“Allegiance” (3×18)
To read more from this series, select a season:
This episode feels oddly low stakes for a story with apparently life and death stakes in both storylines. The threat in the locked room was measured in days rather than minutes; it seemed pretty clear that the Chalnoth wouldn’t start eating people until he was facing starvation. Likewise, the fake Picard was quite clinical in how he steadily ramped up the concerning behavior.
I didn’t quite buy that Riker would turn to considering mutiny so quickly, and I would have liked a less cut and dry scenario where the fake Picard’s orders would have been ill-advised but not necessarily suicidal. When Riker did act, it was no surprise that Worf and Wesley fell into line behind him, because the fake Picard’s orders were a death sentence. Presumably the fake Picard would have pulled back at the last second had he not been removed from command, but Riker and the others had no way of knowing that.
I did find it hilarious that the thing that made the rest of the senior officers suspicious was that Picard was acting fun: dancing, socializing, kicking off a drinking song at Ten Forward. There are many things that they respect and admire about Picard, but he is decidedly not the person they turn to when they want to have a good time. One of the things I love about the older, crankier, more flawed Picard of “Picard” is that isn’t so much the very model of a modern Major-General. It humanizes him, and allows him to connect with people in a warmer, more personal way than he could at this point in his life.
So it was a good character-revealing episode for Picard: We got to see how the real Picard responded to the controlled conditions of the experiment in the room where he and the others had been deposited after being abducted, and we got to see how the fake Picard behaved that was out of character for the real Picard.
I also liked that the abducting aliens were a lot more alien than humanoid aliens in Trek usually are; drastically different skull shapes, a very different skin texture, and barely recognizable noses and ears. I also liked that their telepathic communication had negated the need for a traditional command hierarchy, so that certain things that are very basic to us were completely alien to them.
There’s a tendency in not just Trek but science fiction in general to make aliens like humans but better: Stronger, longer lived, additional senses. But that never made sense to me; greater strength in some areas would significantly reduce the evolutionary imperative for strength in other areas. There are plenty of animals that can do things we can’t do. But we have opposable thumbs, and they don’t. Dogs have much better smell, but much worse vision. I like the Aenar for this reason; it makes sense that subterranean cave dwellers wouldn’t have much need for sight, but would have a need for telepathic communication.
On the other hand, I don’t know that I buy the Chalnoth being a warp-capable civilization given that they are evidently incapable of any sort of cooperative governance. Zephram Cochrane may have broken the warp barrier in a ship he built out of an ICBM in a hippie commune in Montana, but he was still building on work in astrophysics researched and developed by NASA, the Soviet space program, the ESA, as well as universities and defense contractors around the world. And even in Montana, Cochrane was leading a team rather than doing it all on his own.
About The Author
