4x20 Qpid

[6.8/10] I want to like “Qpid”. I really do. It has so many elements I like from Star Trek: The Next Generation: the presence of Q, a wild new locale, and a chance to take some of the starch out of Captain Picard’s uniform. The episode is light and goofy, but I often enjoy Star Trek in its light and goofy mode! There’s even a point to the escapades, about love and what it makes us do. The ingredients are there to make this one a crowd-pleaser (or at least a me-pleaser).

And yet, I found myself struggling with it. Maybe it’s just the presence of Vash, the Jean-Luc’s stock femme fatale love interest. She makes a return appearance after debuting in “Captain’s Holiday”, another comic/adventuring episode written by Ira Steven Behr. She smacks of an attempt to give Picard his own Catwoman equivalent, someone duplicitous and untrustworthy who nevertheless genuinely cares for our hero. Batman is, like Picard, famously upstanding and “private with his feelings”, so aiming for that type of dynamic with a foil who challenges him on both fronts makes a certain sort of sense.

The problem, beyond Vash’s genericness, is that her presence turns Jean-Luc into a romantic lead once again, something that’s never worked on the show outside of his repressed feelings for Beverly. I applaud efforts to humanize the Captain, and showing his personal relationships beyond his duties helps achieve that. But his whole vibe with Vash is just too cartoony and trite to achieve those ends.

More than that, Vash’s arrival once again heralds Jean-Luc turning into a swashbuckling adventurer, which plays as miscalibrated for the measured Captain we know and love. As I mentioned in my write-up of “Captain’s Holiday”, this is something Patrick Stewart reportedly lobbied for. And you can see it show up in the TNG movies, where Picard is more of a romantic man-of-action than we’re used to seeing. Playing it for laughs rather than for keeps helps a little here, but the guise is, ultimately, an odd fit for the character, which should have been a warning when they tried to translate it to the big screen.

Still, I like the structure and throughlines for the episode. Vash arrives to throw a monkey wrench into Picard’s personal life on the eve of a keynote address to his heroes from the world of archeology. Q arrives shortly thereafter to throw a garbage bag’s worth of additional monkey wrenches into Picard’s professional life. Bringing these two mischief-makers together in the same episode to really throw the good captain off his game on the cusp of one of his nerdiest triumphs is a good bit.

Behr and company even find some synergy between the two interlopers. Vash is aghast to learn that Picard hasn't told any of his friends or colleagues about her and believes it’s a sign he doesn’t really care about her. Her fears are a big cliché, which can be said for a lot of her relationship with Jean-Luc, but it gives the two of them a conflict to resolve in the episode, which is something.

Q, on the other hand, is here to repay a debt. He credits Picard for saving him in “Deja Q” and, in a precursor to Shran, reappears due to a professed disdain for owing anything to the captain of the Enterprise, rather than out of any joy in reunion. It's a good excuse to bring Q back, and a tribute to the flexibility of the character and the talent of the show’s parade of writers that they’ve found good reasons for Q’s return engagements each time. When Q witnesses Jean-Luc’s trouble in paradise with Vash, he aims to settle his debt by showing Picard that love is a vulnerability. It’s the right kind of troublemaking mission, with a flair for the dramatic and annoying, that seems true to form for the trickster god.

So fairly late in the episode, he transports the senior staff to a fantastical recreation of Sherwood forest. Picard is Robinhood. Q is the Sheriff of Nottingham. The crew are his merry men (over Worf’s protestations). And Vash is Maid Marian, whom Jean-Luc must rescue to end the scenario. The setting provides an opportunity for Picard to prove to Vash that he really does care, and for Q to demonstrate that affection is a vulnerability, not an asset. There’s something elegant about that.

But it also sets us up for a ton of silliness and swordplay. I have mixed feelings on the show going full Men in Tights here (possibly setting Stewart up for his role in that film). I cannot deny chuckling at Worf smashing Geordi’s mandolin or Troi accidentally piercing Data with an arrow. The whole tenor of the escapades here are just so broad and goofy though. It’s a fine line between “fun” and “cheesy”, and too often “Qpid” veers toward the latter.

Jean-Luc and Vash bicker like an old married couple. Picard does his best Erol Flynn impression against the local villain. The good guys clash swords with the bad guys to avert a castle-side execution, in a throwback to swashbuckling serials. Some of this is fine, but a lot of it feels like something out of a totally different show, one much broader and more aimed at the cheap seats than Star Trek usual goes for.

The saving grace through most of this comes from bouncing the two tricksters off of one another. There’s a natural concordance between Q’s feather ruffling charm and Vash’s “ruthless, amoral” behavior. Showing that the two flies in Picard’s ointment make for an intriguing pair of partners is a deft move in all of this, even if the “You really do care, Jean-Luc” ending with big smooches leaves a lot to be desired.

Maybe it’s just too much. Q + Vash + genre-hopping + Jean-Luc’s love life + costume changes + life debts = Picard’s character arc could simply be too many elements to try to harmonize within the space of a single episode. I admire the efforts to spotlight the Captain’s personal life a bit. I always welcome Q’s pot-stirring intrusions on the show. Venturing the wooly new worlds, sometimes even silly ones, is the name of the game for Star Trek. But somehow “Qpid” is less than the sum of its parts, however delightful those parts ought to be on their own.