5:19 The First Duty – I think that Wesley Crusher has officially joined Lwaxana Troi and Q as a “once a season whether we need ’em or not” recurring character. At least this one doesn’t follow the format of Wesley’s last episode where he showed up for a visit on the Enterprise just in time to save the day; no, this time the mountain goes to Muhammad. Picard has been asked to give the Starfleet Academy graduation address, so the Enterprise gets there just in time for Wesley’s flight team to be involved in an accident that claims the life of a classmate.
This episode has neither a “wow factor” about some intriguing concept, or “the fate of the ship and the universe is in peril!” stakes. If it’s remembered at all, it’s because it introduced actor Robert Duncan McNeill to the Star Trek universe (his character “Tom Paris” on Voyager was pretty much the same character he plays here under a different name).
5:20 Cost of Living – What was I just saying? Once a season, whether we need ’em or not? Lwaxana Troi invited herself onto the Enterprise. For her wedding. To a man she met on a 24th-century dating site. Also, she undermines everything that Deanna is trying to do to smooth the relationship between Worf and Alexander, mainly by indulging Alexander. Basically, it’s two non-star characters facilitating each other.
All of which is setup for the most nightmare-fueling Holodeck experience — one that’s supposed to be “fun.” If 24th-century “fun” for children is disembodied mime heads, animal men soaking in mud baths, and a semi-satyr juggling worlds and then devouring them… Well, I think I just found the reason for all the insane admirals.
5:21 The Perfect Mate – When Professor X and Jean Grey… Wait, that can’t be right. [checks notes] Oh, that’s Captain Picard and an empathic metamorph played by Famke Jannsen. My mistake. What’s an empathic metamorph? A being who molds herself exactly to what another person needs her do be — in this case, romantically and sexually. Yeah, she’s everybody’s catnip! (Except Data’s, of course. And probably except for any heterosexual female crewmember, but nobody even THINKS of that.)
…and then my daughter says, “Picard’s falling in love with her, isn’t he? This is going to be tragic, isn’t it? WHY DOES PICARD ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE TRAGIC LOVE STORIES?” (“Because if they weren’t tragic, there’d suddenly be another member of the cast,” was my reply.)
Yeah; Voyager‘s creators came up with all kinds of excuses for why they didn’t just bring him back as Nicholas Locarno again, but when you follow the money, the real reason they made him Tom Paris instead was probably so that they wouldn’t have to keep paying Ronald D. Moore and Naren Shankar (who wrote this episode) royalties for every single episode where he occurred as a regular character… which was going to be pretty much all of them.
Also, as Max Bialystock tells Leo Bloom in the 2005 movie version of The Producers, “there’s always a part for the [boss]’s girlfriend.” Majel Barett’s being Gene Roddenberry’s wife certainly did great things for her career, although I think Lwaxana Troi was also deliberately written to be a thoroughly annoying character so the writers could bring her in for some “light-hearted” conflict whenever Roddenberry complained that their darker story ideas were ruining his utopian vision of the future. On Deep Space Nine, she pretty much continued to do everything she did here, apologizing at the beginning of one episode that she shouldn’t have given little Molly O’Brien so much candy (which gave the kid an upset stomach and caused her to puke all over her father), and then cheerfully pestering Odo with amorous advances the same as she used to do to Picard.
Fun fact: long before Patrick Stewart got picked to play Professor X in the movies, the famous comic book artist Alex Ross used him as his model for Professor X in Kurt Busiek’s Marvels. Also, since Marvel and Paramount have had some dealings with each other in the past, there have actually been comic book crossovers between Star Trek and X-Men characters. So… character played by Patrick Stewart, meet another character played by Patrick Stewart!
That’s kinda like the real-life explanation for the ending of “Rascals” in the sixth season; “Why doesn’t young Picard just stay young and keep his hair?” “Well, because then they’d have to fire Patrick Stewart and hire David Birkin, and do you have any idea how restrictive union rules and child labor laws are about adolescent actors?”