My Top Ten Favorite
episodes of Star Trek TNG, ranked.
#1 Tapestry, season
6
Almost any episode
in my top five can become my number one on any given day depending on
my mood or time of the year. But Tapestry is a very deep episode that
I’ve always been captivated by. It’s hard to find words to
describe the depth and quality of this episode. The summary of the
story is that when Picard is brought into sickbay with possibly fatal
injuries to his artificial heart, we’re swept into his mind to see
him interacting with Q in what is possibly the afterlife. The fact
that Q is running the show is enough to reassure the audience that
Picard has probably not actually died as just the right amount of
levity is injected at just the right time. It’s Q at his best…
who else but the character of Q could take a serious matter like
death and not only lighten the moment but then steer it back to
perfect gravity with only a small point or two? Ever the opportunist,
once Q smells weakness on Picard’s part, regretting his reckless
youth that led to his artificial heart, he gives him the opportunity
to relive and change the circumstances surrounding it free of the
consequences of changing the timeline or anyone else’s life. This
is an opportunity that you will find on the lips of almost every
adult you meet -“If I could go back and change things, I’d...”
It’s one of the greatest “wish” temptations next to wishing
yourself a heap of money or wishing someone back from the dead, and
that’s why this episode resonates with so many people. Picard
hesitates at first, but after Q abandons him in his past with the
promise that he can’t change anything important in the future, he
takes advantage of the opportunity and successfully prevents the bar
fight that ended with him being stabbed through his real heart. But
almost immediately the fateful Monkey’s Paw moment occurs as he’s
swept back into consciousness as a junior grade science officer on
par with Lt. Barcklay as far as how he’s viewed by the senior
officers of the Enterprise. The crushing humiliation is even more
heartbreaking to watch than his torture in Chain of Command. He
doesn’t have to suffer long before Q finds him and points out that
his brush with death taught him how precious life was and that it
helped him to seize the opportunities that came later in his life. He
never distinguished himself as somebody who could be in charge so
nobody offered him a command. Picard realizes the mistake and decides
that he'd rather die as the man he was than live the life he'd just
seen. Q grants his wish once more and the fight proceeds like it did
in the past only this time he regains consciousness on a table in
sickbay as captain of the Enterprise again. He later has feelings of
gratitude towards Q if the experience was real. Riker doesn’t
understand why, and Picard explains that by pulling out one fiber, he
ended up unraveling the tapestry of his life, speaking the title of
the episode.
When this episode
was written it was supposed to play out like A Christmas Carol with Q
taking Picard through several mistakes in his past, but it ended up
being more like It's A Wonderful Life in which changing one important
event made a life altering difference; only the change affects Picard
alone, not the lives of those around him. The lesson he relays to
Riker isn't a new one to anybody who has lived long enough to be in a
really successful or happy place in life. Every event in our past
whether bad or good contributes to who we are today. However, it also
applies even if you're generally dissatisfied with life but still
have one viable joy to hold to like a spouse, a child, or living in
an ideal location. In both cases we realize that if we were to alter
any event in our past, no matter how painful, we may not end up
successful and happy, or even with that one joy of a spouse, child,
or that beloved location. This episode can have such a broad
impact on people's lives if they've never stopped to analyze
themselves before. It touches on a deep and complex matter of growing
as a person over the years. It can also cause the opposite
reflection - making a person regret that they hadn’t taken more
chances in their youth causing them to feel more like a Lt. Picard
than a Captain Picard in their present life. That’s psychologically
valid, but I don’t think it’s necessarily healthy to take that
lesson from this story. Not everyone is meant to lead and I
personally don’t believe that if you’re not a leader in life or
wildly successful then you’re an abject failure and there is no in
between. Most of us live in between and are happier than we would
probably even realize if we only had a Q to come along and to help us
see our wonderful lives. For a one-off episode it’s one of the most
complex ones ever made. I will always love this episode.
I also have 10
honorable mentions to match my top ten favorites, so I'll throw one
in every day that I post a top ten episode. These aren't ranked.
Remember Me, season
4.
I’d said earlier
that the episode Measure of a Man was in my honorable mentions but
I’ve changed my mind. It had a lot of good points like the first
poker game, adding a little dignity to the character Tasha Yar, and
finally beginning to tap the potential of Picard without the
unnecessary melodrama. There were times that I forgot I was watching
an episode from the second season with that one. But it still isn’t
as much of a personal favorite as this one. I love the really good
mind benders and I love Beverly. Beverly is my favorite female from
this show. She had a pretty unique character and it was
improved on when she came back in the third season. She
balanced the role of a nurturing and loving mother with that of a
competent doctor. And up to this point they'd used her in those
two roles. You see the mother thing all the time with Wesley and you
see her medical skills on display frequently when there's a mystery
to solve. This episode stretches the boundaries of her
character a little for the first time. It starts with her
inviting an old mentor aboard and feeling sentimental about friends
and family. She goes to see Wesley who is too busy experimenting as
usual to have time to talk and in the smoothest fake out ever she
appears to leave engineering after he has a little mishap with his
experiment. You then see her losing people beginning with her mentor
and continuing with large sections of the crew and then the main
characters one by one until she’s left with Picard who sees nothing
unusual about any of this and has never heard of any of these people.
It’s actually a little terrifying and you almost feel like you’re
losing your mind while she feels like she’s losing hers. It’s not
until she’s alone on the Enterprise that it’s revealed that we’ve
not been seeing reality, but a reality that has been fabricated in
Beverly’s mind because she’d been swallowed up in Wesley’s
experiment in that brief engineering scene at the beginning. The
science is definitely shaky and not something to ponder for too long.
And I must say it’s one of Wesley’s finest moments on the show.
His work with the Traveler to get Beverly back is exactly the sort of
thing I'd hoped that they'd do with Wesley from the second they made
him a bridge officer and I’ll always be angry that they didn’t
think of any of this sooner. But even Wesley and the Traveler can
only do so much. It’s Beverly that has to connect the dots and
figure out that the dangerous looking vortexes that have been popping
up in random places are actually her way out of the experiment. And
that’s why this is a great episode for Beverly to shine. Instead of
freaking out she calmly starts talking to the computer to try to
hypothesize her way into a solution. This is not a medical
mystery. This is entirely different and nothing that Wesley and
the Traveler did on the other side would've made any difference if
she hadn't figured out what was going on for herself. It's thrilling
to hear the computer talk about the universe being only about as big
as the ship amid other odd answers it starts to give to her
questions. This is such an exciting and well written episode.
It showcases her bravery as well as she finally figures it out and
realizes that she has to jump into the vortex that she’s been
avoiding throughout the show. It's kind of a shame (but
understandable) that Beverly was limited to medical officer and
didn't get to extend her character as much. But this is the
real start of her exceeding her medical limitations and she goes on
to have other moments where she shines. And I'll always point them
out because I'm a Beverly fan! One of my personal favorites.
No comments:
Post a Comment