“Future Imperfect” (4×08)
To read more from this series, select a season:
This is an unusual time travel episode, because there isn’t really any time travel. And it’s an unusual holodeck episode because there isn’t a holodeck as we know it.
The episode is a bit of a puzzle box, but it plays fair with the audience. It maintains the convention of not showing any exteriors of the ship during the simulation scenes, and plants evidence early on that something is amiss. A lot of the story holds together in the moment, and the stuff that doesn’t eventually makes sense given what we learn in the final reveal.
It’s a great Riker episode, giving Jonathan Frakes a bunch of different facets to explore. And I enjoyed Patrick Stewart’s acting choices as a child’s idea of what a Starfleet admiral would be like.
The payoff really worked for me too: Riker learns that his entire predicament isn’t a shadowy Romulan conspiracy but rather a cry for help from a lonely child. I love how Frakes plays Riker when Barash reveals his true form; he doesn’t even flinch, and is no less empathetic than when Barash looked human. And I liked that his true form was one of the closer approximations Trek has attempted to the short, long-fingered gray aliens that have permeated our cultural imagination for decades.
I’ve said before that Trek in general, and TNG in particular, doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to child actors. But Chris Demetral is excellent in a challenging role. He’s playing three characters who are all in some ways one character: Young Jean-Luc, “Ethan”, and Barash himself. I believed every iteration.
Impacts on Star Trek Continuity:
I wanted to revisit this episode now, in the middle of the final season of “Picard”, to compare how the future Barash’s technology imagined for Riker compared to the future that actually played out for him. His service record is particularly interesting:
These screenshots come from the HD remasters, and I have no idea if they changed the text to incorporate events from later works.
But either way, there are some notable similarities and some notable differences.
In both futures, Riker was promoted to captain and assumed command of the USS Titan. But in the simulated future, it happened a lot earlier: stardate 47203 instead of 56845. In both futures, the Titan was initially assigned to the Romulan Neutral Zone. In both futures, Picard would go on to lead Starfleet Academy as an admiral. But in the simulated reality, it happened much sooner; he never resigned his commission and so he never had to come out of retirement. In both realities, Riker had a son, but with different names and different fates.
The death of Thad is the defining tragedy of the real Riker’s life. And of course his spouse is different, probably because Barash knew he wouldn’t be able to fake Deanna successfully over the long term. There are other major differences too: The Enterprise-D never got destroyed in a crash landing, and the Romulan home star never went supernova.
It’s funny to see such a young Nurse Ogawa in what is supposed to be sixteen years in the future. They probably had no idea at this point that she would go on to be such a prominent recurring character.
I always thought it was a mistake to waste these alt-combadges on a simulation. They make it so easy to discern rank, and just makes so much more sense. I believe the only other time we see them is in some of the alternate timelines from “Parallels”, when they were presumably using everything they had to suggest the various differences.
“Enterprise” took a similar premise — a main character waking up with no memory of the past several years of his life — and spun it in a very different direction in “Twilight”. I think I liked that episode better, but both are strong episodes and distinct from one another.
About The Author
