1x06 Lonely Among Us

[6.1/10] What good is a mystery without any mystery? “Lonely Among Us” spends three-quarters of its runtime on the crew of the Enterprise investigating a mystery that the audience already knows the answer to. Why is Worf acting strange? How about Dr. Crusher? Why is the ship malfunctioning? And who killed Lt. Singh in Engineering with seemingly no one else around?

Those could all be interesting questions to answer. The catch is that the audience knows all of them from the jump. We watch the Enterprise drift near a mysterious space cloud full of lightning. We watch that same lightning hit Worf, transfer to Dr. Crusher, bolt into the ship, and eventually take out Lt. Singh. There’s no reveals, no surprises in all of this, and no relating to the main characters investigating these events, because the viewer’s in a very different, much more knowledgeable headspace than the Starfleet officers.

That doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Sometimes there can be tension or dramatic irony wrung from the audience knowing something the characters don’t. But “Lonely Among Us” doesn’t really go for that. It seems to want you to at least feel some of the crew’s confusion and concern, but that’s hard when the audience isn’t experiencing the same conclusion. Instead, the episode basically plays like any old whodunnit, only the reader’s already been spoiled on the culprit and the method.

As a result, this one’s pretty dull for most of its runtime. The only details of note are incidental and mainly of interest to longtime Star Trek and TNG fans, rather than anything that would stand out taking the episode as a standalone tale. For one, it’s our first glimpse of Miles O’Brien since the pilot, and he even gets a bit of character, trying to settle down a dispute between the visiting, feuding diplomatic delegations.

For another, it’s Data’s first time imitating Sherlock Holmes, something that would be a recurring touchpoint for the series going forward. Unfortunately, it’s played for very broad laughs here, with Data smoking a pipe, looking at fish through a magnifying glass, and spouting Holmesian diction with a goofy affect. The show’s early attempts at comedy have been variable at best, and this imitation game plays like humor for eight-year-olds rather than something genuinely laugh-worthy.

The other interesting connection at play here is that the script was written by D.C. Fontana, the best writer from The Original Series and the showrunner for The Animated Series. To that end, large swaths of it align with her work in the TOS episode “Tower of Babel”, which also features the Enterprise ferrying a host of disagreeable delegates and a seeming act of sabotage that leads to misplaced blame and mutual recriminations.

Unfortunately, the disputes and antics between the Anticans and Selay aren’t terribly interesting on their own. There’s none of the coolness of retroactive recognition since these alien species largely disappeared from the franchise unlike the Andorians and Tellarites. And not only are these species and their dispute a red herring to the larger mystery but, unlike in “Tower of Babel”, the audience knows (or can at least be pretty damn sure), that it’s a red herring from the jump, neutralizing any intrigue the visitors might have.

It’s a chance for the makeup and costuming teams to step out, at least, but even there, the rubber masks and unconvincing mouth movements stand out as hokey all these years later. The effects work here is spotty, which is always something I’m loath to slate an older show for, but with something like the lightning, it reduces the crew to having to shout exposition at the audience to explain what’s going on rather than the visuals telling the tale.

Otherwise, the Anticans and Selay mostly exist for more unavailing comic relief, for the chance to do some standard “aliens have weird customs and requirements” material, and to have Picard theoretically pontificate about the visitor’s societies, but transparently and unsubtly commenting on contemporary Earth-bound geopolitics as well. Frankly, despite Fontana’s involvement, most of this episode feels like a lesser photocopy of her great work in “Tower of Babel”.

The strange thing, though, is that once the show stops playing mystery games and just leans into Captain Picard having been possessed by this weird lightning being from the cloud formation, the episode starts to get really interesting. For one thing, it’s unfortunately topical here in early 2021 to watch senior officers having to confront the possibility that their leader is acting too erratic and dangerous to stay in their position, and debate whether they have the authority and the moral duty to remove him. The discussion among Troi, Riker, and Dr. Crusher is particularly good in that regard.

But the other boon to dispensing with the mystery elements and just focusing on the threat is that, while we rarely see it, Picard makes for a great villain. Patrick Stewart clearly relishes getting to play a little more sly than stuffy. It pays off when the normally good captain effectively gaslights his own crew, taking plainly questionable actions, but hiding behind superficially acceptable side steps, even to the point of turning the accusations around and declaring that Riker, Crusher, and Troi are the ones who’ve been compromised. It’s an unnerving use of the captain’s power and position, which gives it some extra force.

From there, you even have some of that strong “new life and new civilizations” material that Fontana does so well. It turns out that Picard and other members of his crew were possessed by a sentient energy being from the cloud formation, one who shares the officers’ desire for exploration and understanding, but who’s clumsily stumbled through these different forms of matter in an effort to get its bearings. It threatens to merge with Picard and take him back into the cloud nebula to continue that exploration. It works as a strangely sympathetic posture, a being accidentally finding itself in new environs and slowly learning the limits and possibilities of a new form.

From there, however, it’s the usual Treknobabble “science as magic” solution, where somehow the combination of energy pattern Picard being able to reject the merger with the being in the cloud, and his old matter pattern being left in the transporter, Data can bring the captain back good as new. It’s a familiar type of answer to problems in Star Trek, but it’s not a terribly satisfying one, playing more as a cheat than a real solution.

That’s endemic to the misaimed approach which all but consumes “The Lonely Among Us”. For a precious stretch between the unavailing mystery and the shortcut of an ending, there’s a cool story about a leader who’s been compromised and a new form of life with different goals and understandings. But before and after, the episode just presents lesser versions of things the franchise did, and would do, much better than this.