5x14 Conundrum

[8.5/10] It was Seth MacFarlane, of all people, who identified one of the key elements of Star Trek writ large -- the phasers were always set to stun. The various captains and commanders were never afraid to get their hands dirty, but they also didn’t deal death needlessly. There is an inherent respect for life within the soul of the franchise, one that helps each show to bear the Star Trek name earn the “enlightened” reputation that follows.

“Conundrum” is many things. It is a brilliant high concept mystery box. It is a mass amnesia story. It is a “What If?” episode. It is a “traitor in our midst” story. But most of all, it’s a tribute to that ethos, and to the idea that even if our heroes didn’t know who they were or what they were doing, that appreciation for justice, for the right of other beings to exist peaceably, would still abide.

High-falutin morality aside, I just love the way this one is built. Our heroes are just having a normal day, when a peculiar signal and a big green flash robs each of them of their memories. All of a sudden, the characters we’ve come to know over the course of four and a half seasons don’t know themselves. They have to piece together who they are and what they’re doing out here, and there’s a guy we’ve never really seen before in the mix to boot.

Look, I’m not sure I would call “Commander” Kieran McDuff my favorite element on “Conundrum” -- he doesn’t give the greatest performance for one thing -- but I love how he’s used here. The episode relies a lot on dramatic irony. The audience knows more about what’s happening to the characters than they themselves do. But McDuff’s presence adds just enough disorientation to throw the audience off-balance too.

Is he a betrayer among the good guys? Or is he just another random bridge officer we see once and then never again? Or is he someone new destined a multi-episode stint like Ensign Gomez or Ensign Leffler or Ensign Ro? Before the guy says a word, before we find out that the computer has “promoted” him to first officer, before he starts trying to drive the crew to destroy the Lysians, his prominence in the tumultuous aftermath is just odd enough to be suspicious, while just plausible enough to be a red herring, which is a great space for any mystery to be in.

At the same time, there’s some pure fun and intrigue to the crew piecing together their roles aboard the ship without anything to guide them. Without a ship’s roster, they’re left to rely on things like their uniform to determine who’s in charge (Picard’s pips vs. Worf’s baldric), their locales to figure out roles (Data as the bartender), and try to discern their former lives from the clues in their quarters and other semi-familiar spaces. It’s fun to see Worf sit in the captain’s chair or Data speculate that he might be part of a whole race of artificial lifeforms, as the crew strains to piece together how they fit aboard this ship with little else to go on.

I also love the conceit that while the crew may have lost their memories of who they are and what they’re doing, they still retain their skills and personalities. It’s a unique, science fiction-y way to strip down each character to their core essence, tear away the walls of rank and protocol, and see where things shake out. The act is a revealing one, showing how without those guidelines, the officers aboard the Enterprise don’t necessarily end up in the places you’d expect.

Nowhere is that more true than with Riker and Ro. I kind of love this storyline, despite a certain 1990s hackiness to it. When we first see the two of them in the episode, they’re practically at one another’s throats, with Ro the flouter of procedure and Riker the one there to enforce decorum and the chain of command. But when put on the same level by the memory wipe, the pair find that they have a surprising rapport, one that suggests they could be friends, or more, were they separated from the power structures of Starfleet.

And they have pretty good chemistry together! It’s revealing when Ro talks about needing to feel like she’s in control and Riker fostering teamwork when people are interdependent. They both have a certain wild streak, and you can see how that would unite them, even though the lingering parts of their psychological makeup shows what puts them at odds much of the time. There’s a playfulness between them that makes total sense as the kind of thing that could blossom if they weren’t a duty-bound commander and a rebellious ensign.

The one part of this I don’t like is the love triangle element. There’s strong material in Deanna recognizing a romantic familiarity to Will that pulls them together even if they don’t explicitly remember it. It’s honest-to-goodness romantic in a way TNG often strains to be. But setting up a conflict between the sweet pairing with Troi and the steamier one with Ro is just cheesy.

