2x14 The Icarus Factor

[3.7/10] I was wracking my brain when this episode started. “Holy hell! Riker’s father! Why don’t I remember this?” The answer turned out to be that it’s because this episode is so downright terrible that my brain clearly forced it out of my memory banks.

That may be a tad harsh. I honestly like what Star Trek: The Next Generation is trying to do here, in principle at least. Grappling with Riker’s ambition, how it connects to his daddy issues, and how they’re at least partly obviated by the found family he’s made on the Enterprise is a good tack. Likewise, I’m a sucker for quiet character drama episode that hinge more on exploring traumas and burrowing into the major players as a break from the sci-fi action. (See: the superlative “Family” from season 4).

The other side of the coin is that “The Icarus Factor” comes to all of this worthwhile material with the most embarrassingly bad, cheesy, ham-handed approach to everything. There’s zero subtext to any of the material with Riker, just characters practically yelling their emotions at one another or having stilted conversations where they announce them. Riker’s dad is a dull asshole played by poor actor (or at least one who gives a poor performance), and his interactions with various other members of the crew are the absolute pits.

There’s a stagey, almost soap opera quality to everything in the episode. For the attempt to bore into the soul and family history of Will Riker, none of the character interactions that take up the focus of the episode feel remotely real. Instead, they all feel high volume and artificial, which is the exact opposite approach necessary to make such intimate and internal storytelling and character beats work.

The gist of the story is that Will is offered his own command. He has an offer to captain the Ares, a ship going to an uncharted, potentially dangerous part of the galaxy that’s months away. His father, Kyle Riker, beams up to the Enterprise, ostensibly as a civilian expert there to brief him on what to expect, but realistically there to try to reconcile with his son, since the two have apparently been estranged for fifteen years.

That’s just one of the contrivances that strains credulity in “The Icarus Factor”. It’s more than a little convenient that the guy who just so happens to be Riker’s dad has an excuse to connect with his son at a time when Will has to make a big decision about his future. That might be forgivable as a necessary contrivance if it didn’t turn out that Kyle was also apparently deeply involved with Dr. Pulaski once upon a time, something she conveniently neglected to mention at any point, even in the prior episode where Riker (briefly) brought up his experiences with his father. The randomness, and sense of all this backstory just being plastered into the episode rather than building up organically weakens it from the getgo.

The weird thing about all this poorly done Riker Family drama is that there’s a solid Worf story packed in the in-between spaces! Worf is grumpy, and it turns out that it’s the tenth anniversary of his Klingon Ascension, an important occasion in Klingon culture and tradition that he’s upset about, since he has no fellow Klingons to observe the ritual with.

It leads to some mild but cute enough comedy, where Wesley, Geordi, Data, Troi, and others conspire to use the holodeck and other tools at their disposal to recreate the ritual and help feed Worf’s need to connect with his Klingon heritage. Wide-eyed, well-meaning Data has a particularly funny scene where he tries to comfort Worf with chipper earnestness, only to receive a gruff “begone!” in return.

Despite the silliness, it’s meaningful when Worf walks into the holodeck and sees not only the ritual recreated for his benefit, but his newfound family standing on the opposite side of the figurative “river of blood” he must pass through. As is par for the course in this episode, the show lays that detail on a little thick, but in an episode full of terrible performance, Michael Dorn gives a great one.

Let’s be real. It’s easy to seem cheesy when roaring as you’re being jabbed with Klingon “pain sticks.” But Dorn makes it work, evincing a sense of both his pain and his devotion to the tradition of a people he’s only known through education and not immersion. When he thanks the assembled fellow crewman for doing this for him, there’s catharsis in it, a recognition of true familial bonding that comes from seeing what someone you care about needs and providing it for them, regardless of whether it’s something you fully comprehend or intuitively grasp. It’s outsized, like everything in “The Icarus Factor”, but it has power, unlike anything else in “The Icarus Factor”.

Because the rest of the Riker material is exerable and unconvincing. The episode has maybe the worst scene in all of TNG so far, which is saying something. Troi and Polaski talk about how even in the future, men are basically overgrown manchildren, but that’s why they love them. It’s such an unnatural, Bechdel test-failing, backwards perspective for a nominally progressive show about the future. The treatment and depiction of the doctor and the counselor in this one is just awful, with them getting the worst of already terrible dialogue and plotting.

But it’s a tough call between that scene and the one where Will and his dad resolve their differences over the world’s corniest, Asia-appropriating American Gladiators competition while wearing knockoff costumes from Tron. There too, the dialogue is godawful, with on-the-nose statements about Kyle trying to be a good dad while having lost his wife but not knowing how that don’t land or seem legitimate.

Even if you can separate the sheer corniness of that scene, the episode makes Kyle out to be such a cad, that even his “I lost my wife and didn’t know how to raise my son in her absence” excuse rings hollow. It kills me because there’s real meat there! The notion of a well-intentioned parent failing and being too harsh with their child, not because they don’t love their son, but because they meant well and faltered, is a really compelling premise to build on. But the execution is so poor that it induces eye-rolls rather than the catharsis it’s meant to.

That’s the thing I hate the most about “The Icarus Factor”. If you look on the episode with the kindest light, there’s something legitimately profound about it. Will Riker was defined, at least nominally, by ambition and accomplishment from his introduction in the series’s pilot. “The Icarus Factor” suggests the seeds of that striving lie in trying not just to be his best self, but in competing with his father who always challenged him and made him feel like he never quite measured up to Kyle’s own accomplishments and prowess.

And yet, “The Icarus Factor” introduces the idea that after needing to scratch that itch for so long, Will has found a better family by way of his colleagues on the Enterprise, ones who support him and believe in him, rather than try to compete with him or constantly try to beat him in order to “keep him interested.”

More to the point, it may be accidental (such is the credit I give to an episode that botches almost every single exchange), but there’s an interesting suggestion that Will doesn’t need Kyle anymore, because he’s found a much better father figure in the form of Jean-Luc Picard. While Kyle has to make up for lost time, still challenge his son despite an attempt at reconciliation, and act as a measuring stick for Will, no matter what he’s accomplished, Captain Picard is nothing short of thrilled that his first officer has earned his own command, easy with praise for Will after all he’s accomplished (even lampshading his earlier stinginess with the young officer), and offering of sage advice that still recognizes Will’s agency.

The upshot is simple. Will has the opportunity to leave, but chooses to stay on the Enterprise because he’s reconciled his ill-feelings for his father that instilled a need to achieve and accomplish to prove himself better, in favor of a place and, more importantly, a new family, that feeds his soul, appreciates him for who he already is, and feels more like a family to him than his own flesh and blood.

That’s a really powerful idea, and “The Icarus Factor” barely achieves any of it. It’s proof that what makes a great story isn’t just the premise, but the execution of it. There’s so much psychological force in the tale of Riker choosing to stay on the Enterprise because he loves his colleagues and finds a richer, more nurturing environment than the one he grew up with. But this episode squanders the benefits of that setup in favor of a hodge-podge of loud and unrealistic scenes that do too much, while not doing nearly enough.