From: tlynch@cco.caltech.edu (Timothy W. Lynch)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.current
Subject: Lynch's Spoiler Review: "Man of the People"
Date: 7 Oct 1992 18:15:46 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
NNTP-Posting-Host: sandman.caltech.edu
Summary: Nope; prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
Keywords: TNG, Troi, anger, lust

WARNING:  The following post contains spoilers regarding this week's TNG 
offering, "Man of the People".  Those not wishing to be exposed to spoiler 
elements prematurely are advised to keep clear.

Ecch.

Well, I'll say this for it.  It wasn't as bad as it looked.  Of course, very 
little *could* have been as bad as this looked from the preview--and this was 
still pretty godawful.  More after this synopsis from your local station:

After the ship he originally traveled on is damaged in an attack, the 
respected Lumerian ambassador Ramid Ves Alkar comes on board to journey to a 
dispute in the Rekag-Cironi system.  Also with him is a very aged woman, Sev 
Maylor, whom Alkar refers to as his mother, and who is by all appearances a 
mean-spirited, nasty-tempered woman.

As the Enterprise journeys to Cironia, Troi and Alkar hit it off rather 
nicely.  Their friendship is hindered, however, by Maylor, who persistently 
keeps after Troi, threatening that she will always regret any attachment she 
forms with Alkar.  Troi, disturbed, is distracted when Riker comes to work on 
the crew evaluations, but cheers up with his reassurance and begins to work.  
However, just then, Maylor dies--and strangely enough, Alkar seems almost 
completely undisturbed.  He asks Troi, as a fellow empath, to assist him in 
the funeral ritual, a request she happily grants.  However, at the end of the 
ritual, Alkar touches his (now glowing) funeral stone to Troi's dormant one, 
and Troi reacts with something akin to shock.

Some time later, Troi seems very edgy and concerned with her appearance.  
Beverly's examination of Maylor, meanwhile, turns up high levels of 
neurotransmitter residue and no trace of any disease.  She asks Picard for 
permission to conduct an autopsy, but since there's no obvious threat to the 
ship and Alkar says it's against Lumerian custom, Picard refuses.  Not long 
after that, a very distracted Troi goes to see Alkar and attempts to seduce 
him.  When Alkar turns her down, saying that their relationship "just can't 
be that way," she angrily leaves and instead makes a pass at a random ensign 
in the turbolift with her.  When Riker arrives not long after this to work 
again on the crew evaluations, the ensign hurriedly leaves and Troi badgers 
and snaps at Riker about perceived jealousy.  Riker, realizing Troi is in no 
condition to work, attempts to make a graceful exit.

Later, with the Enterprise having arrived at Cironia, Picard and Alkar work 
with two other members of Alkar's delegation (Liva and Jarth).  With 
tentative arrangements made to bring both sides to the negotiations, all 
seems well.  However, Troi shows further signs of strain when she upbraids 
one of her patients for "whining" and "complaining" all the time, and Geordi 
and Beverly find evidence of *dramatic* deterioration in Maylor's condition 
in the three days she was on board.  That evening, as Alkar relaxes in 
Ten-Forward, Troi (who now looks two decades older and is dressed as slinkily 
as possible) marches in and accuses Alkar of flirting with Liva.  She insults 
everyone she can until marched out by Riker--and then, once Riker has brought 
her back to her quarters, she attempts to seduce him, then deeply scratches 
his face with her nails.  Riker, decidedly uncomfortable, hastily leaves, as 
Troi, all but hysterically, begs him not to.

That hysteria becomes even more evident the next morning, when Alkar informs 
her he's going down to the surface.  She reacts with jealous rage, accusing 
him of going to Liva and then attacking him in the transporter room with a 
knife when he attempts to beam down.  The assault is unsuccessful, although 
Picard is grazed, and Alkar beams down as Troi and Picard are taken to 
sickbay.  An analysis shows that Troi (now looking as aged as Maylor did) 
also has extraordinarily high levels of neurotransmitter activity.  Now an 
autopsy is justified, it seems; and as Alkar is incommunicado in negotiations 
planetside, Picard approves it.

