Star Trek TNG - Season 7 - Episode 18
Star Trek TNG - 7x18 - Eye of the Beholder
Originally Aired: 1994-2-28
Synopsis:
Troi and Worf become romantically involved. [DVD]
Problems
- Another reference to that horrible episode Force of Nature, Picard says they've been given authorization to exceed the warp speed limit.
Factoids
- This episode establishes that the Enterprise was built at the Utopia Planitia Mars colony, eight years ago.
- There were thousands of people involvled in building the Enterprise, according to Troi.
Remarkable Scenes
- Seeing the inside of a warp nacelle.
- Worf "asking permission" of Riker to date Troi.
- Riker: "Worf, you sound like a man asking his friend permission to date his sister."
My Review
Some form of mental attack is causing people aboard ship to become suicidal. It's not very credible that people would immediately think of jumping into a warp nacelle to commit suicide; what's wrong a with a phaser set to kill? It's certainly easier to get ahold of a phaser to kill oneself than it is to jump into a warp nacelle without someone stopping you. The time in this episode is largely wasted on trying to discover the source of all this; not enough time is spent on the developing relationship between Troi and Worf which is what the episode was supposed to have been about.
The following are comments submitted by my readers.
Wasn't the reason they jumped into the warp core is that the dead guy was buried nearby in a bulkhead? They didn't experience the urge to jump until they were on the deck overlooking the core.
I have to say that your review kind of missed the point. This wasn't about Worf and Troi in the conventional sense... their whole courtship was part of a delusion suffered by Troi (except for Worf's first tentative exploration of starting a relationship with Riker). They never actually got together. And Troi wanted to follow Kwan into the plasma stream because that's where the "empathic echo" was located due to Pierce having committed suicide there after killing the two lovers.
To me this episode is a mess; the distinction between reality and the hallucinations was incredibly badly handled and kills the story. I had to read a detailed episode synopsis online to clear the confusion in my mind, a sign the episode fails to work coherently.
The whole issue of the bones found in the bulkhead doesn’t make any sense as it was all a hallucination anyway. Why would Troi hallucinate such irrelevant details? What a mess; "Sub Rosa" is a thousand times better.
Bit of a geeky thing this - but hey. I paused this on Lt Kwan's crew record to read what it said. It appears he was posted to the Enterprise and two other starships on the same stardate - not to mention making Lieuteneant on the same date. It also makes no reference to when he served at Utopia Planitia - which Troi says it does. If they're going to go to the effort of creating the computer screen detail, they might as well make it right. Still, digital TV and live pause weren't around at the time....
If the only reason Troi tried to commit suicide was because her empathic abilities tied into the empathic echo, why did Kwan commit suicide? He wasn't telepathic, so the empathic echo shouldn't have affected him.
A poorly executed plot line that should have had more focus on Troi and Worf. 3/10
Plot holes you could fly a starship through.
As mentioned by Dave, utterly inconsistent data on Lt Kwan.
Troi makes a big deal of "not seeing these" (pointing to a solar cell!) during her experience, yet they are all over the place during her vision.
And then we learn that Troi and Worf's liaison, the only piece of real content in the whole episode, takes place during her mind-trip?
Feeble!
ElGuapo, Troi mentioned earlier in the episode that Kwan is half Napean, apparently a species with some emphatic ability.
I get a little annoyed by the last few minutes of an episode being just a bunch of exposition that explains everything you've been watching for the other 40 minutes. But, I've never had the challenge of writing a script for a show that will be watched by millions of people. The empathic echo is a bit silly even by sci-fi standards, but not even close to the silliest thing we've seen in Season 7 so far (I reserve that honor for Sub Rosa).
It was nice to see Worf as something other than the stoic, grumpy warrior he usually is. I give this episode a rating of "meh" which puts it in the 3-5 range.