3x18 Allegiance

[7.7/10] Toward the end of “Allegiance”, Captain Picard gives one of his classic “Aha!” speeches. It’s a form of dialogue where he unravels the mystery for the audience, while laying out the major themes of the episode, and Star Trek: The Next Generation will return to it more than a few times in the future. He has an essential credibility, whether from the writing of the character as a distinguished leader or the inherent gravitas that Patrick Stewart brings to the role.

The central mystery here is why Picard, a timid Starfleet cadet, a deferential Mizarian, and a combative Chalnoth have been beamed into the same prison cell by an unknown force. By the same token, the audience is left to wonder who or what replaced the captain with a looser doppelganger back on the Enterprise, and what the purpose of this kidnap-and-replacement scheme is.

Picard gives us the answer -- that some alien force is trying to test their responses to authority. Picard has been groomed for command. The Mizarian, Tholl, yields to authority to a fault. The Chalnoth, Esoqq (whom I mistook for a Nausican), disregards all rules. And the alien insider is pretending to be a cadet, trained to obey. Their captors are giving them random puzzles, causes for disagreement, to test their reactions given their different approaches to humanity. Meanwhile, the fake Picard sees how far simple authority will get him when behaving erratically aboard the Enterprise.

The premise and conclusion works for both stories. Honestly, there’s enough in either half of the episode to sustain an hour of television. The captain acting peculiar while the senior staff has to debate how to prove it and whether to step in is of a piece with “Turnabout Intruder” from The Original Series. The confounding puzzle box the real Picard and his fellow captives subsist in presages a (less gory) version of the Saw movies. Using each scenario as a test for what authority and different attitudes toward it get you works as a story engine and a reveal.

But the funny thing is that when rewatching the episode, until that speech, I didn’t think the theme was authority. I thought it was about trust. That speaks to the way that Captain Picard runs the Enterprise. Commander Riker isn’t OK with not asking questions simply because his captain said the mission is a secret; it’s because he believes in Picard’s judgment and assumes he has a good reason. When the captain seems a little off, or makes odd requests, his lieutenants are a bit confused, but go with it not due to the chain of command, but rather because Picard has never steered them wrong before. It’s not hard to read the fake Picard’s actions as testing the limits of that sort of trust, rather than the limits of the captain’s authority.

The test, whatever kind of deference a leader receives, gives TNG and Stewart an excuse to play the good captain much looser and even loopier than usual. The audience, and the crew, know something’s off from the jump if only because Jean-Luc is overtly friendly rather than respectful, gregarious instead of dignified, more like an encouraging second grade teacher than the captain of a starship. It’s fun to see this different version of the captain, one who feels not quite antithetical to the calm and cool leader of men we know and admire, but certainly different.

Nowhere does that difference come through more clearly than in his interactions with Dr. Crusher. Despite having seen this episode before, I forgot how far the show goes here. It speaks to one of the great features of the story back on the ship -- as with “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, the opportunity to essentially take back any of the captain’s actions allow them more leeway to explore things that would otherwise disrupt the status quo. A romance between Jean-Luc and Beverley definitely fits that bill.

But their flirtations and date are, despite the ruse at the center, filled with all kinds of passion. Stewart and McFadden continue to have off-the-charts chemistry, and watching their back-and-forth here, with a measured distance between affection and hesitation, is delightful. It works as part of the authority test, seeing how far a subordinate would go despite the inappropriateness of the relationship given their respective ranks.

And yet what’s truly interesting, despite the kiss and denouement that pays off nearly two seasons of teases (albeit temporarily), is that despite the obvious attraction, Beverly tells Jean-Luc that even if he weren’t her commanding officer, she likes their relationship the way it is. It makes the feelings between more complex, and alludes to baggage from Jack Crusher’s life and death that adds depth. It’s a superb scene, and the jokey goo-goo eyes moment at the end of the episode works well enough as a coda.

But while fake Picard and Dr. Crusher are moving closer, the real Picard and his cellmates are unraveling. Anyone who’s played Mafia, Werewolves, or similar “betrayer” games knows the feeling of the captain and his cohort trying to determine who’s working with them and who’s working against them, riddled with the suspicion that there might be someone bringing them down from the inside. I’ll confess that I remembered the twist here, so it’s hard for me to say how well the mystery works in a vacuum, but reveal or not, the episode does a good job of capturing the maddening, paranoid atmosphere of the skinner box Picard is stuck in.

True to Picard’s speech at the end, there’s a good dynamic for conflict and problem-solving amid the four prisoners. Jean-Luc having to manage a tense situation where the captors are unknown, the rules of the game are opaque, and the personalities involved don’t naturally mix allows TNG to present the Captain at his best: finding consensus and making progress despite great differences and difficulties.

The twist even works when you know what’s coming. When Haro, the fake Bolian cadet, mentions Picard’s past adventures, ones she shouldn’t know about given her rank, Picard’s eyebrows raise ever so slightly. His reaction is subtle, but it’s enough to tell those in the know that this is his epiphany point, without giving away the game for the uninitiated.

Even before that though, their setup feels more like a trust exercise, the reverse of the one on the Enterprise. It seemed to center on whether people with different perspectives and priors could set aside their mistrust of one another to work together and find mutually agreeable solutions to get them out of their shared predicament. The ship-bound story is about what it takes to tear trust down, while the prison cell tale seemed to center on whether it can be built back up.

Of course, our heroes pass both tests. As mentioned, Picard figures out that Haro is the faker, and she confesses the whole trap-and-replace plan. Meanwhile, the senior staff has it out over the fake Picard’s strange actions and, when he threatens the safety of the ship and the crew, something that would be anathema to the real man, they mutiny and turn the ship around. It’s a testament to Picard’s character, both in how he handles the situation inside the cell and the callousness toward the well-being of the Enterprise and its crew of his duplicate that confirms for his senior officers that it’s not really him.

He’s also, as usual, damn resourceful! The whole deal with Picard contradicting his captor’s condescension over their telepathic links being superior to humans’ vocalizations by signaling to his subordinates to trap the intruders with a mere look is a little too cute. But Picard’s demeanor -- the anger and almost taunting quality he has when giving the aliens a taste of their own medicine -- works both as catharsis and as a means to believably scare them away from ever bothering the Federation again. And the notion that, as a telepathic society where every member is linked, leadership is a peculiar concept to them, worthy of study, provides a solid motivation for their whole scheme to test authority and, by extension, trust.

Maybe those two things aren’t so different, at least in the world of Star Trek, or at least perhaps good leadership requires earning trust instead of just relying on pure authority. You couldn’t just swap in any other captain and expect the same kind of loyalty. (See: Jellico.) It takes the kind of concern and consideration for the people who serve under you, who depend on you, to earn that kind of trust. It’s a form of authority the captain’s captors don’t seem to understand, but which stands out from Picard even in captivity, and in his absence.