The autopsy shows two mysterious things:  first, that Maylor was in many 
respects a scant thirty years old physically; and second, that her DNA shows 
she was most definitely *not* Alkar's mother.  With Troi's condition 
deteriorating rapidly, Picard and Worf beam down to confront Alkar.  He 
informs them that he has the ability to channel his unpleasant, distracting 
emotions into others, thus freeing himself to be the perfect diplomat.  
Unfortunately, the results are the rapid aging and death of his 
"receptacles".  Although Alkar sees nothing wrong with this, Picard is 
completely appalled, and threatens to take Alkar back immediately.  However, 
Alkar refuses, and Picard and Worf come under threat.  They leave 
empty-handed, but immediately work to plan a way to bring him back.

In the end, Beverly temporarily "kills" Troi to get Alkar to break his link 
with her.  Alkar, sensing that death, returns to the Enterprise to conduct a 
new "funeral ritual" with Liva.  With time running out, Beverly revives Troi 
just as the ritual is concluding, and as she begins the neurotransmitter 
decontamination, Alkar suddenly collapses, then attacks Liva.  Liva is beamed 
to safety, and Alkar, unable to cope with the dramatic overload of emotional 
feedback, ages rapidly and dies in mere moments.  Troi, returned to normal in 
both appearance and attitude, returns to her duties aboard the Enterprise.

Well, hopefully that should do it.  And now, the rest of the review:

First, let me shake you of the belief that I liked nothing about the show.  
There were a few things I thought were interesting.  For example:

--At least in the one scene with Picard planetside, Chip Lucia (Alkar) was 
very effective in playing someone completely conscienceless and virtually 
emotionless.  That one scene was somewhat shocking.

--The climax was harsh; every bit as harsh as it deserved to be.  I found 
that particularly effective.

--There is one particularly cute bit of name-dropping that I thought was 
clever.  We have a threat whose most prominent symptom is rapid aging; and 
the name of the ship originally carrying Alkar was the "Dorian".  I expected 
to see a Capt. Gray show up somewhere as well.  :-)

That, however, is about it.  Now, on to the much longer list of problems I 
found.

The biggest one has nothing to do with the storyline; it's the writing and 
acting of the characters.  I can't remember the last time I saw a TNG episode 
with everyone *this* flat; I felt like I was watching a picture of an episode 
rather than an episode.  I don't know if the writing or the acting is more to 
blame, but given the abilities this cast can do when written well (and that 
Stewart and Spiner can often turn in terrific performances even from lousy 
scripts), I'm tempted to blame more of it on Frank Abatemarco, new 
supervising producer and writer of this show.  

Actually, I should amend that point above just a bit.  Everyone was flat and 
lifeless except Troi.  Unfortunately, *she* was over-the-top and in major 
"screaming ninny" mode.  I don't know where the decision was made that a show 
turning Troi into the bride of Frankenstein and letting her occasionally run 
around in skimpy outfits was somehow a great dramatic idea, but I completely 
disagree.

Bits of the scenes featuring Troi, in fact, made the show downright 
*unpleasant* to watch at times.  Her scream of abandonment after Alkar leaves 
had me sorely tempted to go back to grading the papers I had in front of me, 
and her attempt to seduce Alkar had me wondering if anybody actually talks 
that way.  (Certainly no one I know does.)  

Although I think Troi has often been misused as a character, I'll grant that 
there are a few Troi-focused shows here and there which have succeeded:  
"Loud as a Whisper" and "The Masterpiece Society" come to mind as two of 
them.  This, on the other hand, highlighted the facets I really *dislike* 
about Troi:  Sirtis is usually rotten at getting across any anger without 
looking petty and "Hollywood" doing it, Troi is too often used as a token 
sexpot without any rhyme or reason, and there doesn't often seem to be 
anything beneath the sexpot exterior.  That's not what I watch the show for, 
folks.

