Technically, TNG did not do it better. Because TNG did it very, very poorly. However, Big Finish did do it better. So way to go, Big Finish, you found a bar you couldn’t limbo under.
There is also nothing forthrightly racist this week! That’s technically a big step up! The worst thing they do is mock the disabled!
Baby steps!
For the first time, the pre-titles sequence is actually relevant to the main plot. For some reason, Mariner is invited to a conference while the captain introduces the plot-of-the-week. They’ll be assisting another California-class ship, this one a science ship with blue highlights, in towing an ancient disabled colony ship to… I don’t recall if they say where. They refer to it as a “generation ship”, but I don’t get the impression that it actually is one. The crew died when their stasis pods broke down, but the ship is full of a “terraforming fluid” that creates living matter out of inorganic substances, and you’ve already figured out which TNG episode this is cribbed from, right?
Mariner keeps yawning, though, which embarrasses the captain in front of her counterpart, and I think these two are supposed to be old rivals? They do balls-all to establish this, it just kinda feels assumed. The captain is desperate to get Mariner to request a transfer, since it would look bad if she kicked her own daughter off the ship. Ransom suggests she assign all the worst jobs on the ship to her, though the captain just repeats the idea back to him, claiming to have thought of it herself.
So I guess we’re raiding Dilbert for jokes now. Once you go Pointy-Haired Boss with a character, I think you’re kinda limited in what you can do with them afterward. For example, having her come to some kind of understanding with Mariner and the two of them learning to appreciate each other more would not work. Guess where this episode is going.
There’s a couple of embarrassing scenes as Mariner has to lubricate the turbolift and clean the holodeck’s jizz filter and –
Let’s stop for a moment and address that. That joke is funny, but eww. They never actually say it. They call it the “biofilter” most of the time. Mariner reacts with revulsion. But then later Ransom refers to it as something that gets bleeped, and the captain’s reaction makes it clear that, yes, the holodeck is basically like the viewing booth in a porn shop, and yes, the thing you are cleaning out of it is semen. There is a certain kind of relief (I thought about saying “release” here, but I reckon I should keep it classy) in them coming (snrk) right out and saying that, yes, the main thing people use holodecks for is fuckin’. But, again, when you decide this is the tone you want to set, you’ve locked yourself into a certain subset of possible plots, and you can’t really segue from there to a heartwarming plot. Cockwarming, maybe.
But anyway, Mariner finds a way to make carbon filter cleaning fun, so in desperation, her mom promotes her, knowing that she’ll find meetings and paperwork a fate even crueler than splooge-removal. And there’s a somewhat effective montage that lampoons a lot of TNG-era conventions through Mariner’s eyes: the senior officers’ poker game is a snore because you know what? Exciting TV poker games where everyone always gets a playable hand are fictional and in real life, you usually get fifteen deals in a row where no one has anything better than a pair of threes. Vocal Jazz night at the officer’s club is exactly as much fun as you think watching your mom try to scat would be. Ransom’s birthday party involves a lot of folk guitar. I mean, that kinda sounds cool though.
Anyway, at some point they realize that the story is not really going anywhere, so for absolutely no clear reason, the captain of the other ship looks at a picture of Captain Freeman and grumbles a little and decides to do a stupid, dangerous maneuver to assert dominance and this pops a hull panel off the generation ship and engulfs his ship in terraforming fluid, which also splatters the Cerritos. Now things are On, as it were. There’s a lot of scenes of the Cerritos crew being menaced by rapidly-growing exotic vines and planets, but the resolution is straightforward and the details don’t really matter. Mariner and Freeman have to fight their way through the transforming ship while having it out about their issues with each other, how Mariner treats her job like a game and Freeman refuses to respect her daughter’s choices and judgment, but in the end they come up with the same plan to do some technobabble to render the terraforming fluid inert and it just works and the plot is resolved and they have a tender, heartwarming moment where they come to a better understanding of each other and this would all be very touching and the appropriate sort of emotional drama for a light comedic show, and hey, remember they were doing semen jokes five minutes ago? This new heartfelt respect between mother and daughter comes after mom ordered her daughter to clean the jizz out of the ship’s masturbation room.
And then Freeman suggests that they can actually get along and maybe she’ll give Mariner a position on the bridge so they can spend more time together, so Mariner makes fun of an admiral’s speech impediment for like five straight minutes in order to get demoted again. It’s fun!
There’s other stuff going on too, but the parallel construction in this episode is weaker than it has been before. Rutherford is barely in the episode at all. Boimler fares only slightly better. He has an emotional crisis in the face of Mariner getting promoted, and decides that the way to success is to flaunt the rules like her. But literally the only thing to come of this is that he spills a cup of coffee in Ransom’s lap and then disappears.
Tendi actually gets a plot for once, though. So far, she’s barely been a presence. Her plot has nothing at all to do with the rest of the story, but whatcha gonna do. She’s been invited to watch someone ascend to a higher plane of existence. Okay. That’s a fun structure for some jokes about energy beings in Star Trek. I think taking it the extra step that apparently, just any old normal human-type-person can ascend and become an energy being (“Like a Q or a The Traveller”, someone suggests) through meditation is a reasonable level of hyperbole for The Funny Show. But in her enthusiasm, Tendi ruins his elaborate meditative sand drawing, and harshes his mellow. He takes an immediate dislike to her, and her aggressive attempts to get his ascension back on track only annoy him further. But once the Cerritos is being Masaka’d into an alien jungle, he confesses that his ascension was a scam; being “the ascension guy” was his angle for standing out and being Important, and he was letting her take the fall for ruining it because he wasn’t sure how much longer he could string people along. She saves his life, then he saves hers, they bond, he is pinned under a rock and almost dies, but the rock dissolves at the last moment with the recovery of the ship. He and Tendi make out, and then… He ascends. Turns out that “fake it until you make it” works for ascending to a higher plane of existence. Also for soiling the holodeck. Semen jokes!
If I weren’t so tired from the rest of this episode being the rest of this episode, I think I would’ve liked the way the ascension is played better. Because it turns out not to be pleasant. At first, he just glows and floats, but then it hurts, physically, as his body is converted into PURE ENERGY, and he’s overwhelmed by the scope of the cosmos as he becomes one with it. Also God is a koala? He tries to say what the meaning of life is, but before he can get it out, he sort of explodes like Jon Osterman turning into Doctor Manhattan and disappears into a rift in spacetime.
Both Tendi and Boimler feel like they were supposed to have more plot in this episode. In fact, so do Freeman and Mariner. There’s one coherent plot-line through the episode, but it feels like it was trimmed to accommodate more plot in a truncated form. Tendi’s story could’ve been a good B-plot for an episode where it had some relationship to the A-plot, but here, it just seems random. The angle of the captains of the Cerritos and the Mersette having some kind of rivalry doesn’t feel connected to the plot about Mariner’s relationship with her mother. Boimler’s frustration over Mariner’s promotion seems like it’s setting up a comedy plot about him trying to imitate Mariner but failing. But it doesn’t happen.
And then they end with Mariner mocking an Admiral’s speech impediment.
Shoulda just stuck (heh) to jizz jokes.
hey a review I didn’t completely disagree with