4x05 Remember Me

[7.7/10] Star Trek rarely goes for straight horror as a franchise. The Original Series did what amounted to a haunted episode with “Catspaw” and Star Trek: Enterprise would do something close to a zombie episode with Impulse. But while there’s plenty of creepy or weird things the various Starfleet crews encounter in the course of their adventures, it rarely aims for that level of scary or spookiness.

But what Star Trek does go for is psychological horror, using some of those heady sci-fi concepts to terrify the audience on a more cerebral level than just scare them with things that go bump in the night. On that score, “Remember Me” is one of the franchise’s most frightening outings. It plays out more like an episode of The Twilight Zone than the usual sci-fi escapades, and crafts an existential terror from watching the world and everyone you love in it, steadily slip away.

“Remember Me” gives Dr. Crusher the spotlight, which is a welcome (albeit unusual) choice for the show. After watching her son perform an experiment in engineering, she finds more and more of her comrades disappearing, from her visiting mentor to her sickbay staff to, eventually, the entire rest of the crew. Beverly has to figure out the cause of these disappearances so she can discover how to stop them, or alternatively, whether she’s slowly but surely losing her mind.

I’ll confess that I remembered the twist here, which makes some of the early funny business slightly tedious. Despite that, once the episode gets into the thick of the issue, it becomes easy to put yourself in Beverly’s shoes, even when you know the answers she’s hunting for. The sense of her knowing with certainty that people she’s cared about exist, only to not only lose them but watch her friends and confidantes profess that they have no memory of them, drives the emotional energy of the episode. It’s a distressing scenario, one that plays even if you know what’s really happening.

Much of that owes to Gates McFadden’s performance. Particularly given the premise, she has to carry a lot of the weight of the episode. Sometimes, her theater roots come out in those solitary moments and you get emotions and reactions at higher volumes than feel real. But for the most part, McFadden sells the desperation, the determination, the distress at watching people you care about fade away while the support system and tools you’re used to having at your disposal to tackle problems like these disintegrates along with them. Her acting brings the terror home, even if the audiences can guess what’s really happening.

Frankly, “Remember Me” is a lot more compelling when it’s focusing on Dr. Crusher’s frantic efforts to prove herself right and stop the disappearing phenomenon than when it pulls back the curtain and delivers the big reveal. It turns out that Wesley’s warp bubble experiment in the episode’s opening moments accidentally sent his mother into a pocket dimension, and the blinding light and swirling vortex that nearly suck Beverly away are, in fact, Wesley’s efforts to retrieve his mom.

On that account, this episode is a not-so-stealthy sequel to season 1’s, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, with name-checks of Kosinki’s warp equations and a return appearance from The Traveler. Candidly, the episode revives a number of things that were best left relegated to the doldrums of TNG’s first season. While I almost always appreciate continuity, bringing back the “Wesley is the special-est boy and only his magic powers can save the day” bit is an eye-roll of a solution to the problem. Likewise, the “literal power of thought” concept from the earlier episode always felt like an odd fit for the scientific approach of Star Trek and removes some of the intrigue here.

It not only takes away the mystery of what’s going on with Dr. Crusher, but makes her anxieties the literal cause of the spookiness rather than something that resonates with them. Instead of Beverly hearing her mentor talk about the pain of growing older and losing people you’ve loved, only to be thrown into that scenario in a science fiction-y way herself, it’s the act of thinking about those concerns at the same time Wesley is doing his experiments that creates the disappearing pocket universe.

The line between advanced technology and outright magic is famously thin, but the explanation scans as a little too outlandish for me. It leads the show to waste a lot of the episode’s final third on holding the audience’s hand through all the exposition and explanation necessary. Worse than that, leads to a “just believe in yourself and think good thoughts” solution to the problem.

But if you can cut past that, there’s a strong story here of one person’s determination in the face of even madness itself, bolstered by a desire to restore and, true to the episode’s title, remember the people she cares about. Those connections boost Beverly, even when everything’s going wrong. And it’s particularly heartening to see how Captain Picard goes along with all of this, only at her word, despite how out there her protestations become from his perspective, because he just trusts her that deeply. TNG once again fruitlessly teases romantic feelings between them, but more than any possible rekindling of the old flame, is a tribute to the pair’s trust in one another as friends and colleagues.

As the episode unspools, we feel more and more of Dr. Crusher’s fear and pain at the loss of that kind of trust and connection. It’s a high concept dramatization of the very thing her mentor talks to her about: reaching an age where the people you’ve known all your life start to go away. The root concern of that -- of squandering precious memories and not having time to tell people how you feel -- amplifies the central unnerving nature of the story.

To have the universe disappear around you and take away everyone you love is a truly frightening concept, even if there’s few outright scares to it. Star Trek may not go for outright horror very often, but when it tries to channel its headiness and thought experiments in a more unnerving direction, in episodes like “Remember Me” it manages to find tales just as chilling and just as cathartic.