7:15 Lower Decks – None of the main characters get a character episode! Instead, we get an intriguing look at four junior officers on the Enterprise bucking for a promotion to lieutenant and bridge crew, none of whom we’ll ever see again. It’s an interesting look at how things seem from the underside of the command structure, but it also makes me wonder: What do a thousand people on the ship actually DO? I guess we could generously say, given what we’ve seen, that 20% are non-Starfleet spouses and children of crewmembers (obligatory reminder: Having children on the Enterprise is a frickin’ bad idea), but then we’ve got entire departments that we almost never see, like Stellar Cartography and Botany (although I think that botanist Keiko O’Brien was a civilian expert — we certainly never saw her in a uniform like Miles).
Speaking of which, just how many non-Starfleet types are employed on the Enterprise? The young Ten Forward bartender cements the fact that those bartenders are non-Starfleet, and Mott the barber, and from Keiko’s example, we can assume that some of the more specialized scientists that we never see are civilians. What, I wonder, would persuade a civilian to take a non-specialist position aboard the Enterprise, aside from the thrill of almost being killed on a near-weekly basis? How to the specialized civilians deal with operating under a military power structure? I guess we’d need a “Lower Than Lower Decks” episode to explore that, and that’s getting pretty far into the weeds.
7:16 Thine Own Self – Data gets a character episode! Well, halfway; when Data is sent to retrieve a radioactive sample that accidentally landed on a pre-warp inhabited planet, and accident somehow wipes his memory and he wanders with his radioactive materials into a local village where everyone dresses like Renaissance Italy (costumes are expensive).
Once the locals get Data cleaned up and in fresh clothes, they part his hair on the side. I thought this was a good look, and maybe they were using the episode as a premise to introduce his new hair style, just like they do with Deanna. But no.
Oh hey, Corabeth Godsey from The Waltons as the village doctor and schoolteacher! Apparently actress Ronnie Claire Edwards had exactly one acting mode.
7:17 Masks – Brent Spiner gets an “actor’s reel” episode! This is like they crossed “The Inner Light” with “Darmok” and ended up with something less than the sum of its parts: an alien probe at the center of a comet for 87 million years beams stuff at the Enterprise and transforms its interior to approximate an alien temple, while Data is “ridden” by several characters from the aliens’ mythology. Only Picard, with his vast knowledge of comparative mythology due to his archaeological background, can figure out how to insert himself into the narrative to bring things to a resolution.
And the big question left is, WHY? Why would someone build a space probe and send it out in order to force some other species to play along with their mythology, without cue cards or character sheets or anything? What was it supposed to accomplish? At least in “The Inner Light,” the alien race had a touchie-feelie reason in that they “wanted to be remembered.” In contrast, this episode’s ancient aliens must have said, “We’re gonna be total dicks to someone millions of years from now.”
(You know it will be a bad episode when Data appears in the intro, having trouble understanding artistic concepts in a children’s sculpting class. This despite the fact that he’s been studying the production of art, and making his own in various styles, for several years.)
Actually, as long as you’re not in uniform and don’t hang around the main characters too much, chances are your odds of being killed just to demonstrate how dangerous the crisis of the week is are not all that high. Whenever some poor nonentity gets killed on-screen in The Next Generation, it’s almost always some guy in a uniform on the bridge (and usually in a gold uniform, since the writers were trying to get away from their critics’ old “red shirt” jokes; as if such a superficial change really made any difference). The real question is what motivates those guys to put on a uniform when they could have taken up a much safer and more productive life in some civilian position on that same ship.
I guess I’ve never seen the episode with Mott the barber, because I have no recollection of that character. My first thought about that was, “Why have an actual barber on the Enterprise instead of a holographic barber on the holodeck?” Then I realized the holographic barber’s programming would inevitably get replaced by Sweeny Todd and the holodeck safeguards would fail leading to Riker eating an Ensign Jones burger. So, a real barber is the only sensible choice.
As for your question of why the space probe wants to force people to play act the civilization’s mythology, I’m assuming it’s because the probe was created by that civilization’s equivalent of 4Chan.
Mott (or apparently “Mot,” according to the Memory Alpha wiki), was a Bolian, which means that he was bald and blue-skinned, which further means that his career choice was highly suspect. He shows up in a couple of episodes (notably Worf goes in for a trim and then is “triggered” by the sight of Mot’s scissors in the alien abduction episode “Schisms”) and is mentioned in a few others.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Mot
And the 4chan hypothesis is as good as any.
Having begun going bald* in my early 20’s, I unexpectedly developed relatively strong feelings about other men’s hairstyles. Maybe that was tied into Mot’s motivation to become a barber. “You have hair and you do that with it? You ungrateful swine.”
*I lucked out there in that my head is not weirdly shaped.