TNG Flashback: We'll Always Have Paris

Television fans may recall the strike by the Writer's Guild of America a few seasons ago. But it's happened before, including back in 1988, as Star Trek: The Next Generation was finishing up its first season and looking ahead to its second. The strike is the reason why that second season was cut short by four episodes, and it can also be blamed for the creative shortcomings in many of the episodes made that year.

From what I've read, one such episode was the late first season entry "We'll Always Have Paris." Conceived of as a deeply romantic tale for Captain Picard, the first draft was thrown together badly in just a few days, then tweaked during filming by whatever non-striking people were stuck trying desperately to make the thing work. The result is a complete mess.

Temporal distortions are causing brief spans of time to loop back on themselves throughout the sector. The Enterprise traces them to a professor whose wild experiments have ripped a hole into a parallel dimension. As that other reality spills into ours, these temporal "hiccups" will gradually worsen until all reality unravels. And as the crew tries to solve this problem, Picard must deal with his unresolved romantic feelings with the professor's wife Jenice, who he walked out many years ago to pursue his Starfleet career.

Neither of these plots is successful. There's never any real sense of the threat posed by the temporal disruptions. In the handful of moments we see time repeat, it comes off at best an eerie moment of déjà vu, and at worst a moment of light comic relief. How we're supposed to get from there to destroying the universe isn't at all clear. We're also told the effects of these loops are supposed to be intensely disorienting to humans -- something we never see in action. Instead, Picard instructs Data beams down alone to solve the problem at the climax of the episode, as the captain thinks that only Data will be able to handle the distortion's effects.

That climax is anything but climactic. Data dodges a couple of lasers in a series of badly filmed stunts and "cowboy switches," then confronts a simplistic prism-like visual effect. It's all clearly constrained in shooting time and budget. Data then asks Geordi for a countdown purely for the audience's benefit (as Picard just told us that temporal confusion won't affect him), faces off against a couple of clones of himself without drama, and just "patches" the problem, simple as you please. Worse still, the meddling professor that supposedly just came close to destroying the universe is then left to go back down to his lab at the end of the hour to try again!

But stupid as it all is, it's not much worse than the romantic storyline. Michelle Phillips, of The Mamas & The Papas, plays Jenice Manheim, and there is absolutely no romantic chemistry between her and Patrick Stewart. But to be fair, it would have been impossible to achieve any with the implausible script.

First, the episode compromises the character of Picard, bringing in something more suited to Riker's past than his. Riker has always been described as the ambitious one, but now we learn that it's Picard who walked out on a woman -- without even saying goodbye -- to further his Starfleet career. He tries to characterize his real motivation as fear when he explains himself in the episode, but it doesn't come off right.

Odder still is the way Jenice instantly strikes up a playful flirtation with Picard. It's hard to believe that she'd instantly get over a 20-some-year-old psychological wound this man inflicted on her when he left her sitting alone all day in a French cafe. Would even that much time and distance get you nostalgic for someone who dumped you without saying goodbye? But Jenice seems downright sociopathic when you consider that she is flirting with another man as her husband lies dying in sickbay, suffering horrific hallucinations resulting from his time experiments!

Then again, maybe she feels permission to indulge these feelings because of how strangely Dr. Manheim is portrayed too. He's supposed to be in personal jeopardy, bouncing back and forth between two realities, but we never see any illustration of what that's like. He just describes what he sees (badly), and mostly rests in a bed. In one of the few moments he's conscious, he implores Picard to take care of Jenice for him if he dies, saying she deserves better. (But is what Picard did to her actually any "better?")

The one decent thing this episode has going for it is a fairly fun score from composer Ron Jones. He hams it up with fun, French-flavored music to underscore the holodeck restaurant scenes in Paris; he also writes a very dramatic action cue for Data's closing of the temporal breach. It helps things seem as dramatic as everyone says they are (as opposed to how undramatic it all looks.)

Other observations:

• Picard is given the hobby of fencing in this episode. Sadly, it's rarely shown again. It might have been nice to show it coming in handy some day, say in the way that Sulu's classic series hobby of fencing was incorporated into J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie.

• Counselor Troi confronts Picard about coming to terms with his past feelings. She doesn't use the word "holodeck," but that's ultimately what Picard decides to do. When you think about it, "holodeck therapy" seems like a marvelously effective way of dealing with emotional issues. Imagine if you could conjure up an alternate reality where you could go tell someone what you wish you'd have said, live out a side of yourself you don't want anyone else to see, and so forth. This is essentially what the character of Barclay does when he's introduced late in season 3, and yet everyone seems so shocked at his usage of the holodeck in this manner.

• When the Blu-ray re-mastering team was assembling this episode, there was one brief shot, of less than two seconds, where they were unable to locate the original film. It's a reaction shot of Riker, in which he isn't even speaking, but it sticks out like a sore thumb when you see it in the episode. It's the only missing footage in the entire first season of 26 episodes, but it's a monument to how amazing it is that they decided to re-master the episodes in this way, from the original film, rather than "up rezzing" the video footage. What a difference it makes!

• It's established in the episode that security precautions on Dr. Manheim's lab prevent beaming down safely. But there are no anti-shuttlecraft measures mentioned at all. It further hurts the already unbelievable notion that this problem threatens the entire universe when the people aren't even trying the simplest things they could to resolve it.

• In one scene, Troi goes to Dr. Crusher to sound her feelings on Picard's past love interest being on board the ship. It's not the best scene, feeling rather incomplete, but it's frankly surprising it's there at all. The whole point of the scene is basically "I know you have feelings for the captain, Beverly, so how are you dealing with this?" And yet, just a few episodes earlier in "The Arsenal of Freedom," Gene Roddenberry didn't want to pursue the Crusher-Picard relationship at all.

Not even a talented main cast can help lift up this dog of an episode very far. It's definitely among the dregs of he first season, worth no more than a D-.