The Enterprise is in a layover awaiting to meet with a supply ship giving the crew time to pursue personal activities while staying in the bottle. Picard pursues his musical interests with the Ressikan flute, Crusher prepares for her next dramatic production, Geordi and Data work on a special program and interface that'd allow Data to control the ship from his mind in the case of an emergency and though he tries to get out of it by coming up with make-work tasks, Worf spends the day on the holodeck with Alexander in a simulation of Earth's "Ancient West."
In the program Alexander is Worf's deputy in a small, stereotypical, western town from Earth's mid-19th century and following the trope the Western genre Worf gets the attention of a well-known local outlaw by arresting his son leading to an eventual standoff in the town's main street at high noon...er, 4:30 in the afternoon.
Unfortunately something goes awry with the interface Geordi and Data are working on and part of the computer's secondary systems become corrupted as well as parts of Data's personality. The corruption causes Data-related events to occur around the ship. Picard's musical composition is replaced by music Data was studying, the dialogue in Crusher's play scripts is replaced with Data's poetry on the PADDs, and some of the replicators on the ship start only producing cat-food.
More importantly to the story characters in the holodeck simulation are placed with Data, most notably the villains Worf is up against. In the simulation the holodeck characters have abducted Alexander to force a prisoner exchange.
Troi, who had joined in on the fun playing the role of a mysterious stranger passing through town, notices the Data-replaced characters seem to have Data's speed and abilities as well which will prove more of a challenge during Worf's face-off with him during the exchange.
Worf and Troi are able to use their communicators and pieces of replicated 19th-century electronics to somehow create a short-term personal shield for Worf so he can survive the shoot-out until Data runs out of bullets, at which point Worf opts not to execute holo-Data and orders the outlaws to leave town and never return. With the holodeck story now complete and Alexander rescued the program automatically shuts-down -after Worf has a brief and tame thank-you from the local floozie, also replaced by Data.
Data and Geordi are able to restore the ship's computer, and Data, to normal and the Enterprise meets with the supply ship before heading off into a sunset for it's next adventure.
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This episode I go back and forth on. There are elements of it I like and there are elements I'm not too keen on.
The underlining premise of story, Worf and Alexander bonding, is fine and good and I really wish the show had stuck with that rather than introducing the elements with Data and the screwy interface. There's plenty of episodes in the series where not all of the characters are used, I think this one would have been fine just using Worf, Troi and Alexander. There was no need to introduce the B-Story with the stuff with Data which adds to the usual problem with Trek at this point -that'll extend and expand in Voyager- of the ship's computers being so sensitive that one little mistake apparently can cause pretty serious damage to systems and even endanger lives.
The holodeck simulation would have been more than enough to carry the episode and didn't need the addition of the stuff with Data and the computer and showing again how the holodeck can ruin you if you, or everyone else on ship, aren't careful.
The bonding stuff between Alexander and Worf here works nicely, especially as we see Worf get more and more "into" the program when he realizes they're in law enforcement and the physical exertions in the program.
Sirtis plays out-of-type well here as Troi gets into her role as the "mysterious stranger."
Naturally, the episode is an homage to Eastwood westerns, most notably "A Fistful of Dollars."
Interesting that Data's corruption of ship's systems impacted a holodeck program being run by a main character. I mean, certainly other crewmen were using the down-time for some R&R in the other holodecks?
I love how genuinely "hurt" Picard seems when he realizes Crusher isn't asking him to have a more meaningful part in her next production.
I get that Worf is all about duty and has struggled as a single father but at this point Alexander has been on the ship for a year or two now and he's still struggling? To the point where he didn't want to spend some down time with his own son and was actively trying to generate an excuse not to play on the holodeck with him? Sheesh, Worf!
Silly as it is, I like that what we call "The Old West" is considered the "Ancient West" by TNG's time. Though in some of the TOS episodes that dealt with things from the 19th century I'm sure they still considered it the "Old West", so another 80-100 years was enough from something to go from, "Old" to "Ancient."
Do I really have to accept that using a communicator and a telegraph machine they were able to create a personal shield for Worf? If it's that easy, I think they'd be a lot more common on crewmen during dangerous away missions. Granted a bullet is a lot less energy than a phaser or disruptor beam but Worf and Troi had little to work with. Certainly using nothing but 24th century components something a lot more robust could be built!
So, they had communicators, then? Did they try using them? Sure the computer wasn't responding to commands but there's been plenty of times we've seen communicators work when there's no ship nearby to act as a server suggesting the communicators transmit on their own without any dependencies. Story wise they wouldn't have worked, sure, but it would have been nice to see them try just so we can see an excuse being made.
So, all of the tropes and clichés common to 20th and 21st century depictions of the 19th century continue into the literature and depictions in the 24th?
As much as a scenery chewer Brent Spiner can be (oh, just wait until we get to "Masks.") he does pretty well here without going overboard. Even as Western-ified Data. I noticed something odd during a scene though and I couldn't quite pin-point it or figure it out.
There's a scene where we see the outlaw's son (replaced with Data) shuffling cards in his cell. Normally when we see Data shuffle cards we see Spiner, or Spiner's body/hand double, shuffling the cards and the film is simply sped up to make it look like he's moving very fast.
Here it's very different. The shuffling "Data" does isn't super-humanly fast. It looks like the speed a professional card player/dealer would move at not the superhuman speed we see Data move. And we're shown a wider shot of him doing it and the person shuffling the cards seems to have thicker and much harrier arms than "Data" or Spiner have. When we see the wider shot the proportions look... "off" like that's not really Spiner's body. Either some tricky camera-work/lighting was used to replace a "shuffle-double's" head with Spiner or some tricky CGI was used for the replacement. (But it doesn't look like it) Or that really was Spiner and he's really good at shuffling cards and he just has thicker and harrier arms than I'm used to seeing.
Meh episode. It's not bad, not horrible, but I really think it could have been better without the Data/holodeck crisis stuff. The holodeck simulation of the "Ancient West" should have been enough to carry the episode.
Next week. The Meh continues.
