Counselor Deanna Troi Personal Log; Stardate: 44805.3. ... My mother is on board.
The Enterprise is in orbit around a planet whose star is set to die sometime in the next century or so, the planet is of a mostly reclusive race taking a rare leap of faith and accepting the Federation's aid in their work to find a way to give their star a new life.
Beaming aboard is project leader Timicin who has a plan to reconfigure Federation torpedoes to stabilize Helium fusion in a star in order to prevent its eruption when the star enters its next cycle, the Federation has provided some aid for years and has recently discovered a suitable star to test the technique on. Timicin is immediately greeted by the visiting Lwaxana Troi who quickly takes a liking to Timicn and imposes herself into his time on the ship as much as she can.
Fortunately for her, her affections are not spurned like they are with Picard and Timicin actually takes to them quite well and a relationship builds between him and Mrs. Troi. After the experiment is attempted, and fails, Timicin resigns himself to return to his home-planet defeated and to continue out the rest of his life, such that it is.
It turns out Timicin's species performs something they call "The Resolution" where a person commits ritual suicide on their 60th birthday, of which Timicin is only days away from. Timicin explains that this decision was reached by his people millennia ago to prevent an elderly population from becoming a burden on the future generations and on society, as well as to prevent the suffering of the aged people as they reach the end of life being resigned to living in [nursing homes] or hospitals.
Naturally, Mrs. Troi is outraged and angered by this practice and after her pleas to Picard go un-answered to her satisfaction (he cites the Prime Directive, saying he cannot interfere) she managed to convince Timicin to seek asylum on the ship in order to not only live out his life but as he has the best chances of saving his own world.
Mrs. Troi has underestimated how ingrained the Resolution is to Timicin's culture as his home planet takes a rather aggressive stance to get Timicin to return. Mrs. Troi insists Timicin can be one to convince his people that people his age and older can still be a value to society and lead them away from the Resolution. Ultimately, after a visit from his daughter, Timicin decides to retract his request for asylum and return to his home planet to die. Before beaming away, Mrs. Troi requests to accompany him to be part of the family and friends who oversee the ritual, promising Picard she won't start any trouble planetside. Her and Timicin beam off the ship hand-in-hand.
This is an episode that relies very heavily on its guest cast to work and David Ogden Stiers and Majel Barret-Roddenberry both really deliver, as does Michelle Forbes who appears as Timicin's daughter (and later would come back as Ensign Ro Laren.)
In previous episodes it's easy to be very annoyed by Lwaxana Troi's antics and mannerisms of reaching sit-com levels of "Terrible Mother"-ness but here she really pulls things off and makes us see more deeper levels of this character. As she recounts the story of an old Betazed custom that was brought to an end due to the defiance of a single woman it's impossible to not imagine Mrs. Troi as being that woman. There's also some nice, touching, mother-daughter interaction between the Trois as for once Deanna behaves like a loving daughter to her mother, and not as a child who (though maybe rightfully) is annoyed by her behavior.
Stiers does a really, really great job as Timicin, you can see him as a man really conflicted between his new-found love for Mrs. Troi and his commitment to the ways of his people, something he's grown all of his life to respect.
The episode also brings to thought the number of social issues we have when it come to the treatment of the elderly in our society. While we'll never reach the level of killing the elderly at some arbitrary age, Timicin's recounting of how it used to be for the elderly on his world sounds eerily a lot like how many are treated in our own world. Where the elderly are seen as an annoyance who're in extreme cases kept away in retirement homes where we don't have to really look at or think about them.
The Resolution is also an interesting parallel, that doesn't go un-noticed by Mrs. Troi, to what is happening to their home star. Their star, a star much like our own that is considered "middle aged" and is set to go nova in a few decades (while our has several eons to go granted) and here Timicin's people are trying to find an artificial way of prolonging its life, circumventing nature. While at the same time artificially cutting short the life of their own people, also circumventing nature.
Their dedication to the Resolution is also so strong they're not only willing to go to battle with the strongest ship in the Federation, but they're willing to carry it out despite the fact Timicin is a leader in the science and it will take the younger scientists decades to catch up and maybe find a solution.
Again, all very interesting details and story parts that just makes this a great little episode, the rest of the main cast is largely missing, but it hardly goes noticed as Majel and David both do a great job portraying this aged couple you really want to root for.
For me this is one of the stronger episodes of the series and, by far, the best episode for Lwaxanna.
Of notice:
Watch during a late scene with Lwaxana talking to Deanna in the quarters. In a mirror that does a nice job of framing a shot between the two women we can see a boom-mike pole move across the mirror as the elder Troi moves across the room, along with it we can see the shadow of the mike itself on the wall in the background. Obviously this isn't something that could've been easily fixed for the BD given time, budget and the complexity of removing these things, but it still makes for an interesting production error.
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