1x15 Too Short a Season

[3.5/10] In an acting class I took, our instructor challenged us with an exercise. Within one scene, we had to play the same character at different ages, starting as a child, working our way up to an old man, and then tumbling back down in age. It was hard. Putting yourself in different headspaces, trying to show contrast while maintaining continuity, and communicating the different stations of life without overdoing it made for one of the toughest exercises we performed.

So I feel for Clayton Rohner, the actor who took on the role of Admiral Mark Jameson in “Too Short a Season”. It is not easy to play a Benjamin Button-type character, who starts as an elderly figure, and slowly descends in age until he is a young man again. The challenges to make it believable, let alone compelling, are daunting and legion. As cool as it would be to appear in Star Trek, I don’t envy the task.

But the truth is that whatever the difficulty or intent, the results are downright terrible. Admiral Jameson is a clownshow of a character, too caricatured and, frankly, goofy to carry the pathos and tragedy the script wants to laden him with. Some of that isn’t Rohner’s fault. For one thing, the makeup and prosthetics here are ridiculous, showing that Star Trek’s makeup department hasn’t improved in its ability to make young actors look old since the TOS crew’s nearly-as-ridiculous transformation in “The Deadly Years.”

From the jump, Jameson’s old man makeup looks like something out of a Halloween costume shop. His transformation doesn’t feel gradual or believable, but instead seems random as to what it affects in him and how. And they do a poor job of conveying the effects of his internal degradation to boot, basically just making him look really sweaty and calling it a day.

What’s more, the script is stilted and awkward at best, with scores of conversations and monologues that go beyond stylization and into the realm of “No human being would talk like that.” The other guest performers struggle with it, and even the unflappable Patrick Stewart has issues making some of these lines ring true. I am a big fan of the episode’s co-writer, Dorothy Fontana, from her work on TOS, so my hope is that the blame lies at the feet of the other scribe here, Michael Michaelian, but regardless of who’s at fault, the words the performers are expected to spit out aren’t up to snuff.

Still, despite those hindrances, Rohner’s performance is still abjectly terrible. His efforts to seem old or young or somewhere in between are cartoonish and buffoonish. Every line delivery and gesture is over-the-top in some way. What’s worse is that it can’t be excused by the mere challenges of playing the same character at different ages.

He brings the same overblown qualities when Admiral Jameson is experiencing his paroxysms of pain. His comments still clang when he’s playing a man of the actor’s actual age. He still sounds clownish when he’s supposed to be dying from the overdose of his youth treatment. So much of the episode is anchored around Jameson, his transformation, and decline, and when these things are communicated in such an overdone, frankly laughable matter, the whole thing falls apart.

But it’s not like this is a good idea ruined by a bad performance. At a very basic level, there’s something to the notion of an old man doing anything to become young again in order to correct the mistakes of the past. But everything here is so on-the-nose and over-the-top in execution that none of it can land with any grace or impact. (God help us in the scene where a slightly younger Admiral Jameson tries to seduce his wife. I’ve seen subtler come-ons in a Benny Hill sketch.)

Admiral Jameson didn’t just try an experimental treatment in order to be younger, he took double the doses all at once, including the one he’d earmarked for his wife! The hubris! We have a painful series of exposition dumps about Karnas, the man on the planet where Admiral Jameson is supposedly needed as a negotiator, to tell the audience that Karnas just wants revenge, because rather than settling a hostage dispute forty years ago, he just gave both sides advanced weaponry leading to decades of civil war. None of these ideas are explored with any nuance; they’re just blasted in the audience’s face at full force.

If all that bluntness wasn’t enough to hit the audience over the head with the proverbial 2x4, the score does the rest of the work. Look, if you’re watching something made in the 1980s, you’re going to have to deal with a certain amount of cheesy synthesizer music. It just comes with the territory. But the backing track is almost oppressive here in how it attempts to gin up tension or drama with chiptune-sounding trumpets placed behind blaring performances in already exaggerated scenes.

The whole thing is just a mess. It barely feels like a Star Trek episode, with the Enterprise crew mostly reduced to reacting to whatever Admiral Jameson does, or having comforting girl talk with Anne Jameson. I don’t mind the main characters being side characters for an episode -- some of the best episodes in the franchise follow that tack. But when all of the guest characters are so loony and unconvincing, you yearn for a little more of the steadying presence from the usual cast, who are largely sidelined here.

Good TV shows should take risks -- risks like putting your main cast in the background for an episode, reaching for big ideas about aging and regret, and trying to present high concept experiences like aging in reverse. But to avoid disaster, you have to actually pull them off, rather than let them crumble and degrade like the quivering, blustering Admiral Jameson does in his final moments here. It’s admirable to take on those sorts of challenges, but you wish the old hands in the writer’s room had enough grace and wisdom to see how poorly this attempt turned out, and avoid these types of glaring misfires as the show moved forward.