3x14 A Matter of Perspective

[7.4/10] “A Matter of Perspective” has a lot going for it. It’s a courtroom drama-type episode, which is usually a positive indicator for Star Trek. It’s a mystery and stealthy whodunnit, which is also a favorable mode for the show. It’s a Rashomon-style story, giving The Next Generation the chance to reflect on the fallibility of human memory. It has the typical, mysterious spatial phenomenon of the week, forcing our heroes to Treknobabble their way into figuring out the situation. And it has a good dilemma for the Captain, torn between what he knows to be true about his first officer and what the evidence and his duties as a Starfleet commander require of him.

On a nuts and bolts level, the episode firmly works. It centers on an allegation by the locals from the planet of the week, the Tanugans, that Riker killed one of their top scientists, Dr. Apgar, after a come-on involving his wife, Manua. The Tanugan inspector wants Riker to be extradited, and Picard has to decide whether the evidence supports the necessity of subjecting one of his officers to a trial under Starfleet regulations. The meat of the episode comes when Picard enlists his crew to create holodeck recreations based on the descriptions of Riker, Manua, and Dr. Apgar’s assistant to help determine what really happened.

It’s a good setup. The audience isn’t privy to the truth of the encounter, and so is placed in the same position Picard is -- wanting to trust Riker’s account but having to try to objectively ascertain the truth based on the reports and information available. The different perspectives displayed allow us to judge the reality of what happened based on the variances in the details as told by the people who were there.

In Riker’s version of events, Manua flirted with him from the word go, propositioned him despite his efforts to remain professional, and lamented her husband’s preoccupation with his work before an angry Dr. Apgar hits her and lunges at Riker. In Manua’s, Riker’s an attempted rapist who had eyes on her from the jump and beat up her husband when he arrived, while she was just a devoted wife. And in Dr. Apgar’s account (told through his assistant), Dr. Apgar is the manly champion who beat up Riker, only to get threats of vengeance in return.

Like a good mystery, the different accounts hint at different motivations for the character. Did Riker just want to do his job when he was caught up in the internal marital drama of an unhappy couple he wanted nothing to do with? Was Manua a doting wife who was just trying to be hospitable to a guest of her husbands whose report determined the future of his work? Was Dr. Apgar a humble scientist strong-armed by an outsider whose judgment could set his fate and who tried to use that position to take advantage of his wife?

And could it lead any of them to murder, whether to eliminate a complaint that could threaten Riker’s career, take out an uncaring husband whose focus on his work left his wife bored and unfulfilled, or protect a life’s work of research and get revenge at the same time. There’s enough material in these scenes to suggest anyone present could plausibly be the culprit, and enough import in the discrepancies to make the truth genuinely uncertain, which is the foundation of a good mystery.

The episode also does a good job with Captain Picard’s role here. Stories where he’s torn between his view of what’s right and what objectivity or duty require almost always prove to be good ones. The sense of Picard’s willingness to send Riker to trial because the evidence supports it, even if in his heart of hearts he believes Will is innocent, because he doesn’t want to use the Federation’s might to make right, shows his belief in fairness even when it’s the exact opposite of convenient or welcome. At the same time, his efforts to remain impartial, to not let Will plead his case to him in private, show the decorum and commitment to doing things the right way the captain maintains in everything.

Of course, it never comes to that. The spacial mystery of the week -- some mysterious radiation burning holes in the Enterprise -- provides the clue that Picard and Geordi need to absolve Riker. By examining the interval of the radiation bursts and some other technobabble, they discover that Dr. Apgar attempted to use his “kriger wave generator” (hello Archer fans!) to blast Riker as he was beaming away, only for the blast to reflect off the transporter beam, into the generator, destroying his space station and killing him. In the end, the one who killed Dr. Apgar was...Dr. Apgar.

That’s a neat trick. I can appreciate the twist and the fact that, as usual, our heroes use scientific investigation to get closer to the truth and save the day. It’s true to form and connects nicely to the consequences of Dr. Apgar’s previously-established experimental research.

