The Road to Deep Space Nine continues as I try to understand how Derek picked "The Next Phase" over "The Inner Light." I don't know why this episode works and I feel like it's down to an ineffable combination of pacing and acting.
Is it weird that this episode and Deep Space Nine's "Far Beyond the Stars" are considered among the best episodes of Star Trek DESPITE not being episodes which really function like Star Trek episodes?
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source https://anchor.fm/tbntb/episodes/The-Inner-Light-ec4b19
3 comments:
wrt your digression into other perception-bending episodes, I'm now picturing an (hypothetical) episode where it looks like the crew is torturing a holographic person they took off a probe, and the episode concludes with the person being real and on the probe and everyone else is holographic.
You talk around the symbolism of Picard spending five years trying and then moving on, without explicitly acknowledging that it corresponds to the Enterprise's Five Year Mission. Deliberate choice on your part, or happenstance?
That pitch sounds a bit like a few Voyager episodes, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
TBH, I don't remember what symbolism I was talking about. My take would be that Kirk's Enterprise's mission and its length is interesting in that it explicitly means that the rest of Kirk's story is untold. A real, opportunity for fans to write their own 'continuing voyages.'
In-universe though, I don't even get where the five years is that symbolic. No one talks about missing family for five years. We don't hear about traditional celebrations on returning from such a mission. Folks who've been on those missions aren't singled out or recognized culturally. Starfleet seems to have done exactly one round of five year missions c. 2260 and then sent random ships on deep space exploration missions of varying lengths after that.
Really? Even Kirk's Enterprise did a lot of ambassador-ferrying and colony-checking-up-on and experimental-technology-testing for an exploration mission that was allegedly so far-flung they didn't even have a proper home port.
TL;DR, I wasn't referencing the five-year mission format because I never saw it as being too important past covering some literal Lost Years of Kirk's history before TMP.
Well I don't mean it's that symbolic. Just, how long is the "right" amount of time for Picard to stay committed to his Starfleet identity? The length of the TOS mission is kind of a cipher for "accept this amount of time as an appropriate amount of time." That's all.
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