5x22 Imaginary Friend

[5.8/10] What audience is Star Trek: The Next Generation for? The easiest answer is that it’s meant for everyone, designed to be acceptable and entertaining for the whole family or, more cynically, every disposable income-having demographic available. But that’s a bit of a cop out. I’d like to think of TNG as a very adult show. Despite its fantastical setting, the show handles most events with sophistication and maturity, without the need to devolve into the usual entree of grimdark sex and violence that characterizes “adult” shows to this day. And yet, I watched it as a kid and never felt bored or out of my depth.

I ask this question because I remember watching “Imaginary Friend” as a child. I remember liking the episode quite a bit. It was exciting to see an installment centered on the perspective of a kid. More than that, it dealt with issues relevant to young children, like feeling overwhelmed by choices your parents made for your family, and feeling humored rather than listened to by adults, and the importance of holding onto your imagination. It was a scary episode for someone still in grade school like me, but also one that let us imagine what it would be like to have an imaginary friend come to life and centered on the treatment of children.

Imagine my chagrin to return the episode as an adult and find myself, at best, bored with it and at worst, apt to consign it to the scrap heap. The things that hooked me as a kid are still there in principle. It’s good to devote an episode to what it’d be like to be a child aboard the Enterprise. You can strike a chord by examining the hardships being the Starfleet equivalent of an army brat would impose on the officers’ kids. It’s genuinely frightening to have a malevolent force pretend to be a child’s friend while threatening them or otherwise putting them in danger.

But the dramatization of these ideas is tepid at best. “Imaginary Friend” has little in the way of incident or momentum. Focusing the story on a child requires lots and lots of child acting, which is always a gamble. And once again, TNG gives us a mystery story with no mystery.

You can see the bones of a better version of this tale. Clara Sutter inventing an imaginary friend because her Starfleet dad changes assignments too often for her to make real ones is a good foundation to build on. A powerful energy being (again?) assuming the role of that imaginary friend to observe humanity isn’t a bad way to turn that setup into a science fiction story. Particularly when things get hairy, having Clara try to convince adults that something nefarious is at work, when they’re more apt to blame her or, worse yet, believe she’s psychologically unwell, is a time-tested “kid deals with the supernatural” genre of plots.

The problem is that, once again, the audience is in on all of this from the word go. We see a magic light bubble pop in from a peculiar nebula, flit around the ship, and take on the form of Isabella, the fictional playmate Sara’s been describing. So from the word go, there’s no puzzle to solve or ambiguity about whether Sara is simply imagining things or, if not, where her now-corporeal friend came from.

As I’ve said before in these write-ups, you can wring some good dramatic tension from the audience knowing something the characters don’t, but that doesn’t happen here. Isabella never does anything serious enough for it to matter whether the adults believe in her existence or chalk minor transgressions up to Sara acting out. And by the time she does, Troi and Worf have seen the real Isabella, so the “little girl is making this all up after feeling alienated by her dad’s constant assignment changes” angle is completely kaput.

Worse still, Isabella’s existence muddles that worthwhile explanation of Sara’s circumstances. The show grazes the notion of exactly why an officer’s daughter would imagine a playmate rather than risk getting close to someone she’ll just have to say goodbye to. It pays lipservice to Troi wondering whether that’s a natural, age-appropriate coping method or a harmful crutch. And in a great scene, Guinan sings the praises of hanging onto your imagination well into adulthood. But the “How do we deal with a child so lonely she acts out and dreams up friends instead of playing with other kids?” problem becomes moot -- and in fact goes almost entirely unresolved -- when that imaginary friend is real.

The only real boon here is that Isabella is a legitimately frightening presence. Noley Thornton does her best as Sara, to mixed results, but Shay Astar delivers a chilling performance well beyond her years. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cheesy as hell when the show makes Isabella’s eyes flash red, but the measured affect in her voice, the Kubrick-esque stare, and the tone of menace in her voice when she threatens Sara or Captain Picard sell the terror at the core of this story better than anything in the script.

That’s because the script is jumbled and superficial. The episode closes with one of those stock Picard speeches -- this time about rules meant to protect children and society’s being judged in their treatment of kids -- that works better than it has any right to thanks to Patrick Stewart’s gravitas. As an adult, though, I can recognize that the performance lends the episode’s finish an emotional swell it doesn’t really deserve. “Imaginary Friend” doesn’t earn its catharsis, instead throwing together a bunch of half-baked ideas about energy-sucking beings and conjured-up playmates that belie the genuine opportunity for insight the premise provides.

But maybe this is simply an episode that only works if you’re a kid, and that’s okay too. In an ideal world, Star Trek would offer different avenues for entry: places where kids can understand the basic outline and moral of a story, young adults can see more nuance and complex ideas, and those who want to throw themselves in can delve into the endless intricacies of Trek. That’s probably a pipe dream, even for instances like this where the show’s reach exceeds its grasp. Whatever the case, “Imaginary Friend” lost me as a grown-up, but had me as a kid. That’s worth remembering, if only to help us hold onto the imaginative power of childhood that Deanna regrets losing and Guinan lauds so eloquently.