged, Crusher fighting to maintain a professional detachment when she herself is the patient. And their performances are even more incredible when you take into account the incredibly harsh conditions under which they were filmed. I've read that the sand trucked in to coat the floor of the set was infested with fleas; McFadden had to lie half buried in it as they bit her all day long.

While the battle against the drones fought by Riker, Tasha, and Data does have some interesting moments in it, it's the other subplot that also attempts the personal element of the Crusher-Picard story. Geordi is left in command of the Enterprise, where he has to butt heads with a know-it-all chief engineer and provide reassurance to a pair of inexperienced junior officers who have never been in battle before. LeVar Burton strikes a good tone in his performance as Geordi, exuding the necessary command confidence, not responding to the belligerent engineer in kind, and dealing gently with the junior officers. If anything, he's perhaps a little too good with the junior officers, though. There's a plot point of Troi pointing out to him that he needs to soothe their anxieties, but Geordi hasn't been especially hard on them to that point. My take is that LeVar Burton did the best he could with the lines as written.

Speaking of the lines as written, they stink when it comes to the pompous guest character of Chief Engineer Logan. He's set up as a heavy to antagonize Geordi, but he's all over the map in that role. First, when the ship is under attack, he criticizes Geordi for not fleeing and getting the ship to safety. Later, when Geordi does break orbit, Logan berates him for leaving the away team behind on the surface. And all of this is delivered by a bad actor with only one gear: smug. Sure, there are people like this in the real world, but they aren't very believable in the Star Trek world.

With all these subplots and so much time within them spent on more personal character moments, some things simply couldn't fit in the allotted minutes. And what seems to be missing are some particulars explaining the plot. This automated, self-teaching drone system is supposed to have destroyed everyone on a planet filled with weapons, plus the Federation starship Drake that was first sent to investigate. And yet the drone starts off against our heroes quite stupidly, not being able to fool them in its attempt to gather intelligence with a hologram, nor able to survive even one shot from a hand phaser. Equally confusing is why, after Picard discovers how to "turn it off" at the end of the episode, the drone in orbit continues to attack the Enterprise. The best I've got to explain it all is that there must be two separate drone systems: one smarter and unstoppable, responsible for wiping out the planet (and also the one attacking the Enterprise); the other a basic demonstration model triggered by the away team's arrival, and which hasn't learned anything yet.

Other observations:

• Hard-working character actor Vincent Schiavelli plays the automated salesman of the drone weapon system. (I assure you, you'd recognize his face, if not his name.) Here, he's a perfect, smarmy huckster.

• We've been told in past episodes that Riker's driving ambition is to command his own starship. But we learn here that he turned down command of the Drake to be first officer of the Enterprise. Sure, the Enterprise is a more prestigious assignment, but if what he really wanted was command, why would he say no? At least this character quirk is consistent in future episodes (yes, plural) when Riker is offered a command and turns it down.

• In a ruse to draw out the drone's hologram, Riker says his ship is named the Lollipop. And then, in what has to be the only shout-out to Shirley Temple in all of Star Trek, he quips that it's "a good ship."

• This is the first episode since the pilot to feature saucer separation. I believe it happened only once more in the entire series after this.

• They crammed a lot in this episode, but there was no room for Wesley, who isn't anywhere to be seen.

• For most of the episode, the away team's communicators don't work as part of a plot device to keep them from talking to each other or the ship. But near the end, there's a moment when Picard contacts the ship with total certainty that this time, he's going to get through. (He does, but how does he know that?)

• This episode has a great musical score, and I'm shocked to acknowledge it came from the composer I don't care for, Dennis McCarthy. It has tense, pizzicato strings during the attacks on the planet surface, rousing adventure in the saucer separation sequence, dark and sinister tones when Picard confronts the automated salesman, and wailing horns for the final action sequence aboard the Enterprise. I wish all his episodes could have sounded this good. (And I'm shocked that in all the Star Trek scores La-La Land records have released, including other McCarthy work, they've never released any music from this episode.)

This episode did overreach and fall a bit short, but what did make it to the screen, I found pretty entertaining. I grade this episode a B.