5x25 The Inner Light

[8.3/10] If anything, “The Inner Light” is more salient now than it was in 1992. As warm and welcoming as so much of the episode is, the looming disaster that threatens Kataan is a familiar one. At a time when national, let alone global, agreement on how to address climate change is variable at best, the fight to persuade disbelieving or disinterested officials to take action rings true. And just as potent, the fear for what comes for the next generation, the urge to preserve something for them, something of us, echoes across the years.

You don’t need to hear me sing the praises of this episode. Give or take “The Best of Both Worlds”, it’s arguably the most lauded episode of The Next Generation there is. Give or take TOS’s “City on the Edge of Forever” and DS9’s “Far Beyond the Stars”, it may even be the most praised Star Trek episode there is. But take away the laurels for a moment. Strip it of nearly three decades of anointing oil. And you still have a story of a people who slowly withered away to nothing, whose lives still mattered, reaching across centuries be known and understood.

There is remarkable power in that idea. And the way “The Inner Light” dramatizes it is clever. Captain Picard is afflicted by a nearby probe vessel. It’s beam sends him into a coma aboard the Enterprise, but also mentally transports him to Kataan, a much simpler civilization. There, Jean-Luc awakens as “Kamin”, a husband and local iron-weaver, forced to reconcile the life he thought he knew in the Federation with this new one that, however thrust upon him, seems equally real.

It’s as high concept a sci-fi premise as you’ll find. So much of good Star Trek storytelling puts you in the characters’ shoes as they face some wooly, speculative fiction scenario, and implicitly asks how you’d react. This episode may be the height of that, forcing the viewer to confront how it would feel to be plucked from your life and deposited into another without warning or recourse. Picard finds a wife, a home, and an existence he’d all but denied himself as a Starfleet officer, only to slowly accept that, whether or not he asked for them, each is his now.

That is an adjustment, to say the least. But one of the deftest choices in “The Inner Light” is its depiction of the passage of time. Each break in the action moves Picard forward five or ten years, allowing the process of acclimation and acceptance to be a gradual one. By the same token, it permits the audience to experience the rush of the ages much as Jean-Luc does, giving us a flavor of what it must be like to experience forty years in twenty-five minutes, in the way only television can muster.

But it also allows us to see developments both personal and communal happen on a longer time scale than TNG’s forty-five minute time slot usually allows for. We see Picard go from reluctant husband to proud father to scientific agitator, to resigned doomsayer and grandfather. We watch his children grow, like the tree of hope his community plants in the center of town. We see him retain his scientific bent and share it with his daughter, exposing the terrible realities of his people’s future. We watch him lose his best friend, and eventually his wife, to the ravages of time passing. To capture a whole live in an hour of television requires a great deal of shorthand and subtle exposition and vignettes that are exceedingly deliberate in their construction, but “The Inner Light” pulls it off. The episode grants us safe passage through a hesitant Starfleet officer turned fixture of a humble community.

As always, that journey would not work without the extraordinary acting of Patrick Stewart. After five seasons, even I have come to take the star’s impeccable performances for granted. He seems so effortless in his ability to exude warmth or strength or sensitivity on a week-to-week basis that it’s easy to forget how talented he is.

This episode is a showcase of what he can do when called upon to carry the hour. He weeps for his lost love. He sits aghast at the realization that all of this was for him. He clutches a precious flute to his chest and drips with recollection and longing as he gazes into the stars beyond. The script calls for him to essentially play several different people, showing Picard (or “Kanin”) at numerous different stages of his life, affected by the birth of his children, their reflective or rebellious adolescence, his growing affection for Helene, the looming disaster of his planet.

The change over time is difficult to show, particularly with little more than five minute scenes to sell it all. Stewart, however, makes it look seamless, finding the recognizable core of Picard in each scene while adapting it to the changing circumstances of context and time. There’s a restrained quality to the writing when it counts, letting Stewart’s acting take center stage to convey the impact of what Picard has seen and experienced, which makes it that much more gob-smacking in execution.

All that said, this outing isn’t perfect. Shoestring budget or no, add this to the pile of Star Trek episodes with less-than-convincing old age make-up. The brevity of each scene and the big jumps in time between them occasionally require some clunky explanatory dialogue to bring the audience up to speed. And at times, the script falls back on family clichés to evoke the feeling of something recognizable in Kanin’s dynamic as a husband and father when there’s just not time to develop it further.

Through it all, though, we see Picard embracing the life he thought he had to eschew to become a Starfleet officer. He retains his scientific curiosity, imparting it to his daughter and using it as a cudgel against his government. He changes, as anyone would when immersed in a new environment for decades. It’s jarring, then, when at the end of that life, the people of Kataan join together and reveal the truth. He’d spent so long trying to preserve a piece of this community, to save it for generations to come, only to realize that this experience itself is the fruit of that labor. The probe the Enterprise encountered was a means of memorializing this lost civilization in as visceral a way as possible, to make the passerby one of them, in the hopes he would pass on their story.

I am a sucker for such stories, of lives lived only to evaporate as part of some larger effort at recollection or healing or preservation. It’s hard to discuss them without spoilers, but there’s something so piercing about the idea that all you think you know could be pulled away like that, your reality changed but your experiences abiding. As that final, nigh-wordless scene in Picard’s quarters indicates, those experiences, that life, will be with Jean-Luc for a long time, the last vestiges of a lost civilization, living on through his light.

I pray that our people will not suffer the same fate as those of Kataan. I pray that those who matter will listen to people like Picard and do what can be done to save us, to make a way for our children and their children, before it’s too late. But particularly in what feels like a fraught and tumultuous time, not only for our nation but for our world, it’s sadly but movingly relatable to witness the Kataan’s effort to preserve something of themselves, to teach whoever and whatever comes next that loved and lived and died and mattered to one another, even as they were destined to wash away in the tide.

Efforts have been made to do the same for us, albeit in not such an immersive fashion. Plaques and memorials and even clocks have been fashioned to try to show the future some semblance of what we are. But these objects can only convey so much of what it is to be a human being here and now. We lack the Kataan’s technology to capture those experiences and save them for others. The closest thing we have is stories like these, tales that put the viewer in the story, making us feel what the characters feel, hope what their friends hope, strive for what they strive for. The effect is not as all-encompassing as what Picard undergoes, but through stories like these, maybe we too can live on, after a fashion, and be remembered.