2x22 Shades of Gray

[5.0/10] I’ll start with a compliment. If you absolutely have to do a clip show, this isn’t a bad concept for it. It would be easy to just have the latest spatial anomaly pop up, have Picard bring the team together for a conference, and introduce the clips by having each member of the senior staff say “Why don’t we try the strategy from _____ episode.” There’s a million lazy ways to have characters introduce clips, and Star Trek: The Next Generation at least has the decency to put some effort and structure into it.

Here, Riker has been infected with an alien parasite that is attacking his nervous system, including his brain. Dr. Pulaski and Counselor Troi soon realize that not only do they need to stimulate Riker’s brain in order to stop the parasite from destroying it, but that they have to stimulate negative memories to repel the little brain bug.

Look, it’s not much, but it’s something. The clips we see aren’t random. They fall into general buckets and have a progression. At first, when Pulaski is just trying to stimulate Riker’s brain no matter what, we see positive memories: one batch about Riker’s friendships with other members of the crew, and another where he’s remembering all the times he got frisky. (Or, if you’re Troi, “passionate.”)

These honestly feel like a missed opportunity. At the end of the show’s second season and nearly fifty episodes, this could be a chance to mark how things have changed for Riker and others by flashing back to key moments. It seems like the show’s going in that direction when we see Riker’s first encounter with Data. But from there the clips are just random around a given emotion or theme, and don’t really gain much from being put together or contrasted with present circumstances.

If anything, it’s a little embarrassing seeing Riker’s cheesy romantic conquests lined up like that. (The Aryan free love planet, the female-led planet, the Space Irish -- it’s a who’s who of bad episodes!.) But it does at least sell the idea that Riker is enjoying some pleasurable memories and that’s feeding the parasite somehow.

That’s part of the problem too though. This is, by definition, a very circumscribed episode, so there’s not much for Pulaski and Troi to do besides do some medical exposition about the parasite’s effect on Will. There are some opportunities for Troi to do some capital-A acting, but high volume emotions have, ironically, never been Marina Sirtis’s specialty on the show, so the two’s presence here doesn’t amount to much, despite a good amount of screentime. It’s a particular waste for (I think) Dr. Pulaski’s last appearance in the series.

But the two at least figure out that negative emotions help keep the parasite at bay, so they use the magic Treknobabble machine of the week to induce them in Riker. It’s a little silly, but again, it at least provides some structure to the episode. We get a decent progression of negative experiences for Riker, from seeing people die, to being in fights, to being near death himself, to not only nearly dying individually but having others almost perish with him. The jump from one to the other doesn’t make perfect sense, but there’s a vague sense of escalation to it that at least helps the episode fit into the overall mold of the story’s premise.
The catch is that, out of context, the clips aren’t terribly interesting (if they were to begin with). Rewatching Riker’s roundhouse kick fight with the beetle-buffed admiral is still laughable. The Ferengi dildo whips are still laughable. The Saturday morning cartoon villain voice from Armus is still laughable. To the extent these scenes had any meaning within their episodes, in isolation, all that’s left is the pure craft, and that element is shaky, at best, in TNG’s early years

There’s also not much in the way of actual stakes. The show tries to sell the audience on the fact that Riker could die. And hey, the show did kill off Tasha and it is a season finale. It’s not outside the realm of possibility. But it never feels like the episode takes the prospect that seriously, with everyone feeling a little phoned in or detached from the theoretically life-threatening stakes at play here.

The best you can say is that there is, against all odds, some philosophical concept at the root of this one. Riker writes off his misfortune at being taken by this parasite not with anger, but with acceptance, as the cost of exploring the galaxy. He explains that in his experience, most lifeforms just act out of a survival instinct. It adds some poetry, then, to the realization from Pulaski and Troi that it takes a rush of primal, survivalist memories from Riker to flush the parasite out. Is that a stretch? Maybe, but I’d like to think the show is still trying to use its clip show to say something, however dull the results might be.

There’s honestly more character work and non-clip material here than I’d remembered. Riker talks about facing death with pride and a sense of humor. The show tries to sell Troi’s concern and affection. There’s even a weak attempt to close with some gagwork, something that recalls The Original Series. The success there is variable, but it’s something.

If an episode like “Shades of Gray” is the price we pay for getting episodes like “Q Who?” with the Borg and other exciting, but expensive hours of television, it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. The episode may not be terribly exciting, but it isn’t lazy; it finds a solid excuse and concept behind the clips, and it even seems to be making a point with them in the end. I wouldn’t rewatch it just for fun, but as a financially-motivated exercise, you could do worse.

That’s largely how I feel about season 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’d expected a big leap over the quality of the show’s first season -- Riker grew the beard after all. Instead, I saw a show that largely through off the TOS-aping style of before, but found its own ways to be less than up-to-snuff. Make no mistake, there’s a passel of lowlights in this season, from drek like “The Schizoid Man” to filler like “The Royale” to embarrassments like “Up the Long Ladder”.

At the same time, you can see the show slowly but surely finding what works, with improved camaraderie among the cast, some performances that start to really jell, and episodes that live up to the show’s potential. We meet the Borg, the see Klingon culture developed through the experiences of Worf and Riker, and we get one of the best episodes in all of Trek with “The Measure of a Man.” Season 2 is still a rocky one for TNG, but it also contains some of the show’s first true gems that set the tone for all the glory to come.