Have you ever seen The Inner Light? · 11:17pm Mar 22nd, 2020
I've been watching Picard, the new Star Trek series CBS produceccd, with Patrick Stewart and a bunch of people. It's... confusing. The pacing is the problem, whenever I think about it. The conceit is interesting, but the pacing is terrible, and it also suffers from something I've come to think of as "hifi/low budget" in its set design, inasmuch as the production of relatively high quality props and sets - or the parts thereof - has become possible for a fairly low price, leading to a lot of productions building sets made of high quality pieces that, despite the quality of those parts, still feel like something produced on a very low budget. The lighting contributes to this, I think; parts of the series are shot with film-quality lighting, with backlights and sidelights and fills and all sorts of things, but other parts feel like they've got one backlight, one fill and a cheap digital camera, and when these changes occur is it's inconsistent.
I had a point. I am drunk though, so it may emerge at an unpredictable moment.
I've adopted a habit, since Picard launched, of watching an episode of that, and then watching a somewhat random episode of TNG (seasons 4 to 7) afterwards, as a sort of comparison. My most recent was The Inner Light, which never fails to utterly hollow out my heart, fill it with slow-burning explosives, and then utterly demolish my entire being by the end. The acting in that episode is tremendous. Utterly believable. It has verisimilitude in spades. I am emotionally ruined by it every time I watch.
There is a question of how much of this emotional connection is simply the result of nostalgia and fandom consensus, which someone should expend a psych masters on at some point, but suffice to say, it is the ur example of the Star Trek experience in so many ways. Nearly perfect pacing, writing, and acting. Picard's final scene in the episode, where he grasps the flute that meant so much to him in that other life... it conveys so much in just a few seconds. It was a masterful moment of writing, direction, and acting.
I feel that experience in Picard, but it is truncated. Diluted. Stewart's acting is there, but the script, the direction, the pacing, they all conspire to dull it, to reduce its impact. He tries, but he is a puppet of the direction, the script. He cannot emote.
He acts his age. I get that. I love it. Nevertheless, something is wrong and I can't quite work out what it is.
I mean, it probably doesn't help that the hero ship reminds me of a Viper from Elite Dangerous, but bigger; in fact all of the space combat reminds of of Elite Dangerous; the whole thing feels like a video game. Fast, impactive, immediate, involving, but lacking a fundamental quality, by virtue of the lack of personal interaction . Nothing the characters do or say actually matters all that much. There's no momentum to anything, but merely set-pieces, as if you're watching cut-scenes that expound the narrative of a game, without getting to experience the gameplay. The whole interaction is divorced and helpless.
I think the exemplar of this might be Hugh. The moment I heard Hugh would be back, I was sold on this series as an idea, because Hugh, as a character, was interesting to me. He was a counterpoint to Picard's brief subsumation to the Borg; where Picard was momentarily kidnapped and oppressed by the culture of the Borg, Hugh was fundamentally a part of it. He was raised in it, subsumed in it, inculcated in it possibly from birth. Picard had experienced it by force; Hugh had been part of it for his entire existence, as far as anyone knew. For Picard, to escape the Borg was a release. For Hugh it was a potentially terrifying undermining of everything he had, for want of a better word, believed about his existence. It led to the subsequent revisiting of his character in the borg rebellion, with Hugh and his faction facing off against Lore and the borg he had turned to his side. The deprivation of theircolective existence, the resentment Hugh felt toward the crew of Enterprise, toward his newfound freedom from the collective was a powerful and involving narrative. A narrative that this new series has, again, utterly wasted.
They squandered it. They squandered his character, wasted the possibilities and opportunities that were presented by the reuniting of Picard and Hugh after so long. It was a waste. It was a disappointment.
The whole series feels like a waste. An exploitation of the nostalgia I feel when I watch TNG. A revisiting of the familiar, in an attempt to extract attention and payment without understanding the qualities that made all of that nostalgic material a target for nostalgia in the first place.
It lacks soul. It lacks emotion. It is the pop media equivalent of cotton candy; voluminous, colourful, irresistible, but utterly insubstantial and fundamentally destructive.
Have you ever seen The Inner light? You should. In 40 minutes, it tears apart your soul, your very essence, and rebuilds it in fundamental ways you couldn't even imagine, to mirror the journey Picard experiences within the narrative. It is visceral, as few episodes of any series you could care to mention are visceral. You don't merely contemplate Picard's journey; you enjoy it, you experience it. You become it, as he became the person he was learning through in the plot.
That is what TNG had, and what this new show doesn't have; the gut-punching, heart-breaking, personal experience of the emotion and kenning of which the character you're watching partakes.
As the great sage once said, do you see it, can you remember?
