1x09 The Passenger

[5.4/10] The thing about The Next Generation and, frankly, most television shows, is that after a couple seasons, you can generally expect a level of baseline competence. Not every episode is going to be a winner. Not every big swing is going to connect. But the cast and crew have had time to jell and settle in, to where the basics should be solid, if not always spectacular.

But there’s a reason the running gag in the fandom is that every Star Trek show takes a season or two to find its footing. “The Passenger” offers a pretty standard Trek story. Some villainous murderer has taken up residence in the mind of someone on board. The Original Series did it. (“A Wolf in the Fold”) And TNG had done it in the same month as DS9. (“Aquiel”). It’s a little loopy, but plausible enough for a sci-fi show (or three) to give it a go.

The issue is that there’s major problems in the foundation of this one, first and foremost the acting. Good lord, I’ve griped about Dr. Bashir being reduced to nothing but naive self-flattery and “ME HORNY!”-style interactions with women about the station, but if this is what you get when you give him something meatier, then I can understand trying to limit the young actor to shall we say, broader material. His attempts to seem intimidating or domineering when possessed by Vantika, the killer du jour, are downright laughable. He punches every line and is utterly unconvincing in the effort.

But he’s not alone. The actress who plays Ty Kajada is way too over the top in her delivery. And candidly, pretty much the entire cast is just a few notches beyond believable in terms of their performances. Everyone here gives a little too much, which suggests it may be an issue with what veteran Star Trek director Paul Lynch was asking from them, rather than the actors themselves.

The only one who comes out unscathed is Odo. He too is a little intense here, but Rene Auberjonois is such a pro that you buy every angry word out of his mouth. Odo’s story is the most compelling part of this one. Apart from the killer on the loose, it’s a subplot about where the “constable” fits into the hierarchy of a Starfleet-administered station. One of the best elements of Deep Space Nine’s premise is having to untangle the power structures of the Federation, the Bajorans, and the raft of civilians passing through, and this is a good example of how the idea can pay dividends.

Odo’s foil is Lt. Primmin, a Starfleet security officer assigned to the station who steps on Odo’s toes a bit. (I don’t think we ever see him again? Maybe he’s just here temporarily because of the whole diridium situation.) I like their story of bristling against one another, both having to be told to work together with mutual respect for the good of the station by Sisko, and ultimately finding the common ground that let’s them help save the day. Odo and Sisko’s conversation is a particular highlight, with the Constable showing his pride and marking his territory, while getting respect from his commander for it, but also the expectations that come with it. This little subplot is miles ahead of the main story.

Some of that just owes to the production and staging issues visible here. Odo and Primmin’s issues are mostly person-to-person, with little beyond a small “shunt” requiring much in the way of set pieces or visual challenges. But the tale of the mind-hopping killer has to go for big drama, and stumbles (or plummets) mightily in the process.

The overblown sequences here completely stink. The moment where Kajada dangles from the balcony in Quark’s, only to fall to the ground below, lacks danger or believability in the moment, with it not even being clear that she was pushed or how. When Vantika’s mercenaries take over a simple freighter, once they’ve blasted most of the crew, one crewman calmly walks over, stops, and gets shot. It’s a bizarre choreographed sequence. And even poor Siddig is called upon to show what it’s like to have his brain fried by the latest reversed polarity beam, and can only muster some totally unconvincing paroxysms that feel torn from an Ed Wood movie. Every time “The Passenger” goes big, it fails.

The best thing in its favor is that its twist works. I’ll confess, I thought this was going to be another tedious mystery where the answer was obvious. But DS9 managed to swerve me well. Kajada seemed like an obvious red herring, but I figured the killer had possessed Lt. Primmin, so seeing it turn out to be bumbling, full-of-himself Bashir caught me by surprise. The twist adds up, given Vantika’s close physical contact with Julian in the teaser, so the nuts and bolts of the answer to the “whodunnit” work, even if it leads to an embarrassing interlude from the character as a conniving baddie.

Unfortunately, the mechanics of Vanitka’s body-hopping don’t. I’ve said a million times in these write-ups that what makes something feel silly or implausible on Star Trek is totally arbitrary. We’re in Clarke’s Third Law territory here, where despite some grounding in actual science, the abilities and technology on display in the world of Star Trek are basically magic, with no real limitations. So it shouldn’t seem too far afield to have an alien use unfamiliar technology to skin-dive his way into other people’s brains.

Still, the science here feels especially dumbed down and unable to pass the smell test. The big discovery is that Vantika had a map of the humanoid brain which...great? It doesn’t help that when validating the mind-jumping theory, Dr. Bashir repeats the old canard about humanoids only using a small part of their brains (which is at least false for humans). The whole concept of him transferring his consciousness to a little chip and transmitting it like a stowaway through low level electrical pulses from physical contact with someone else just reads as a bridge too far. The fact that Dax can just beam the bad neurological patterns out of Bashir’s brain and into a little computerized receptacle makes it seem even more foolish as a central mechanism.

The truth is that plenty of Star Trek shows past have had to grapple with less-than-convincing, Treknobabble explanations for the high concept premise of the week to limp toward a resolution. Plenty of them have had set pieces that didn’t come off right or bouts of acting that weren’t up to snuff (lord knows William Shatner provided snootfuls of the latter.) These problems aren’t new to Star Trek shows, especially in their first seasons. But they hobble an episode like “The Passenger”, without enough else going for it, to where the flaws in the key building blocks of the episode mean nothing else worthwhile, save for Odo’s corner of the episode, can be built on top of them.