TNG Flashback: Too Short a Season

The uneven first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation served up bad episodes both racist and sexist, but as offensive as I find both those attitudes in life, perhaps in entertainment, the even greater offense is to be boring. Because while I found one or two minor redeeming qualities in those other installments, I can find absolutely nothing to recommend about "Too Short a Season."

A planet that just recently ended a four decade long civil war now faces a hostage crisis, as dissidents have captured the local Federation ambassador. The planet's leader, Karnas, has requested a negotiator with whom he worked years ago at the start of the war. 85-year-old Admiral Mark Jameson arrives to be transported to negotiations. But to make himself ready for the mission, he has taken an extreme overdose of an alien "de-aging" drug. He arrives at the planet appearing as a young man in his 20s, but so tormented by the drug's painful side effects that he may not be able to resolve the crisis.

Notice that in that recap, I didn't mention the Enterprise or any of the main characters once. That's the biggest problem with this episode -- it doesn't impact our heroes in any way. Their lives aren't in danger. They aren't requested to resolve the hostage crisis. They can do nothing to stop the admiral's rapid aging. They're all just bystanders to an Iran Contra metaphor about what can happen when volatile factions are armed with superior weaponry by an outside power.

There are two big revelations in the plot. The first comes when Karnas' ruse is revealed; there are no dissidents, and he has taken the hostages himself as a pretext for bringing Jameson to his planet to be punished for his role in causing 40 years of civil war. The second comes when Jameson reveals that he is not the master negotiator Starfleet believes him to be; he armed the rebels to secure a hostage release 45 years earlier, and then armed their enemies as well to maintain "balance" and satisfy his own warped interpretation of the Prime Directive. Neither of these is a particularly dramatic twist, and once again, none of it has anything to do with the regular characters.

Even ignoring his role in starting a civil war, Jameson is still a thoroughly unlikable character. His remorse and profound need to be useful again ring true, but he's needlessly standoffish and stupid as well. His first act upon boarding the ship is to admonish Picard about just who is going to be commanding what aspects of the mission. He even takes the captain's chair at one point, bumping Picard into Riker's traditional seat. And when he later leads a rescue mission to the planet, he insists that his memories of the subterranean tunnels will be more useful than any current tricorder scans, as though nothing could possibly have changed over the course of 45 years.

Everything about the way the Jameson character is brought to the screen fails as well. The old age makeup used for the first part of the episode is terrible, looking caked on and waxen, particularly on the cheeks. He's also saddled with an awkward wheelchair (that I've read malfunctioned extensively on set) which only serves to highlight how wheelchair-inaccessible the Enterprise actually is. We never see how he gets down off the transporter platform after beaming aboard, for example, nor do we see how he gets through any narrow doors on the ship (save the suddenly wider ones on his quarters).

The performance is equally bad. Actor Clayton Rohner, who plays Jameson, is decent in one scene when (appearing as his actual age) he expresses remorse over the misdeeds of his past. The rest of the time, he's either overacting advanced age through the shabby makeup, or overacting the pain of his drug's side effects. I've read that the ensemble cast complained he did not work well with them, and that certainly shows on camera.

Yet shockingly, he's not even the worst actor in the episode. Michael Pataki, who played a hammy Klingon in the classic Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles," here plays the even hammier Karnas, hostage-taking leader. That old episode was a comedy, so the tone was appropriate. Here, his bellowing and grunting around the stage, chewing up all the scenery, is unintentionally laughable. And he is not sufficiently skilled to sell the turn-on-a-dime written at the end of the episode, when the character decides after seeing Jameson's suffering to let up on his lifelong quest for vengeance and become a nice guy.

There's are some moments sprinkled throughout the episode with dramatic lighting and camera movement. They catch the eye, but they're transparent ways of hiding (and then revealing) a new stage of Jameson's de-aging process. There are also a few interesting musical moments contributed by one-time-only composer George Romanis, including some mournful piano phrases, and an unusually militaristic rendering of Alexander Courage's Star Trek theme at the close of the hour. But these brief flashes of interest aren't nearly enough to save a thorough bore of an episode.

Other observations:

• There is an absolutely mystifying exchange between Picard and Dr. Crusher in this episode. Speculating early on about Jameson's medical condition, Crusher declares that "he's hiding something." When Picard responds that that's the sort of observation he'd expect from Counselor Troi, she appears to take offense. What's that about? Does Crusher think Troi is a hack? Or that psychology is a hack science? What exactly is her problem here?

• Angry (more or less) about the way Jameson is dictating to him, Picard decides to assert himself by beaming down with him on the rescue mission. Inexplicably, Riker offers no objection to this.

• The episode ends with a very classic Trek-like scene in which Riker and Picard pontificate about the futility of questing for youth, and the value of age and wisdom. Sulu and Chekov Data and Geordi exchange knowing nods at the conn.

Even episode director Rob Bowman later acknowledged this episode was verbose and not good. To quote Picard from this very episode, "not good is a galactic understatement." I grade this episode the first of the series worthy of an F.