Star Trek #1727: Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass

CAPTAIN'S LOG: The soap opera episode.

WHY WE LIKE IT: The TOS sound effects on Trelaine's powers.

WHY WE DON'T: Not the Sybok we were asking for.

REVIEW: It's another gimmick episode, but Trelaine's participation makes this one no sillier than, say, Qpid, and actually quite a bit better than that. Though in terms of ambition, the puppet show was this season's Subspace Rhapsody, the soap opera episode is the musical's truest heir. Pike even references it and makes me think perhaps they should have set the season after a similar accident created similar bubbles of altered space. With one umbrella explanation, they could have gone wild with it, with perhaps less pushback. In any case, this is a better "Q" episode than Wedding Bell Blues because though he plays with the crew's behavior, it's still grounded in their real emotions, just amplified in a soap opera style, and Trelaine's experiment is to force them to confront their issues by making the "space adventure" take a back seat, or really, to be a metaphor FOR those issues.

I don't know what soap operas are like today, but when I was a kid, my mom and my stepmom both had their afternoon stories, which I was exposed to, and sometimes actually watched. On my stepmom's side of things (summers), there was The Days of Our Lives, which this episode specifically spoofs, not just in the title, but the opening credits they included post-credit material along with a fake commercial (cowards!), and the deepest cut of all, having soap legend Deidre Hall play the Enterprise's counselor. She has been playing a shrink on Days of Our Lives for 50 years now (doesn't look it) and I personally discovered her in a storyline where she was kidnapped by a mad scientist played by John de Lancie (whose EPCOT robot fascinated me). So there's your Q connection. And though de Lancie isn't in this, the Q who acts as Trelaine's evaluator wears robes that evoke the Judge Q from the TNG bookends. Otherwise, the episode uses soft lenses, crash zooms, a different aspect ratio, commercial breaks, dialogue recaps, and melodramatic acting and music. In some ways, it's a lot like A Space Adventure Hour, but not as objectionable.

The various plot lines take aim at ongoing personal complications, and the similar content in The Griffin Incident and Level Five Transporter Accident makes me think the production is straining to develop the characters without the benefit of 24-episode seasons. These episodes all use a conceit to advance multiple subplots. So here we have Uhura discovering Pike is her father - her parents died when she was a teenager, and the captain has become a father figure, even as she tries to mentor a cadet herself. We have M'Benga's space madness - his PTSD, and Ortegas admits to the same. We have La'an tracking down Spock's evil twin Sybok to get him a heart transplant - she ended her relationship with the Vulcan, but she's nevertheless sad about it. These are fairly clever ways to address each character's trauma, though in the last case, fans who have been asking "what about Sybok and Captain Angel?", wondering when that loose end would be closed and why the show was instead spending all its time on novelty acts, will probably be disappointed. Ethan Peck plays a romantic version of his half-brother and, aside from the catharsis, none of this happened. (Just a joke, but I still have to wonder what Chapel's collection of brains was all about.)

At the center of it all is trauma-magnet Christopher Pike who, somehow, is immune to Trelaine's behavior modification. Between The Cage and his full life with Batel, Pike is a past master at realizing he's in a simulation, and I wonder if this plays a part in Spock's decision to give him that fate in The Menagerie. He refuses Trelaine's reality, a mirror of his refusal to see the ship's counselor. He doesn't need therapy (whether offered by a Q or a human being), and he's said his goodbyes to Batel, so what's the problem, right? He applies self-therapy and it's good enough for him. But he breaks down here when he realizes that he never grieved for the daughter he had in Batel-World. Given the timey-wimey nature of that storyline, Juliet may well have existed, and even if she didn't (and certainly doesn't in THIS timeline), she was real to him, much like Picard's memories of his Ressikan family in The Inner Light. Though Pike isn't "under control" and actively fights the television tropes, his situation still manifests as "cosmic amnesia", a metaphor for where he has relegated his life with Batel. The episode is silly in presentation, but rather clever in its intent.

LESSON: Don't skip those therapy appointments.

REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: The cleverness behind this one wins me over. It only seems like a comedy episode, but it's really about how each character deals with loss.