Eye of the Beholder

DVD, TNG S7 (Eye of the Beholder)

Deanna Troi, PI. Or was she? Though it wasn't as confusing, and certainly more substantial than 'Masks,' I was still left confused as to how much of the episode was real, and at what point Troi went off into dreamland. If it was early in the story, when she first went to the tube room, then that would take any of Worf's romantic notions out of real life, even though he's been leading to an approach of Troi on the series. Somehow that seemed incredibly controversial and wrong, seeing two main characters just do such things, even with the scene where Worf almost asks Riker's permission in Ten Forward. That scene was a little off, too, as how can Riker be taking a junior officer out for a drink? Maybe it's only Captains that suffer an inability to fraternise with the lower ranks, as Picard did in 'Lessons,' I don't know.

The thing is, if that part of the story really did happen, and to be fair, being a Brannon Braga special, there's so much paranoia going around that even genuine scenes feel as if anything could happen, (I thought Worf and Riker were going to attack each other!), if that scene happened, and it's difficult to say it didn't, because Troi wasn't present then, at what point did she succumb to her nightmare? Or was that just the last few minutes when she was in her quarters alone (always a bad sign in a Braga episode, especially for Troi - the only thing missing was her looking in a mirror). Yet any scenes featuring Lieutenant Pierce (a suitably inexpressive, vaguely threatening turn from Mark Rolston), had to be in her mind due to the fact of his being dead for eight years. So even as far back as Troi looking through the records and seeing he had joined the Enterprise must have been part of the vision. So Worf never really did go all gooey on her, after all. Right?

If an episode makes you wonder, even after you've seen it before, then it's either ridiculously convoluted, makes little to no sense ('Masks'), or keeps you guessing and wondering, and this one falls into the latter category. It begins with a shocking moment of suicide, and ends with a shocking realisation of grisly murders embedded in the wall - how Braga-esque can you get! I had thought Kwan played a greater part in the story, in flashbacks and log entries, but he's actually only a small on screen presence. I don't know why, but his Napean species made me want to learn more about him and his race, but although the makeup was used again in background shots of other Trek series', we never learnt more about them. The suicide is chilling, not just for the dramatic leap into the 'fire' of the plasma, but that it could be a Starfleet officer who does it. But why was it that particular moment when Kwan felt the empathic suicidal urge if he'd been working on the nacelle tube for a while? With that, and humans having affairs and committing murder, I have to wonder what Uncle Gene would have made of it all!

Not that that matters, and I wouldn't criticise the episode for breaking any rules. On the contrary, it breaks into new territory, both character-wise and location. This could be the one and only time we ever got to visit Utopia Planitia (unless that scene with Dr. Brahms on the Holodeck back in 'Booby Trap' was the same place). Granted, it was in a hallucination or empathic echo, whatever you want to call it, and took place inside the Enterprise with no windows, but the ship was there! Such historical moments in a ship's life, always so rare, make me cherish their brief inclusion, such as the visits to station DS9's past under the Cardassians. We want to see the genesis of these created vessels that we know so well.

I thought Kwan seemed too young to be one of the many people to have worked at Utopia on the Enterprise, but he was a Lieutenant, so it could be his species had a youthful appearance for longer than humans. I loved seeing inside one of the nacelles, and not until 'Enterprise' would we have such a close encounter with that most essential part of a starship (in such stories as 'The Catwalk'). No doubt budgetary concerns were what kept these well-known, but little-seen parts of a ship out of the limelight, but you have to applaud them whenever they took the initiative and grabbed the plasma conduit by the handles to bring us more visual extensions. Another little something that was left to the imagination for the most part was the warp speed enforcement laid down earlier in the season, in 'Force of Nature.' It gets another mention here, but once again Picard is allowed to circumvent the restriction, which makes me wonder if any race or organisation ever really kept to the speed limit, seemingly an impossible thing to enforce.

The Suicide of Lieutenant Daniel Kwan (that sounds like a good title!), may be difficult to question, in terms of the aftermath, because it isn't entirely clear when Troi was acting in reality, so oddities can be explained as being from her vision, but the clues were laid down quite early of the danger she was walking into: we learn that Kwan was partially empathic, so that's an obvious pointer to Deanna; and we get an early suspect in the form of his superior, Lieutenant (there's a lot of Lieutenants in this episode!), Nara, who looks ugly and we hear unpleasant things about. Were those conversations real?

Calloway's line "It's not like Dan to take his own life," got past the script doctors - she sounds pretty stupid saying that, almost equating Kwan's behaviour with something mundane, like 'it's not like Dan to turn up late for work.' I also felt the scene between Data and Geordi on the subject of suicide (did that part really happen? Oh, I'm so confused!), came off a little facile. They talk about how if only Kwan had been able to see his problems as challenges to be overcome, he might have done better than to kill himself, but it smacks of a glibness and superior attitude - 'pull yourself together,' kind of thing. I don't suppose that's what the writer's were looking for, or that the character's really believed that expression, but then, in the future, such things are supposed to be extremely unlikely, so it could be they were struggling even to get a handle on the concept. I did enjoy Data's overly conscious body language, however, I just wish I knew where the episode ended, and Troi's mind began!

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