“Where Silence Has Lease” (2×02) & “The Royale” (2×12)
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These two episodes from the second season embody both the weirdness and the teething pains of this transitional season.
“Where Silence Has Lease”
This episode features two ideas that would be done better elsewhere in Trek later on.
The Enterprise gets caught in a starless expanse outside of normal space, and the only other vessels are impossible illusions straight out of an M. C. Escher artwork. I preferred the Voyager episode “The Void”, which explored the kind of Lord of the Flies-esque savagery that would ensue in such a resource-scarce scenario. I appreciated the ending of that one more, too: The solution required everybody to set aside immediate self-interest and embrace the Federation’s ethos of cooperation and resource-sharing. Here, Picard basically bluffs his way out.
And I thought “Schisms” did a much better job of capturing how violating it would feel to have a mysterious entity experiment on you.
This episode also really highlighted why the Pulaski season-long experiment failed: She basically acts like McCoy here. All of the other characters are markedly different than their original series counterparts. A reheated imitation of something already loved is never going to be as successful as something new and original to love. It’s not a criticism of Diana Muldaur, who gives a fine performance as Pulaski. But Maurice Hurley firing Gates McFadden never sat right with me, and even in the first season Crusher was a better character than Pulaski.
“The Royale”
In which humanity finds a space casino. My first reaction was that it felt more like a TOS story, where they’d take advantage of whatever set another show had recently discarded to save money.
And it’s not too different from TOS episode “A Piece of the Action,” in that both stories revolve around societies created by aliens from incomplete human cultural artifacts.
Of the two, “A Piece of the Action” is more interesting because it pushes the concept further.
The 52-star American flag was an interesting bit of speculation, though, given the current debate about statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. Are we likely to have a manned mission outside our solar system by 2037? No. But it’s been clear for some time that the Prime Trek universe is set in an alternate history to our own,
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