Love at first sight.
The short recap:
Wesley falls in love with a shapeshifting alien princess.
The long recap:
Basically Titanic, only Jack is Wesley Crusher and Rose is a shapeshifting alien princess and Billy Zane is her incredibly overprotective shapeshifting governess/bodyguard, and the ship doesn’t sink.
It’s not a bad episode in the grand scheme of “young character falls in love for the first time but has to learn an important lesson about heartbreak” television. But there’s not a lot of meat to the story.
Every teen boy’s nightmare.
The Enterprise is delivering a young woman called Salia back to her homeworld. She’s the daughter of people from two warring factions and will, in some way that is (a) never explained and (b) not even explained to her, unite the factions and bring about peace, and for this task she has been raised on a distant world with only her shapeshifting governess for company. So of course she’s going to fall in love with the first teenage male humanoid she encounters, which is of course why Wesley is randomly on engineering duty and not being a helmsman. And in the end she ultimately has to leave.
Through the power of young love, the holodeck doesn’t malfunction.
Salia is a bit of a tragic figure because she perfectly fits the trope of the Chosen One who has no agency and not even much buy-in into her own Chosenness. Whereas a lot of the TNG romance storylines seem very forced and eye-roll-inducing, this one actually works, and in part it’s because of Salia’s performance. The other part is because of the first scene in TNG to make me shriek with laughter, when Wesley turns to Riker for romance advice (good call, Wes) and Riker puts on an amazing display of pick-up lines with Guinan.
The many faces of Anya.
Salia’s bodyguard Anya is a total enigma, utterly dedicated to her charge to the point of demanding that Dr Pulaski execute a mildly-ill patient, yet saying “so long” and disappearing back to her own homeworld at the end of the episode with hardly any notice.
There’s no B plot, and I basically ended up day-dreaming a dystopic twist where Salia arrives alone and unprepared on her homeworld and is promptly murdered, or something. You don’t have a lot of reason to assume it goes any better, and I suspect her people and their story will never be seen again.
Additionally:
- It feels like a cop-out that we see nothing of Daled IV’s peoples or cultures, especially with their fascinating “one half of the planet is in perpetual night” set-up.
- Madchen Amick appears as the shapeshifting governess’ younger teen-advisor form.
- Deanna actually senses that people are hiding something before they make it obvious they’re hiding something.
- The shapeshifting monsters are terribly executed, especially the short version, because you can’t help but compare it to Ewoks, which were done far better 6 years earlier.
Points scored:
- Riker: 1 for the Riker Manoeuvre
- Worf: 1 for seeming appropriately turned on by the idea of women throwing furniture at him
- Wesley: 3 for wearing an almost permanent gawky smile. He is in love, after all!
MVP: Riker and Guinan
This should by all rights be utterly cringe-worthy … but dammit, it works.
