Hey a pretty good one for once! The ending could have been better, like what if the admiral’s scar had healed because of the de aging process and the civil war would go on forever because he tried to correct the past? Anyway not a bad one in any case
Hmm it was an okay storyline. It would have been more interesting if his singular dose killed him and not him arrogantly taking two doses to fight some old rival :rolling_eyes:
Star Trek again takes on an idea halfheartedly.
There were many depths this story could have plumbed, from the nature of aging to the danger of drug overdoses. But instead, we got only a shallow tale of attempted revenge.
Granted, that very last scene on Mordan in which Karnas seems to realize what an obsessed man he'd become worked really well. Seeing the personal hell Jameson put himself through in an attempt to correct a mistake made four decades earlier, Karnas understands that Mark regretted the course of events more than anyone, and that was enough.
But outside of that beat, the episode feels pretty weak. TNG hasn't hit its stride yet in terms of writing, obviously—what Star Trek series had, this early on?—and a lot of ground is left uncovered. The inspiration this story drew from the Iran–Contra affair appears pretty superficial, and it's not an especially strong "what-if" either because of how dramatically important Karnas' personal vendetta against Jameson is made out to be. I'm honestly not really sure what point this story was trying to make, outside the obvious "you can't ever be young again" and/or "revenge doesn't pay"—which are rather cliché morals, since so many stories illustrate them (and better).
Perhaps, then, some things can be explained by this tidbit: D.C. Fontana's original script for this episode was heavily rewritten by Gene Roddenberry's lawyer, Leonard Maizlish. Why a lawyer, of all people, would be deemed best qualified to rewrite a television script is beyond me… Fontana quit and complained to the Writer's Guild of America, and producer Maurice Hurley eventually gained control of the writing staff from Roddenberry (by pressuring him). Sad as it might seem that the Great Bird himself lost his direct say, letting his lawyer rewrite a script, of all people, tells me that he might not have known what he was doing any more (as Hurley believed)…
[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.
How useless Deanna was in season one. She obviously senses something. But she does not inform the Captain? Only Beverly is concerned?
To be completely honest, I don't understand the whole fountain of youth storyline. The main story is good enough. It's a story of revenge. The hostage situation adds gravity to it. It's about a senior Star Fleet officer whose actions have personal repercussions years later. That's enough to tell a great story. Don't really understand why they need the "fountain of youth story". I also don't like how the old Admiral is played. It's difficult to play an old man. Better use two actors. The silly makeup is also to blame. Plus, it's astonishing that this medical miracle isn't thoroughly discussed. Everybody seems to be scared about the prospect of reverting the aging process. Everybody is shocked by the admiral's rejuvenated body and his mood and temper that seems to be affected negatively by the therapy. Is nobody curious how this "therapy" works? Isn't that something that needs further research? Not even Crusher seems to be interested. As if the admiral's fate is prove that this "therapy" could never work. Perhaps it could work after further research.
The reverse aging part of the plot was pointless because it ultimately served no purpose. It's also another one of those things where they try to pass off magic as something sci-fi. It only got in the way of the true story - an admiral attempting to right a wrong of the past. However, even that storyline didn't deliver. Karnas just gave up without any real reason to.
Apparently, that wheelchair cost $10,000 to produce (in 1987 dollars!) and didn't even work the way they needed it to.
Even when I watched this episode for the very first time it was obvious there was a young guy under all that make-up- So, I instantly knew there was something not right with the admiral. Luckily they didn't try to hide that fact too long. Alltogether another rather mediocre episode that had a good idea but seemed to afraid to pull the trigger.
Shout by Jerry HowellBlockedParent2018-01-12T19:12:08Z
A great episode that really made me think.