TNG Flashback: The Ensigns of Command

Filmed first but deliberately aired second, the next episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's third season was yet another Data-centric story from writer Melinda Snodgrass, the woman behind "The Measure of a Man" and "Pen Pals." It falls somewhere between those two episodes in terms of success.

The Enterprise is contacted by the Sheliak, a powerful race of legal-minded aliens who have a century-old, Wheel-of-Time-sized treaty with the Federation. They inform the crew that a colony of humans is on a planet in their territory that they intend to settle themselves -- exterminating the intruders if they're not immediately removed. The colonists have adapted to this planet in spite of local conditions normally toxic to humans and disruptive to the transporter, so Data must take a shuttlecraft alone to try to convince the colonists to evacuate. But Gosheven, the charismatic leader of the colony, refuses to abandon his people's home. Data, working with a local technophile named Ard'rian McKenzie, must find a way to assert authority and change the colonists' minds.

Like the season premiere, this was not a truly great episode, and yet still demonstrated in many ways that the series was improving. I say this because there were problems behind the scenes here -- including a last minute budget slash for this installment and a rushed rewrite to abbreviate a romantic subplot for Data -- yet while many of the flaws are obvious in the finished product, the episode is still not that bad. By contrast, first- or second-season episodes forced to deal with similar challenges usually wound up a total mess.

The guest actors playing the colonists are pretty terrible. They give performances so stilted and emotionless that Data actually ends up looking less robotic in this episode by comparison. Grainger Hines, the actor playing Gosheven, must have been especially bad. He reportedly used a John Wayne-like accent so obtrusive that the producers decided to re-record all his dialogue in the final cut with another (uncredited) actor. Hines then asked his name to be taken off the episode, leaving no one in the role of Gosheven, as far as the credits are concerned. The results on screen are quite rough.

Filming seem to have been rushed through in places. After Data destroys the city's aqueduct in the climactic scene, water is still clearly visible flowing on the set, as though no one thought to turn it off. In another late scene where Ard'rian says goodbye to Data, one of the two camera angles is noticeably unstable. The distracting shake kills what little momentum is being generated between the actors, yet either this obvious problem wasn't noticed on the day, or the schedule was too backed up to allow them time to re-film.

But as I said, despite all these obvious flaws, there's a lot to like in this episode. The emphasis on character-driven scenes continues, for example. The hour is bookended by scenes exploring Data's development as a violinist. The opening telegraphs the episodes themes about taking command, while the closing floats the notion that emotionless Data does in fact display a form of creativity in the various human behaviors he chooses to mimic. Plus, the very idea that Data has to "get tough" and go against his nature to resolve this situation provides good development for his character. Particularly effective is the writing of the "rousing speech" he attempts to give in the town square, a transparent bit of reverse psychology that one could imagine being effective if delivered by a Captain Kirk or Picard; Brent Spiner gives it just the right deliberately stilted performance to make it fall flat the way it should.

There's another well-written scene between Troi and Picard, where they discuss how remarkable it is that two alien races (here you could really substitute "foreign cultures") can manage to communicate at all. Troi illustrates with a compelling hypothetical: we're stranded together on a planet and I want to teach you my language; how would I go about it? In the fifth season, this very scenario would become one of the series best episodes, "Darmok." Even here, in the abstract, it's intriguing.

Another nice touch in the writing is that technobabble does not save the day. Desperate to find some way to evacuate the colonists in the short time frame, Picard assigns Geordi, Wesley, and O'Brien the impossible task of making the transporters function despite the planet's interference. And though the trio labors on this all episode, they're unable to make it happen.

The Sheliak make for fun alien villains. Their ship has a strong appearance, and even the minimalist interior is oddly intriguing. I almost found myself wishing they'd appeared on the series again... except that surely they would have become a predictable nemesis, always defeated by finding some obscure paragraph of legalese in their massive treaty. By the way, if the mud-slickish Sheliak leader looks or sounds familiar, he should -- he's Mart McChesney, the same actor who played Armus in "Skin of Evil."

Other observations:

• This feels to me like the episode where Chief O'Brien moves from recurring character to unofficial ninth member of the cast... but for a very odd reason. He appears in this episode, and yet doesn't speak a single line of dialogue. Why would you bring in Colm Meaney for that, as opposed to paying a non-speaking extra, unless you wanted the continuity? O'Brien also gets a hobby in this episode; we learn that he plays the cello when he participates in Data's string quartet.

• There's a strange metal sculpture near the entrance of Ard'rian McKenzie's house that looks eerily like the battle droids of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. (10 years before The Phantom Menace was released, of course.)

• Picard is beginning to cut loose as a character. It's hard to imagine the first- or second-season incarnation of him toying with the Sheliak as he does when he gets the upper hand near the end of this episode.

While this episode certainly could have been better, it manages to transcend its flaws enough to still be mostly enjoyable. I give it a B-.