The Enterprise is dispatched to transport a young alien from the planet where she's grown up to her true homeworld, where she is expected to unite two long-warring factions in peace. A chance meeting in a corridor between her and Wesley sparks up a budding romance. But between her obligations and her powerful guardian -- a shapeshifting governess who threatens the lives of a crewmember -- can the relationship have any future?
No. The answer is no. And that's a large part of why this is such a boring episode. Though it wants to pretend there is considerable suspense and conflict in the premise, there is neither. We know that Salia, the object of Wesley's affections, is not going to abandon her obligations and become a permanent fixture on the Enterprise and the series. One way or another, this relationship is going to end in the next 42 minutes. We also know that guardian Anya, despite her considerable bluster, is not actually going to kill Wesley or anyone else. Indeed, she says exactly this to Anya near the end of the episode.
So, one's enjoyment of such a predictable plot depends on the engagement one feels in the depiction of "a boy's first romance" storyline. The episode fails here too. It's not that Wesley turns into such a goober -- that's actually a relatively realistic depiction of a teen with "raging hormones" (as Geordi puts it). The problem is the way Salia is constantly sneaking out to see her forbidden boyfriend; the episode is presented as a "good girl/bad boy" kind of romance.
That's preposterous. We all know that Wesley is no bad boy. The episode tries a little bit to skew him this way, but it doesn't flatter the character well. No matter how many people tell him Salia has obligations that place her out of reach -- most notably including Salia herself on multiple occasions -- he always brushes it aside. And at the end, when he briefly rejects Salia after her not-terribly-interesting-revelation that she's a shapeshifter too, it's hard to know how to react. Sure, this is a rather big secret she's hidden from him. But would you tell someone your greatest secret on your first date? And by Wesley's brief rejection, is he on some level confessing that he only liked her for her looks?
Visual effects are a mixed bag in this episode. The planets Salia is ferried from and to are particularly impressive in the Blu-ray remaster. The dust storms on the surface seem powerful and look crisp. They're much more dynamic than the typical planets we see on the series, befitting the specific plot point made of it. Also, in a sequence on the holodeck, when Wesley wows Salia by showing her two alien environments, those places are both highly detailed and very unusual. The greenscreening to insert the characters into the scene isn't 100% effective, but the places themselves are every bit as impressive as the dialogue claims.
But the shapeshifting in the episode is terrible. The "monster" forms of Anya and Salia are laughable, Roger Corman level stuff. When Worf has to "fight" one of these costumed jokes, it's painful to watch. And the morph effects between forms are almost as hokey. I understand this was made in 1989. The pioneer of the morph effect, the film Willow, was less than a year old, and its technology utterly beyond the grasp of a television production. Still, it just doesn't hold up at all, which might not be so disappointing but for the fact that so many of the effects still do.
There is a consistent success in the episode, however, and that's the comedy. There are a lot of great comedic scenes, and each one works. Worf's explanation of Klingon mating to Wesley is hilarious, and then is immediately topped by Data's clinical observations. There's a mock flirtation scene between Riker and Guinan that simply sings; Whoopi Goldberg is a skilled comedian, and Jonathan Frakes matches her note for note. There's even unintentional comedy, in the fact that Wesley first asks for romantic advice from Geordi; in the full run of the show, it's probably safe to say that no other character has a more spotty love life.
Other observations:
- When Wesley asks the food replicator to serve a chocolate mousse, it provides no spoon with which to eat it. But then, there is a noticeably long pause before the replicator fills the request. Maybe it was determining that Wesley was on a date, and was helpfully providing a chance for his girlfriend to do a "sexy finger lick" thing.
- Anya is just such a weird character. It's unclear why she thinks that just because she can change shapes that everyone else's power is "infinitesimal compared to mine." And though she spends the whole episode trusting nothing and no one aboard the Enterprise, as soon as they arrive at the destination planet, she gives up on guarding Anya before seeing her safely to the planet surface. If the Enterprise was really the Salia-killing death trap she feared, then she totally leaves the door open it to happen.
- There is a jarring lack of emotion in the goodbye scene between Anya and Salia. If this is essentially the only "mother" Salia as ever known, and now she's leaving, I'd expect more than the staid and restrained farewell we get. Though at the same time, I probably wouldn't have wanted to see a bunch of blubbering between two one-off guest characters anyway.
- The final scene between Wesley and Guinan is a good one. Wesley says some predictably teenaged things about love, but Guinan gives some rather unexpected and characteristically astute responses.
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