That goes double for the tonally-weird closing scene where the two women are talking, and it’s treated like a wacky “you caught me cheating” moment rather than the more adult approach the show usually takes to Riker and Troi’s romantic dealings. Still, exploring the romance that couldn’t be under normal circumstances, and the one that persists even when circumstances change, is a nice, humanizing tack to take with this premise.

It dovetails neatly with the bigger plot points of the episode. Being stripped of memory still keeps the essential parts of our heroes. Worf assumes the captaincy and focuses on battle-readiness rather than more humanitarian or technical concerns aboard the ship. Picard focuses on those elements and instantly forgives Worf for the presumptuousness of taking command. Geordi’s anxious to get a crack at engineering even before he knows his role. Dr. Crusher reflexively helps heal people. They’ll need all those skills, and the core of who they are, to get through the next challenge.

When they manage to get the ship’s files up and running, it tells them they’re at war with a group called the Lysians, on a mission to destroy their enemy’s superweapon. (Hello Star Trek: Enterprise fans!) It’s a great monkey wrench to throw into the proceedings. That small but significant detail confirms that their present circumstances aren’t an accident or unfortunate misunderstanding, but deliberate subterfuge by some nefarious force with its own interests. And the presence of Commander MacDuff as first officer gives us a pretty damn good clue.

But rather than taking the air out of the balloon, the strong hints that MacDuff is behind all of this only adds to the intrigue of the episode, as we watch him try to manipulate the crew in his direction -- if only because he has compelling arguments! When Picard tries to hail a seemingly overmatched Lysian vessel, MacDuff points out that the communications array may be how the Lysians (allegedly) mind-wiped them all in the first place. When Picard expresses his ethical queasiness to his “first officer” about barreling in to destroy an apparently underpowered enemy, MacDuff reasonably notes that such calls may be worth it to end a war with thousands of lives at stake. And when Picard still seems shaky, MacDuff’s smart enough to appeal to Worf’s thirst for battle as a failsafe.

In short, MacDuff is a smooth operator. Aside from one corny aside glance after he thwarts Crusher’s attempt to fix the memory loss, he’s not a mustache-twirling villain. He’s someone who could plausibly fit into the crew, making plausible arguments for staying the course and following orders. Hell, even Riker responds to Troi’s uneasiness about the whole thing by noting that war never feels right, even when it may be necessary, helping to justify why our heroes would fall for MacDuff’s ploy. The saboteur only goes off the reservation at the very end when it seems his plan will fail.

The key moment comes when the Enterprise encounters the supposed superweapon, finding it guarded by a meager force of sentry ships and a minor laser array, such that one photon torpedo would destroy. It’s the final straw. Troi pleads with the captain not to do this, because it feels wrong. Picard gives into his instincts that being “handed a gun and told to shoot a stranger” can’t be right. When MacDuff tries to intervene, he earns a phaser to the chest for his troubles, vindicating how the senior officers are not afraid to use force when necessary, but not when the moral calculus seems too out of whack to possibly justify it.

The resolution is a little simple and easy. There’s a touch of exposition about expressing condolences to the Lysians and unneeded excuses for why MacDuff’s people could reprogram the Enterprise but don’t have photon torpedoes. It’s the quick hit mumbo jumbo to shore up the loose ends of the plot, but it’s not important.

What’s important is that even when you remove the protocol, when you remove the years of experience, when you remove the reliable orders from Starfleet Command (which aren’t a given under the best of times), there’s still a moral undercurrent to Captain Picard and his team that cannot be ignored. They will disobey orders when the ethics of a situation demand it. They will act first with an eye toward mercy and use force only as a last resort. And most of all, they will seek to preserve life wherever possible, to weigh the costs of weaponry and war and consider what the best alternative to engaging either is.

I can think of no better tribute to the spirit of Star Trek. More than almost any other show, The Next Generation instilled values in young viewers like me, principles like: the importance of tolerance for other cultures and community, the vitality of intellectual curiosity, and the vibrance of hearing a diversity of opinions before reaching a decision. But more than any other, it taught me that other lives have as much value as your own, and knowing how to respect that, how to vindicate it even in the most difficult of situations, is something that should stay with you, even if they take everything else away.