4x10 The Loss

[6.1/10] It’s amazing how rarely I say “That was a bad idea for an episode” with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Every once in a while, you stumble across an installment that just seems misguided from the ground up. But most of the time, there’s the germ of something good at the core of a given episode, that helps you understand why the show’s producers chose to go with that premise. It’s a testament to showrunner Michael Piller and his predecessors and their ability to select quality concepts.

That doesn’t mean the execution is always up to snuff though. The central concept of “The Loss” is a good one. What if someone with empathic abilities suddenly lost them? It works as a way for the show to explore the notion of disability, to explore what human instincts and intuition can do for us, and to show that one of the show’s characters has value apart from her psychic powers.

There’s just one big problem with all of that -- the episode hinges on arguably TNG’s weakest character and weakest performer. I don’t dislike Counselor Troi. I’m a fan of Gene Roddenberry’s utopian idea that in the future, enlightened societies would take mental health as seriously as physical health. I’ll laugh along with the rest of the fans when an enemy snarls invectives at Picard over the viewscreen and Troi’s big insight is “He sounds angry, captain.” But I think the character has her place on the show and can add something meaningful in the right moment.

But she’s just not built to carry an entire episode. To be frank, Marina Sirtis just isn’t up to it, or at least wasn’t in 1990. The script asks a lot of her: to be comforting, insecure, angry, scared, reassured, and even triumphant over the course of the hour. Despite having her moments over the course of the series, Sirtis just doesn’t have the chops to pull off all of those complicated emotions. Her reactions and responses rarely feel convincing or affecting in the way a very character-driven episode needs them to be, and it’s an ever-present albatross for “The Loss.”

That said, the script, from Hilary J. Bader (who would go on to be a prolific writer for the D.C. Animated Universe), does her no favors. It’s hard to know how much to blame writing versus performance, but Bader writes it all on the screen. There’s no internal journey for Troi, just a number of scenes where she all but announces how she’s feeling about her the loss of her empathic abilities while Sirtis overemotes the whole way through.

I’m apt to give the script at least some of the blame, if only because the B-story, which is light on Troi, is also no great shakes. The Enterprise finds itself pulled into a “cosmic string” by a swarm of two-dimensional creatures as the crisis of the week. It’s the usual dose of Treknobabble problem-solving without much intrigue as the episode wears on. The crew tries something to avoid being pulled into the string or alert the creatures. It fails. Lather rinse repeat. The problem doesn’t evolve and our heroes’ techniques don’t really improve as things proceed. It works to add some paint-by-numbers science fiction-y tension beyond Troi’s personal journey in the episode, but that’s about it.

At least the episode tries to connect the two stories, with Troi proving her worth even absent her empathic powers when she’s able to figure out the psychology of the two-dimensional creatures in a way that frees the Enterprise. Basically, she gleans that they’re acting on instinct, “like a moth to the flame,” and deliberately heading toward the string rather than being compelled toward it.

There’s a lot of problems with this though. For one, it feels like a pretty trite realization, not one that it takes an expert psychologist to figure out, weakening Troi’s triumph. Second, it’s not clear why this is the cinch that allows the rest of the crew to figure out how to communicate with, or at least redirect, the creatures. Third, the whole “We’ll just create vibrations on the same frequency as the cosmic string reflected off the Enterprise plays as the most generic “recafoobling the energy-motron” solution to the problem. There’s very little satisfaction to be had from the solution here or Troi’s role in it.

But there’s a few things that work in the episode which save it from the doldrums. For one, there’s a nice, if simple, thread where Troi helps a fellow crewman cope with her husband’s death. Even if “The Loss” gets heavy-handed in explaining it to the audience, it’s interesting to see Troi confront Brooks about being in denial rather than facing her grief, only to engage in the same activity herself when it comes to her abilities disappearing, Likewise, it’s much more of a tribute to Troi’s talents as a counselor when she’s able to see through Brooks’s “I’m a new woman!” facade than when she helps escape the latest spatial booby trap. There’s a lot of hand-holding to the dialogue, but it’s solid storytelling to make Brooks a case study for Troi’s abilities both with and without her psychic powers.

In the same vein, I love the use of Guinan in the “Who counsels the counselors?” role here. If there’s anyone who works as a professional sounding board for Deanna, it’s the person in charge of Ten Forward. And her wisdom and insight about all the other skills Troi’s developed apart from her biological advantage as a Betazoid carries the weight and wry profundity Guinan always imparts to those who come into her establishment.

Last but not least, one of the few things that’s worked consistently with Troi is her friendship with Riker. The two have a believable warmth and chemistry together, which makes the scenes where Troi lashes out at him or Will is comforting his “imzadi” feel realer as a reflection of what Deanna’s going through than the other scenes the episode has to offer.

On a more technical level, the show doesn’t do much to compensate for the dearth of other quality elements. The pacing is languid, with overextended scenes showing a computer display or watching the ship slowly depart, making it seem like they were stretching for time. Likewise, the direction resorts to standard “shot/reverse shot” framing for most scenes, further sapping the hour of visual energy.

Even if you could correct for those things, “The Loss” would still be a flawed episode. The dialogue in particular is very clunky. The acting from the star of the hour is less-than-convincing. And the connection between the main story and the latest intergalactic oil spill is shaky at best. But if you squint, you can see the elements that made the powers that be sit up and take notice, with a noble attempt at exploring what it would be like to suddenly lose one of your senses, and to affirm the value of one of the show’s main characters (and one who’s often derided as useless in the fandom to boot). This isn’t the best realization of those worthy ideas, but it’s a testament to the quality of TNG that even when the show stumbles, it’s trying to dramatize something worthwhile.