Plot Synopsis: Several crew members suffer violent hallucinations and comas while three alien telepathic historians visit the Enterprise.
Plot A and B Analysis: The teaser isn’t particularly interesting: the Enterprise is on a mapping survey while hosting a race of telepathic historians, and Keiko gets a memory restored. Plot A is about the aliens and violations, there is no plot B. The Ullians are building a library containing the memories of entire civilizations, that’s what these guys do. There’s three of them: an overbearing father, his son, and a woman. It doesn’t take long before the violations begin. Troi gets mentally raped within the first 15 minutes, in a surreal dream experience involving Riker, and we know who did it. She’s comatose. This sets up most of the rest of the plot, with Riker and later Beverly getting violated and put in comas, while hardly anyone does anything about it. Worf gets ignored, and neither Picard nor Data can figure anything out. Geordi finally gets to the bottom of it, but by this point you’re just waiting for the guy to get caught and the episode to end. Troi almost gets violated again, Picard gives one of his weaker speeches and we’re finally released from 45 minutes of ick.
Favorite Scenes: None really, though I will admit to a bit of ‘historical interest’ in Picard accompanying Beverly to view her husband’s body for the first time.
Use of Cast/Characters: The cast are particularly ill-used in this episode. Picard doesn’t do much. Deanna’s job is to flirt with Jev, get raped and go into a coma, then fight him off later. Riker’s job is to irritate Jev, get violated and go into a coma. Worf seems to be the smartest one on the ship, pointing out the obvious: both crew members had problems only after the Ullians came aboard–let’s quarantine them. Worf later delivers arguably the fastest beat down in the whole series. It’s only after Beverly points out how the Ullians could be implicated that Picard agrees to talk to them; she gets proactive and investigates Keiko. Data does nothing really. Geordi really come across the best, finding a pattern on previous worlds the Ullians visited, and ultimately finding the culprit. It’s not even his job, he’s the engineer!
Blu Ray Version: Pause at 11:04. When the turbolift doors close it reads deck 8, which is correct because that’s where Deanna was going. Except it’s a fix, because in the original version it still read deck 3, which is where they started. Isn’t that awesome, fixing details as small as that? It’s also the only episode where it’s pretty clear in a couple of scenes that Marina is definitely not wearing a bra in them. At 34:20 there a few in-jokes on the computer screen.
Nitpicks: The Enterprise is on a mapping survey again? That usually means the writers didn’t know what to do with the ship. Riker is a bit of a jerkface to Jev in the 15th minute, and he doesn’t really have a reason to be–it’s unprofessional. I get that the purpose of the scene is to give Jev motive to violate him, but it still comes across as contrived. I am not a fan of these aliens’ clothes, they’re just white robes with holes in them. The female alien’s relationship to the others is never explained. Is she a wife, a mother, just a random professional? Geordi solves the mystery, which is fine, but is it too much to ask that Beverly be the one to do it? It doesn’t quite feel right to see Geordi doing it down in engineering working on a medical mystery, besides which Beverly hardly gets featured on the show anyway. While Worf’s idea to quarantine the aliens wouldn’t have prevented Jev from using telepathy, it would have limited his exposure to others and he might not have struck out at Beverly at all. Remember it was only after he got turned on or ticked off that he decided to go after Deanna and Riker respectively. Finally, the thalamus is definitely not the ‘memory center’ of the brain; it’s more like a traffic cop, relaying sensory information from one region of the brain to another.
Overall Impression: An episode that’s best forgotten! This is one of the few from the fifth season that I actively dislike watching. This is an episode where the audience knows who the bad guy is from the start and we get to watch the cast figure it out. Unfortunately they come across as dumb and passive, except Geordi and Beverly. Instead of interesting or edgy viewing, it instead comes across as uncomfortable, and is not particularly effective at whatever it was trying to accomplish. I do not recommend this episode for kids. Is it wrong that I have a morbid curiosity to see what some of the other crew members’ violation scenes might have included? I rate this episode 1.5 out of 5 stars.
Behind the Scenes/Trivia: There’s a reference to Shades of Gray in the 17th minute, when Riker is talking to a comatose Deanna. Like anyone wants to be reminded of that episode! We learn Betazoids can’t read Ullians telepathically, though it doesn’t matter because they never appear again. This is one of only four episodes that we see the engineering sealing doors coming down; the others are The Best of Both Worlds, Disaster and Starship Mine. The flashback scene for Beverly is one of the only ones in which we get to see her actual hair. Remember she wears a wig for almost the entire series. She did say we saw her real hair in the Generations film also. If you pause right at 27:34 you’ll see a copy of the shooting script for this episode on top of the stairs on the bottom right of the screen. Marina Sirtis said this was the most difficult acting she did on the show, essentially acting out a rape scene.
Supposedly the writers wrote flashback scenes for every member of the crew before they chose which three were going to be used. One involved ensign Ro’s actions on Garon II–which would have been awesome, as that’s what landed her in prison–another was Geordi’s traumatic experience with a fire, which we learned about in the previous episode. A memorial service for Gene Roddenberry was held during the shooting of this episode. This isn’t the first time Marina has had to play a character that gets raped. It happened in Death Wish 3, and essentially happens again in Star Trek Nemesis–in the movie she calls it a ‘violation’, get it?
Missable/Unmissable? Missable. The next episode is a step up, but then again most episodes would be.