1x23 We'll Always Have Paris

[4.1/10] This should be a great episode. You have Picard wistfully reflecting on his choice between a sense of duty and the chance to be extraordinary on the one hand, and human connection and domestic life on the other. That’s a core part of the character and The Next Generation, something the show would explore to great effect for a long time after “We’ll Always Have Paris”.

You also have some timey-wimey nonsense. And look, there’s plenty of dumb time travel/alternate universe stories in Star Trek, but also a heap of all-time classics. So the fact that time is, technically speaking, going funky in this corner of the galaxy should make for an exciting and challenging problem for our heroes to solve.

Instead, we just get a heaping helping of unconvincing melodrama and a surprisingly dull solution to a surprisingly dull problem. When the Enterprise encounters a temporal hiccup mid-fencing match (another TNG first!), it turns out that Picard has a personal connection to the cause. It stems from the research of one Dr. Manheim, an experimental time theorist who just so happened to have married Picard’s old flame. Jean-Luc stood up this woman, Jenice, at a cafe in Paris, choosing to blast off with Starfleet without ever saying goodbye.

As I often say, there’s a solid setup there. There’s hay to be made from Picard having to solve a tricky time-related problem at the same time his judgment is clouded by wistful romantic connections that hint at the road not traveled. But the execution here is pretty awful all around.

That starts with the romance element of it. Both of the Manheims give underwhelming performances at best. Jenice is breathless and overemotes in just about every scene, failing to sell her long-dormant but intense connection to the captain in a shared past. Dr. Manheim is a discount Orson Welles, just as prone to delivering over the top reactions and failing to sell the “one mind trapped in two dimensions” insanity of his situation. With so much focus on the guest stars, it can make or break an episode, and this one nearly shatters.

On the other end of things, the time-dilating effects of Dr. Manheim’s research are surprisingly dull. The most we really get is a couple of repeated moments and one vaguely trippy scene where Picard, Riker, and Data run into one another on the elevator. “We’ll Always Have Paris” wants to frame this potential crack in the barriers between different dimensions as a Big Deal:tm:, but everybody seems pretty staid about the whole thing aside from the cartoonish Dr. Manheim, so there’s very little suspense or intensity about the whole thing outside of the unavailing conclusion to it.

There’s no particularly clever solution to “patching” this crack. Picard just sends Data, somehow less mentally affected by the blips given his status as an android, to Dr. Manheim’s lab once the doctor’s conscious and lucid enough to give him the codes. There’s another mildly trippy scene where three time-dilated Datas fix the problem at once, but despite the unique image of a three-android approach and Data reflected in the temporal field’s many facets, it’s not some brilliant epiphany or sharp method of disposing of the problems; just a fairly mechanical (if you’ll pardon the expression) effort to put the right MacGuffin sauce in the right receptacle.

(As an aside, this would be a total retcon, but given his description, it’d be neat if what Dr. Manheim saw in his fugue state was fluidic space and Species 8472.)

Then there’s the score, which is particularly awful here. Beyond the just the treacly, tinkling tones that try to convey (I presume) a music box like sense of time moving, the episode’s music team kicks the synthesizer into high gear here. That leads to a bunch of overwrought, soap opera style backing tracks that hurt, rather than help, the emotional quotient of the episode’s attempts at moving interpersonal scenes.

That said, the script does plenty of damage on its own. Like so many season 1 episodes of The Next Generation, the execution here is so on-the-nose and full of tired clichés. The bookend scenes of Picard recreating the cafe he never arrived at in the past and reflecting on his choice, as well as finally saying goodbye to Jenise there in the present, play like some cheap made-for-TV adaptation of a romance novel than a genuinely moving reunion between two people with a complicated history. There’s too much emotional exposition and hammering home the point or the feelings a character, or the audience, is supposed to have.

The worst offender here is Counselor Troi, who basically exists to turn subtext into text in the episode. Picard’s reaction to the name Manheim does more than enough to tell us that it means something to him, but instead he has to have a conversation with Troi that spells it all out. In the same way, Dr. Crusher’s reaction to seeing Jean-Luc and Jenise together says everything we need to know about how she feels, but we need another scene between her and Troi to write it all on the screen. The episode spends more time signposting the emotions in this story than it does earning them, and the results speak for themselves.

There’s one, and only one scene in this episode that carries the emotional truth “We’ll Always Have Paris” seems to be shooting for over the course of the hour -- the scene with Picard and Jenise in the conference room. There’s a playfulness, an honesty, the sense of a shorthand falling back into place for the two of them that’s missing everywhere else. For five minutes in the episode, you believe that these two people had a meaningful relationship, that Jenise sees through Picard’s guarded exterior into his true wants and anxieties, and that Picard lets his guard down in the presence of someone in whom he sees a different life he might have lived, maybe even one he regrets abandoning. Sadly, that transcendence just makes the pale offerings elsewhere seem even more unavailing by comparison.

The funny thing about going back and watching season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation is that you can see the roots of so many things that would stay with the show for its entire run: strange temporal anomalies, explorations of Data’s differences and similarity, and even the beating heart of a man who seems married to the job. But while these elements are present, the early creative team does them all so poorly that it’s a wonder the show ever returned to them again, let alone made them some of the most exciting and tragic parts of this well-loved series.