Plot Synopsis: Picard falls in love with one of his subordinates, but he can’t deal with having to order her into dangerous situations.
Plot A and B Analysis: The teaser lets us know that some jerk in stellar cartography is taking half the ship’s systems offline in the middle of the night. Picard investigates and has an incredibly bland conversation with a woman, Lieutenant commander Darren, that will clearly become his love interest for this episode. Plot A is about the romance, there is a contrived plot B to introduce danger later on. It doesn’t take long to learn that Darren is an accomplished pianist, which forms a musical connection between the two. They start playing music together, make out and start doing it. She gets increasingly assertive with Riker, who thinks she is asking for special treatment. Later there’s a planetary emergency and Darren gets sent down to a dangerous situation to set up a barrier to a major firestorm. We think she dies on the planet, turns out she’s alive, and they both realize they can’t continue that way. It’s a sobering reminder on why captains don’t date people under their command, but the plot never seems more than just okay.
Favorite Scenes: I don’t really have any? The scene where Picard mimics fencing with his finger to Riker in the 16th minute is funny and ridiculous at the same time. There is a gorgeous shot of Picard’s glass sailing ship at 22:37 I really like.
Use of Cast/Characters: This is a Picard episode, and we do get a little character development. Patrick gives a very restrained performance, and while we can see his emotions in his eyes perhaps it’s a little too restrained. I wanted to see a little more emotion. Frakes gets about as much screen time as Gates, and everyone in the cast gets almost nothing. I will say it’s nice to revisit Picard and Beverly’s friendship with the scene of them having dinner together. Wendy Hughes plays the love interest. Their relationship is warm and mature, and we can see these two being compatible, but she didn’t win me over like Famke Janssen in The Perfect Mate.
Blu Ray Version: The planet Bersallis III was redone with more detail, which is nice. The effects of the firestorm on the planet were redone and are more legitimately menacing. For the entire scene in Picard’s quarters in the 40th+ minute, look in the background. In HD we can clearly see his bathroom mirror was completely blacked out so we don’t see any filming equipment in the reflection.
Nitpicks: The scene where they both play the famous melody from The Inner Light in the Jeffries tube has always seemed a little blasphemous to me. I suppose it’s because of my emotional connection with that episode, it’s always been special to me. I especially didn’t like her playing it on her ‘piano.’ Watch in the 18th minute where she unrolls her piano, which is clearly on the floor. About 20 seconds later the piano suddenly has a stand from nowhere, certainly not from the tiny bag she came with. Also, any piano player who looks at the keyboard will notice that the layout and spacing of the keys isn’t right. They had a real piano in the episode, couldn’t they have looked at it??
Overall Impression: This is not a terrible episode, just not a good one. There is nothing particularly memorable or exciting or moving to me here, and the writing isn’t sharp. Both of the musical scenes between the two are okay, but neither make me feel the chemistry. I do like references to The Inner Light, but then they go a bit too far with it by having someone else play it. The actors do their best but it’s just a bland, forgettable episode to me, and one that I never look forward to watching. I rate this episode 2 out of 5 stars.
Behind the Scenes/Trivia: There’s a brief reference to Picard playing the piano when he was young (mentioned in The Perfect Mate), and of course there are repeated references to The Inner Light with his flute. All the shots of the Enterprise in the nebula are reuses from back in Hero Worship. Evidently this episode idea was tossed around in the fifth season but nobody wanted to do it. It was resurrected now because the writers were struggling for episode ideas–it wasn’t even written by the regular writing staff, but a couple of freelancers.
Missable/Unmissable? If you haven’t gotten the gist yet: missable. The next one is almost as bad.