“The Battle” (1×09)
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After the 25th century USS Stargazer made its debut in the second season premiere of “Picard”, I wanted to revisit the original Stargazer — Captain Picard’s first command — with this episode from the first season.
There’s a real effort made with the ship’s design to bridge the gap between the TOS-era movies and the TNG-era, continuity-wise. The bridge of the Stargazer is very reminiscent of the Enterprise-A, circa The Voyage Home. And it definitely feels like a scrappy, functional little ship instead of the Enterprise-D’s sleek flagship. I like the little details, too, like the use of the warp effect from the TOS-era films during the “Picard Maneuver”.
Like most first season episodes, the execution is a bit rough. There is relatively little effort made to define what exactly the “Thought Maker” is doing or how it’s doing it. And the subplot with the forged ship’s log also just sort of falls by the wayside once Data figures out that one of the two copies was altered. Wesley is especially annoying here, too, solving key problems that the seasoned professionals can’t and being overly smug about it in the process.
The episode both highlights the inadequacy of the Ferengi as the Big Bads for TNG and starts to figure out better storytelling uses for them. One of the quirks of Star Trek is that humans are weaker, less physically robust, and shorter-lived than most other humanoid species. Humanity succeeds in spite of that because of its boldness and ingenuity. But the Ferengi are an exception to that general trend. They are smaller and weaker than humans, and succeed through deviousness. Their starships are largely commercial in nature, so they can’t really compete with Federation weaponry.
So as a direct threat, they’re not very credible. But as outside actors pursuing their own agendas, they can create serious complications. The revenge plot against Picard by Bok was meh. But the exchanges between Riker and the Ferengi first officer were a lot more interesting. Especially when the Ferengi first officer figured out what his captain was up to. He took command, and then extricated his ship from the crisis his captain had engineered. The Ferengi are a reasonable species, as long as you understand their actions in terms of craven self-interest.
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