“Disaster” (5×05)
To read more from this series, select a season:
The only thing I remembered about this episode from when it originally aired is Picard leading the children in singing “Frère Jacques” to keep them calm as they climb up the turbolift shaft.
Watching it tonight, I really appreciated the writing, which does a number of things that TNG doesn’t always do well.
For one, the problem driving the episode is relatively simple: if the Enterprise were car, it hit some debris on the road and tore up the engine. Now it’s broken down on the side of the road, and there are a number of problems that could make it explode. The drama driving the plot is a bunch of a very small but very important tasks.
No bad guys to defeat, no great moral stance to take, just a lot of really solid problem solving and character building.
Impacts on Star Trek Continuity:
This episode creates a lot of interesting and unusual character pairings in ways that take our main characters out of their comfort zones:
- Captain Picard, who is notoriously bad with children, finds himself trapped in a confined space with three of them, in a very high pressure situation. As they all work together to escape to safety, I really enjoyed seeing the impact Picard had on the children, and the children had on Picard. Marissa, who was too shy to even talk about her project at the beginning of the episode, really grows into her role as Picard’s second in command, rallying the younger kids and also pushing back on Picard’s unreasonable expectations. Marissa would be in her early forties in the “Picard” era; it’d be neat to see the character appear as Commander on a Starfleet ship at some point. Picard, for his part, goes from talking at the children to engaging with the children. Like any decent leader, he surveys the crew he has to work with and then makes the most of what they bring to the table. And in the process, a bond forms.
- One of my long running frustrations with TNG is that it doesn’t utilize Troi to her full potential. Most episodes have her walking around in a skin tight, low cut catsuit providing only vaguely helpful empathic readings. Both “Picard” and “Voyager” made better use of her in her handful of appearances than most of TNG did. This episode is a rare exception: She is a member of the senior crew, with the rank of lieutenant commander. But her role keeps her out of the normal command structure. So while Troi brings a lot of specialized knowledge to her role, she’s also lacking a lot of the basic knowledge that most of the Starfleet officers aboard would know. Placing her in the captain’s character definitely brings her out of her comfort zone, but it reveals character because we see how she evaluates competing information and makes decisions. In the end, she acquits herself well.
- This is another big O’Brien episode for TNG, with the birth of daughter Molly. It informs both his position on not abandoning those outside of the saucer component, and creates a great storyline beween Worf and Keiko, as Worf helps deliver Molly. Rosalind Chao really sold the hell out of that delivery, especially since she wasn’t allowed to use any naughty words. And on Worf’s side of the equation, it really gave Michael Dorn some different notes to play.
- The other two-handers worked well too: Riker with Data (and, later, Data’s head) getting to Engineering, and LaForge and Crusher dealing with a radioactive situation.
About The Author