Can you see that inner light that shines through everything you know and feel and experience?
Picard, the series, has no such moments. Much as I may enjoy it, I resent that lack and mourn that loss.
I remember once about 20-25 years ago, they ran a marathon of TNG fan favorites. They spent a while asking viewers to vote, and they'd play the top 10. The chosen set skewed heavily toward war episodes. But "The Inner Light" finished near the top. It's my favorite of the whole run.
If I had a complaint, its that when they start jumping back and forth between Picard's perception and the happenings on the bridge, it revealed the twist a bit too early for me. I don't know there's a better answer. It's not much of a twist anyway, since you see him get zapped in the opening scene, though the time compression isn't apparent until we get another bridge scene. It's also necessary to show why Picard is having a fainting spell, though it's not critical to the plot for that to happen at all. I guess I would have liked it better if the episode started with Picard waking up in his new life and didn't pop back to the Enterprise until the end, so we spend the majority of the episode wondering what's happening and why. But it's a minor complaint.
I didn't like Voyager that much, but it had its moments, and there was a similar episode that jumps out and wrenches your heart. It's the one where the doctor decides to create a holographic family for himself, and the crew persuade him to let it run more randomly so that it's not implausibly perfect. Then everything goes to shit, he can't take it anymore and wants to delete it. The compounded tragedies did come across as being pretty maudlin, the kind of perfect storm of tear-jerking, overblown sad bait that I'd criticize a fanfic author for, but the point wasn't how bad it got. The point was just that it can get bad, and part of having a real family is that you have to push through. You don't have the option of just deleting it, forgetting the pain, and starting over. And that's where the episode's power comes from: seeing the doctor way out of his element, in a situation he can't bear, and for the sake of achieving the goal he set for himself at the outset, he agrees to force himself to endure.
And then they never revisit his family again.
But for TNG, I like the way they did bring that experience back again, by having him share that with a romantic interest later on. It's one of the few good examples of continuity from that show, and with the context, it showed how much trust he was placing in her. He was shown practicing it a few other times, but not that had an emotional connection.
They re-did the special effects for The Doomsday Machine in Star Trek TOS, and it's awesome.
We'll wait...
And perhaps that is it.
Picard is kind of a weird show. It's clearly built solely on some sense of nostalgia, but I think it goes even further where it's sort of build on a distaste for the very things that made TNG good. It's a weird combination. Somehow Picard has gone from being one of the best that Starfleet has to offer, to being presented as a sort of deluded fool, believing in something that never truly existed. It takes the best episodes of TNG, like Measure of the Man, and just throws away the whole underlying conclusions and premises of it. Picard is at it's best when it leans into the nostalgia, whether it's Data or Riker, and it's at its worse when it tosses them all aside to make Star Trek into something it never should be.
As an aside, I don't think I've ever seen an IP so badly mistreated, in terms of looks and feel, than Star Trek with these reboots. Like the weird fact that everyone is suddenly into money, or the fact that the star streaks of warp drive are discarded in favor of a super generic hyperspace tunnel.
I'm not really that familiar with Chabon, but I get the impression he's somewhat unfamiliar with writing science fiction, given how much of the show seems to go out of its way to make sure everything isn't too different from now times, including the way people dress, or things like earbuds.
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Personally, I don't think what was happening to Picard (that is, showing the bridge), is meant to be a twist.
MLP was what got me to watch TNG, from Faust wanting John de Lancie to voice Discord due to how similar he was supposed to be to like Q (which only showed up once throughout the entire series - maybe 2 if you count season 9)
Watched the first season, enjoyed it, watched the Q episodes from the rest of the series and constantly lamented how far Discord had fallen from what had created him
Then I read a fanfic (Arddun Lleaud) which borrowed a few elements from Chain of Command and watched it, which made Picard my favorite character on the show, which then led to Tapestry and a few other Picard-centric episodes
It's nice how one series leads to others through its fandom, shout-outs, references, etc, because MLP is also what got me into Doctor Who.
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That's not really the point though. What I said was that I thought it would be more effective if they delayed acknowledging what had happened. He got zapped, but by the show's halfway point, we knew he was still on the bridge and hadn't gotten kidnapped/transported or something, and that everything in Picard's head was going on at a greatly accelerated rate. It might have been more dramatic if they held that reveal longer.
I haven't checked out Picard yet - though I want to - but!
1. The Inner Light is definitely my favorite TNG episode, or if i am forgetting another candidate, top 3 for sure.
2. We all remember TNG had a LOT of awful episodes, even after Riker grew the beard (Though nowhere near as many as before it). Mostly - Trek shows have a reputation for stumbling out of the gate and then recovering as they find out what they are. Here's hoping this does the same