Looking about, it sounds like critically this episode isn't the greatest. But the humor struck me just the right way. Since Vudu puts this as episode 5, and I'm watching the series for the first time via it, I think this is my favorite episode so far.
LWAXANA! The character stuff in this is great even if the episode itself is just ok.
Data smiling while shit goes down at dinner <3
I thought it was awfully early in the series to pull the "series regular might be leaving" card, and that was before I looked at some episode trivia and learned that this was filmed as the third in the season. Thank goodness it didn't air as such. Way too early!
A couple of goofs I noticed that weren't mentioned in the sources I found:
1. Wyatt's entrance onto the holodeck from off camera is not accompanied by the sound of the doors opening and closing, but Riker's subsequent exit does come with sound effects.
2. The Tarellians are allegedly trapped on their ship and unable to transport due to the Enterprise's tractor beam. But Wyatt is able to transport over with no issue. Either both ships' transporters should work regardless of the tractor beam being engaged, or neither should.
Lwaxana Troi is a divisive character, I think it's safe to say. Even with myself, I have arguments about whether or not she belongs on Star Trek in general (especially when she shows up on DS9… oy). At times, she's hilariously funny—Gene Roddenberry allegedly described her as "the Auntie Mame of the galaxy" (Star Trek: The Next Generation 365 p. 033)—but the writers seemed to misuse her at times. I'll leave further discussion of that for when I get to the relevant episodes, though. This appearance (her first) was mostly great.
What wasn't so great, though: This story. Unsurprising, then, that the script for this episode (as written by Lan O'Kun) was going to be cut from the series. Tracy Tormé rewrote it and "saved" the episode from getting cut, but he still wasn't very happy with how it turned out. I bet a lot of that came from feeling like a lot of the comedy failed to make it all the way to filming. Goodness knows the episode seems to make plays at seriousness here and there, only to fall flat.
The best parts really are the funny bits with Lwaxana, and Data trying to observe more of the human condition. The worst parts all involve Riker ducking out of the room because he's uncomfortable with the situation for some reason that isn't adequately addressed. Oh, and the central idea of Wyatt and this Tarellian girl connecting across the light-years through their dreams. Star Trek usually stays away from that "woo~" sort of thing…
[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.
The way this franchise until Discovery introduces storylines to give them semi-closed endings is annoying. It would have been better if Wyatt found the cure then went off to find a place to settle with Ariana and her people versus him forced to never return home. What’s stopping someone from blowing up the ship beforehand or even after a cute. Too open ended. Other than that I love Lwaxana and Data in this.
The Lwxana-Picard saga is entertaining. Yes, it's often very silly and sometimes annoying, but it's memorable and sometimes funny. (She will show the better of her in DS9 when interacting with Odo).
I honestly don't like this story. They clearly had no idea how to utilize Deanna. In this episode her beauty is used for discussing arranged marriages. In a very shallow way though. Later in this episode, the focus surprisingly shifts back to the plague ship and Wyatt's prophecy. Deanna isn't allowed to be more than a prop. She has no say in the marriage or ship's operations. And she has no say in this episode. Like in all episodes before, she's reduced to say something like I feel like or he/she feels like. Mostly, that's a cover up for bad acting or bad writing. Usually, we the audience, should understand someone's feeling w/o Deanna's explanation. We also should have been thoroughly introduced into the true nature of the Deanna/Riker relationship before this episode. We can only guesstimate what special relation the two had in their past and how they broke up. Thus, we can't really understand what this proposed marriage means to Riker and why he's so pissed.
In the end, it's Wyatt who takes the decision in his own hands and ends the debate about the feasibility of arranged marriages. It's not Deanna who stands up for herself. Plus, is there even an explanation for Wyatt's prophecy? It's just odd. It's also strange. He ran from one marriage proposed by others into the arms of another women he has also never met before. And due to the plague, there's no coming back. Plus, it would have been nice that someone told us ina later episode whether they found a cure and a homestead (but if I can remember correctly we will never hear of them again).
Watching this and seeing Robert Kneper (T-Bag from Prison Break)as Wyatt was cool!
the dining room scene, the striking of bell at regular intervals and reaction of Data are the highlights of this episode
Data's clueless face during the argument was great.
A mostly lighthearted episode that is more comedy than anything else. The story with Wyatt and Ariana never flew with me as I was missing even the slightest bit of explanation.
We see Lwaxana for the first time who can be, and will become, a nuisance here and there. Here she was great. Interestingly she appeared right after Q which made me remember the novel Q-in-law.
And of course the dinner scene is the highlight or should I say Data's reaction to the "petty bickering" . And one of the things that always comes to my mind when I remember this episode is Carl Struycken who is great as Mr. Homn.
Shout by Jerry HowellBlockedParent2018-01-03T22:32:18Z
A fun, engaging episode. The only things I didn't care for were the mild sexual dialogue and Ariana's outfit.