7x18 Eye of the Beholder

[5.6/10] It’s tough to make an “It was all a dream!” story work. You’re inevitably skating uphill when it comes to convincing the audience that what they saw matters when it didn’t really happen. There’s ways to do it -- making the experience more about the character’s emotional journey, creating epiphanies that matter to the person achieving them separate from the plot -- but it’s a tricky business under the best of circumstances.

Trying to pull that off when doing an episode of Law & Order: Spooky Victims Unit is even more difficult. I don’t know who thought it’d be a good idea to center an episode of Troi and Worf playing detective for an eight-year-old murder where they’re literally and figuratively chasing ghosts, but it’s a tough sell within the confines of Star Trek. (I suppose it was Brannon Braga again, which tracks.) The Next Generation does love its mystery plots, but the premise is far enough removed from the show’s usual ambit to seem out-of-place rather than refreshing.

Plus, god help us, this is yet another episode where Troi gets possessed or otherwise psychically consumed by something. I get it. She’s empathic. It’s her most unique character attribute. You want to do something with that. So when the time comes to do a Troi episode, you rely on yet another instance where it becomes a vulnerability. Good lord, though, that well had more than run dry by the time season 7 rolled around.

Granted, some of my impatience here isn’t “Eye of the Beholder”’s fault. I remembered the solution to the mystery from childhood (though not the twist) which makes all the clue-hunting seem extra tedious to me. That said, maybe it’s hindsight being 20/20, but the answer to the big question here seems pretty obvious based on context anyway. And it’s still a failing if you can’t make the investigation of the mystery engaging even when the audience knows the truth.

That said, I’m also biased because, just a few years later, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would dramatize a similar idea in a much better fashion in “I Only Have Eyes for You”. There, the problem was a poltergeist reliving a grisly romantic experience, which makes sense for Buffy. It’s a show focused on both the supernatural and the romantic, so the tale’s a natural fit.

The same’s just not true for TNG. “Eye of the Beholder” throws out reams of especially convoluted technobabble to try to make the notion of a “psychic photograph” sound more plausible. Worf and Troi have early conversations about things existing that we don’t know about or understand to help mark the territory. But the concept, while no more outlandish than plenty of things that have happened aboard the Enterprise, is rooted in the mystic rather than scientific, which leaves it feeling off and even goofy.

At the same time, the show pretends to pull the trigger on Troi and Worf (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the hopes of furthering the romance underlined in “Parallels”. I’ll admit, there’s moments when they’re cute together. The two of them laughing and seeming annoyed when they get calls in stereo from Dr. Crusher during their blissful morning after is an endearing moment. But it remains hard to buy them together, and an outing where they’re paired up for most of the runtime exposes rather than helps that.

It also makes it that much more obvious that Troi is under the influence of some malign force. Worf isn’t always Miss Manners when it comes to social graces, but it’s utterly implausible that he would spend the night with Troi and spend the next day being cold to her while he flirts with some random lieutenant. Plenty of TNG episodes have revealed that a characters’ perceptions were altered or otherwise affected, but you have to make them superficially plausible for the reveal to have any meaning.

Still, at least there’s a mild sense of creepiness about the whole thing. Even if the idea of the psychic echo is a bit silly, the notion of being caught in an inescapable whirlpool of someone else’s trauma, doomed to repeat it, remains a gripping one. Guest actor Mark Rolston does a superb job of channeling a certain unsettling eeriness in his bearing and delivery, and scenes of people muttering to themselves about ridicule before nearly ending their lives is unnerving.

That said, the episode’s handling of the notion of suicide is pretty atrocious. There’s a single hamfisted scene where Data explains why he chose to embrace new neural pathways as challenges to overcome rather than unsolvable hardships. The sentiment is admirable and applicable to the show’s young viewers, but has the tone of an after school special and all the artfulness of Wesley’s “Why would anyone use drugs?” conversation with Tasha.

The show’s heart starts out in the right place, with Riker’s reaction selling how hard it is to lose someone that way, and Picard’s desire to try to answer the “why” of a promising young officer ending his own life. But the whole thing’s a feint since the answer is “He was possessed by a psychic ghost murderer”, which leaves the exploration of the issue unavailing at best and problematic at worst.

It’s not even a particularly good psychic ghost murder kerfuffle, though! I enjoy when Star Trek goes spooky. Melding genres can allow creatives to make the most of each. But yet again, this feels like a big waste. It’s not especially scary. It’s not a particularly good mystery. And to the extent there’s any decent plot points, they’re washed away in the Owl at Creek Bridge reveal that Troi was effectively hallucinating the whole thing from the moment she stepped into the nacelle chamber.

Hell, if you’re invested in her and Worf as a couple, then you could rightfully raise your eyebrow at the “Haha, I murdered you in a jealous rage during my vision” note the show tries to playfully end on. “Eye of the Beholder” just takes on so many challenges: shifting genres, developing a misaligned romance, making the adventures meaningful despite the fact that they’re not real. Any series would have to be pitching its fastball to make all of that work. As TNG rounded out its seventh season, it was lucky to even get an episode like this one over the plate.