But there’s three big problems with this solution of varying degrees of severity. The first is a familiar one -- for all this to work, the holodeck has to basically be magic. We’ve dealt with this before in the context of Moriarty and Dr. Brahms, so I’m generally willing to accept it simply a conceit of how TNG works and not ask too many questions. I won’t look askance at the holodeck being able to recreate all of these scenes with only an 8% margin for error. But the fact that it’s able to recreate Dr. Apgar’s work to the point that it’s creating krieger waves causing those radiation burns on the Enterprise strains credulity. It’s a bridge too far, if you’ll pardon the expression, even for the show’s fantastical hologram machine. Still, tech as magic is nothing new for Star Trek, so if that were all, I’d give it a pass.

But then there’s motive. It’s all well and good for Jean-Luc and Geordi to figure out, via Treknobabble, that Dr. Apgar very likely set off a charge from his machine that inadvertently backfired and killed him in the process. It’s quite another for Picard to discern from a few vague statements about “the rewards” of his research, second-hand reports that Manua wanted the finer things in life, and requests for extra resources that Dr. Apgar killed Riker not because of a lover’s quarrel, but rather due to the fact that Riker seemed to be onto Apgar’s plan to turn his research into a weapon rather than a power source, and sell it to the Romulans or the Ferengi.

Is that plausible? Sure. But the episode wants to treat it as the gospel based on circumstantial evidence, hearsay, and speculation, which the Tanugan Inspector accepts all too easily. It requires leaps of logic and assumptions and provides a solution that’s probable, but far from proven.

Now you can write some of this off. For one thing, maybe the Inspector isn’t fully convinced but buys that Riker’s extradition depends on Picard’s consent, and there’s enough here for Picard to justifiably withhold it, no matter what the inspector believes. (Though that requires a lot of reading between the lines; he seems to readily accept Picard’s conclusion). For another, I’m willing to make concessions, as a viewer, to the demands of network television programming blocks. Realistically, this one needed to be at least two acts longer to fully establish everything and play this all out, but given the hour-long timeslot, I’m willing to accept a few shortcuts via assumptions that are quickly taken as truth in the shadow of over-explanatory info dumps.

But here’s what troubles me about “A Matter of Perspective” and keeps me from rating it higher. Riker isn’t just accused of murder; he’s accused of attempting to force himself on someone. The episode never fully grapples with that. We’re supposed to take the revelations about Dr. Apgar’s actions and motives to absolve Will entirely and again, maybe it’s an acceptable shortcut in a forty-four-minute episode to have Picard’s speech about what really happened to signify that Riker was telling the whole truth this entire time.

And yet, even if Will isn’t guilty of murder, it’s entirely possible, and sadly plausible, that he acted inappropriately on that research station. That may not rise to the level of a criminal violation, but which should give Jean-Luc pause before he completely absolves his first officer and restores the status quo. We know from prior episodes that Will is a horndog and often one who mixes business and pleasure. Granted, one of the best parts of “The Vengeance Factor” from earlier in the season was Riker’s paean to consent and equality in matters of sex and romance. But it’s not impossible to fathom him at least responding to some perceived friendliness and interest from Manua and, at an absolute minimum, showing poor judgment in the situation.

Worse yet, when the holodeck recreates Manua’s description of attempted rape, Riker declares that she’s lying and Troi responds that while she believes Will, she doesn’t sense any deception from Manua and that this represents the truth as she remembers it. Look, I don't want to slate an episode from 1990 too harshly from the vantage point of 2021, when the #MeToo movement, among other changes in society, have laid bare the reinforced perniciousness of not taking these seriously.

But at best, the episode suggests that the real truth lies somewhere in between, suggesting that Riker did something inappropriate, if not criminal, while on the station, which the episode never addresses, and at worst, it unwittingly suggests that rape allegations should be taken with a big grain of salt because recollections are unreliable.

That is one of the major themes of Rashomon and the stories inspired by it -- memories are variable and fallible and should be considered accordingly in the search for truth. But applying that to this situation feels uncomfortable in a way that I doubt TNG’s creative team intended. The core of this episode is strong, with a compelling mystery, a cool structure, and some tough decisions for the captain. But the way it reaches its conclusion not only requires some big leaps in logic; it runs contrary to the values Star Trek espouses or, given the horndog actions of Gene Roddenberry himself, may accidentally affirm one of the franchise’s unfortunate but real values.