1x10 Haven

[6.1/10] I hadn’t seen the 1960s Star Trek show when I originally watched The Next Generation. I certainly didn’t know the behind-the-scenes goings on and shifts in the creative team that changed the series’s tenor. But I did know, when seeing these early episodes, that they felt off compared to later episodes, different in their rhythms and vibes in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.

Now, having both watched The Original Series and knowing that many of its writers returned for TNG, I understand the reason. Despite debuting two decades later, the first season of The Next Generation scans largely like the fourth season of its sixties predecessor. The cadence is the same, the tone is the same, and the feeling is the same, even as the characters and era are different.

That’s especially plain in an episode like “Haven” which feels like something that could have been translated to a Kirk and Spock adventure with little lost in the effort. Most of that comes in the pacing of the episode, the melodrama and randomness of the attempted romances, and the broadness of the efforts at humor and family bickering. But some of it just comes down to the presence of Majel Barrett.

She makes her first appearance on the show as Lwaxana Troi, the good counselor’s mother, having played Nurse Chapel, Number One, and a series of other characters over the course of the original cast’s adventures. I always liked Lwaxana as a presence on TNG and its successors. Not only does Barrett play her with infectious joie de vivre, but like Q, she’s someone entirely unconcerned with Starfleet protocol or human mores, making her a disruptor and agent of chaos amid the otherwise staid confines of the Enterprise.

But here, she’s a little too cartoony for my tastes. Everything is frankly, in a way that makes this episode feel more in line with the franchise’s hammier roots than the bridge to modern television that TNG would eventually become. There’s the germ of something genuine and true in the way that “Haven” uses Lwaxana’s insistence on Betazed traditions and rejects human customs as mere provincialism, despite the affronts to her prospective in-laws, but it’s played to the cheap seats here, which saps the episode of the realness necessary to make that material work.

The setup for her arrival is that, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, Troi has been betrothed as part of an arranged marriage, per Betazed tradition, and her sheepish fiance, Wyatt, and his parents are arriving to bring the matrimony to fruition. That prospect is complicated by Troi’s conflicting impulses to continue her work on the Enterprise and to fulfill her cultural obligations (with the subtext that it was the wish of her deceased father), Riker being stung at his “imzadi” marrying someone else, and Wyatt himself putting up a good front but clearly being disappointed upon seeing Troi, since he assumed she would literally be the woman he’d been dreaming about since he was a child.

It’s all...a lot. The arranged marriage/love triangle material here doesn’t work as well as it did with Spock on The Original Series, or god help me, with T’Pol on Enterprise. We’ve barely gotten to know Troi and Riker as a romantic pairing at this point, so there’s little weight to at this stage, and despite this sort of being a Troi episode, she mostly takes a backseat to others in it, namely Lwaxana (who understandably takes up a lot of oxygen in any scene she occupies) and Wyatt, who’s more of a drip despite his story focus here. There’s very few convincing moments of emotional honesty here, either between the characters pouting or making the best of this romantic entanglement, or in the interpersonal family drama that’s supposed to be the relatable part of this fantastical storyline.

Worse yet, all of this stale yet hammy material takes away from the interesting moral dilemma in this episode. The Enterprise is parked at the titular “Haven” planet known for its “mystical healing properties”, but its presence is complicated when a ship full of space lepers arrives and wants to settle there, despite the destruction that’s followed in their wake. Picard and company have to balance their duty to protect Haven as a Federation member, and their duty to give aid to all souls who need it, including these ill refugees. There’s a compelling, intractable situation there, one that’s sidelined thanks to the Troi drama that occupies most of the episode’s runtime.

The good (or bad) news is that the one storyline provides the solution to the other. IIt just so happens that one of the lepers is, in fact, the woman of Wyatt’s dreams. What’s more, it turns out that he’s a doctor who specializes in biological diseases who may be able to treat them. So he bounds over to their ship to be with her, contaminating himself for good, obviating the cultural clashes between Lwaxana and his parents, freeing Troi to continue on the Enterprise, and short circuiting that tough decision over what Picard should do about the lepers wanting to go to Haven.

It’s a parsimonious solution, I’ll give it that, but it feels random and arbitrary. The closest thing we get to an explanation for why Wyatt and his dream girl had this fated psychic connection is a continuation of the whole “thoughts transcend and are also indistinguishable from time and space” routine we saw with The Traveler in “Where No One Has Gone Before”. I’m not sure what the writers were smoking around this time, but it plays like dormroom epiphanies of college freshmen dressed up as intergalactic profundity, and ends the episode on a mildly satisfying-at-best note.

(For what it’s worth, I assumed that the woman of Wyatt’s dreams was going to turn out to be Valeda, the governor of Haven, which would have at least seemed slightly less random.)

The overwrought yet undercooked emotions, the caricatured squabbles, the plots and solutions that just sort of appear -- there were all trademarks of the underwhelming outings from The Original Series. To be sure, it had a host of great episodes too, but its lesser lights feel of a piece with the same pathologies that afflict early episodes like “Haven”. Memorable guest characters help, and focus on the characters’ relationships is a boon to any show, but thankfully, over time, The Next Generation would use those core elements, and boldly take them to places its predecessor had never gone before.