Anyway, enough about that.  On to the plot, such as it was.  Two words come 
to mind:  "predictable" and "dishonest".

I found the show entirely predictable, in that I could have told you roughly 
what was going to happen before the opening credits even rolled.  Maylor's 
not really ancient or his mother?  Check.  Alkar's a manipulative, 
conscienceless swine?  Yep.  Troi will be his next target, but miraculously 
revived with less than three minutes to go in the show?  Done.  Anything of 
particular importance that I missed?  Not that I can see.

Then, there's "dishonest", which is a word I very rarely use for TNG.  I 
think the show wasn't truthful in setting itself up.  From all appearances, 
both in the preview and throughout the episode itself, the focus of the show 
was usually on rapid-aging problems.  Whoops; but both TOS and TNG have 
already *had* a rapid-aging show; we shouldn't repeat that blatantly.  Hey, 
how about chalking it up to psychically channeling negative emotions that 
somehow end up aging the victim in a way that can be immediately reversed?  
Yeah, that'll work.  

No, thank you.  If you want to rerun an old technique, do that; but at least 
be up-front about it, guys.  Don't attempt to shoehorn in another problem 
that's "really" the cause if it doesn't work.  (The fact that this meant 
another "vampire" type of story when we had one just two weeks earlier is 
also a problem, but that's a different issue.)  

Aside from basic issues of the plot simply not being interesting, it was also 
riddled with inconsistencies.  Let's see, this psychic "waste" rapidly ages 
people to the point of changing *hair color* [you remember, those cells that 
are already dead and not affected by what the body's condition is?], and is 
easily curable by lowering neurotransmitter levels, but Bev isn't swift 
enough to at least *try* lowering those levels if they're known to be 
dangerous?  Alkar is putting all his negative emotions into Troi, yet neither 
one of them seems to get any remorse?  You'd think given the level of his 
actions, there should be lots of guilt in *one of them*.  Riker is shocked 
to the core by Troi's actions (not to mention physically hurt), yet doesn't 
say anything about it to anyone until the next morning?  What about those 
scratches?

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.  (A further point that I'm not 
too concerned about is that heightening neurotransmitter levels is akin to 
lowering the enzyme levels that inhibit neural activity; the same effect that 
LSD has on humans.  We're not talking nasty behavior, we're talking a major 
acid trip here.  I'm not going to sweat that, though.)

I talked last week about giving "Realm of Fear" something of an MST3K 
treatment, but mostly all in good fun.  This time, we were MSTing to survive. 
I recommend you do the same.  (Among other things, try as many Norman Bates 
quips as you can during any scene revolving around Alkar and his mother.  
They work wonders.  ;-) )  Another example which was begging to be attacked:

Bev:  "When I examined Maylor, I found her heart, her lungs, her skeletal 
	system..."
Us:  "Boy, there's just no getting anything past you, is there?  That *is* 
	suspicious."

I mean, come ON.  What were we to do when given a straight line like that?  

That's really about it.  I'm hoping this was the season's "Cost of Living", 
and that it's now out of the way *early*.  Given the major problems that both 
this and "Time's Arrow, Part II" had, though, I'm starting to get worried 
about the season to come.  Let's hope.

So, some numbers:

Plot:  3.  The what?
Plot Handling:  3.  Were we actually supposed to, well, *care* what happened
	here?
Characterization:  2.  A bit up for Alkar's one really good scene, but 
	everybody else was just going through the motions.

TOTAL:  3.  Not a good sign at *all* here, folks...

NEXT WEEK:

A certain Scottish engineer we all know makes a trip to a new century.  Now 
*this* looks promising...

Tim Lynch (Harvard-Westlake School, Science Dept.)
BITNET:  tlynch@citjulie
INTERNET:  tlynch@juliet.caltech.edu
UUCP:  ...!ucbvax!tlynch%juliet.caltech.edu@hamlet.caltech.edu
"Um...foreplay's usually more fun with someone else, Counselor."
		--us, while watching Troi's solo scene on the holodeck
--
Copyright 1992, Timothy W. Lynch.  All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...