Remember Me

DVD, TNG S4 (Remember Me)

One in a long line of weirded-out characters plunged into a different reality. This time it isn't the Holodeck or another dimension, not aliens playing tricks or all happening in the mind. This time it's Beverly's own personal universe and things aren't going well. I've always loved the mysterious and otherworldliness of these kinds of story where you can't tell up from down and you don't know what outlandish thing will happen next. The absurdity of the situation as people tell the Doctor they don't remember familiar characters is something that stuck in my mind when I saw this, one of the few episodes I got to see when I was younger and was impressed by. There has to be something creepy in the benign to make one of these work and few things are creepier than an entire crew vanishing with no record of their existence. The line Picard says sums it up: "We've never needed a crew before". It does bring imaginings to the fore of your brain - Picard and Beverly travelling the galaxy in a massive starship. There's a weird series in that idea.

Crusher's gradual realisation that things are worse than they at first appeared carries on through the episode, right to the end when she has mere seconds to survive as the 'universe' collapses in on her. There was one moment when she didn't react in the most realistic of ways, in the briefing room when her colleagues don't know Worf and when she stumps down the corridor after Troi she wonders if she's mad. Surely she would continue to try to convince her fellow officers that there's something wrong with them if they don't remember Worf, maybe do some tests on them to search for parasites or alien influence as it could more commonly be.

When we do resurface in the real world we're brought back to memories of Season 1 when the Traveller shows up again to remind Wesley that he's smarter than the average bear. The first time, it was what encouraged Picard to speed up the boy's inclusion aboard the Enterprise and has since led to his application to the Academy and maybe even the field commission. Kozinsky is mentioned too, his warp experiments remaining to cause trouble three years after he visited! Another throwback to the first season is Beverly and Picard's 'understanding' or lack thereof, and that she often was about to say what she really thought of him, of them, but has the moment rudely snatched away. Shame we didn't get to see the Picard of her mind's reaction, but a nice touch, especially as such things have been slow to return after Dr. Crusher's absence from the series. Dr. Selar is another reference to the past, and of course O'Brien is almost a regular now.

Beverly's distress and dawning knowledge is only rivalled by the tense rescue attempt - what before she thought was a danger in a safe universe proves to be the other way round and her only way out (long before 'Star Trek Nemesis' gave us people being sucked towards the viewscreen Dr. Crusher shows how it's done!), all thanks to good son Wesley and the enigma that is the Traveller. His arrival neatly in the mid-point of the series is like a masterplan coming together and one of the enduring threads that made the series more than it might have been though the makers probably had no inkling where it was all going. Dr. Crusher makes a strong single focus for the episode and confirms her position on the ship isn't to stand at the back smiling and scanning.

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