The Enterprise has entered orbit around an isolated planet in order to retrieve data from a research base that used to operational on the surface. The planet's atmosphere precludes beaming most of the time and the first window in 8-years has opened up, Commander Riker was part of an evacuation operation the last time the station was occupied.
On arrival on the station the away team finds the station appears to be occupied due to it's current state and initially believe someone has crashed on the planet and was using the station as a shelter, soon the station's occupant arrives in the main room and it turns out to be William Riker.
The Other Riker is wearing a battered S1/S2 Starfleet operations uniform with lieutenant pips, has tussled hair but manages to have the same level of beard-growth as our own Commander Riker. He welcomes the site of the rescue crew but is stunned by the presence of Commander Riker, who is also stunned.
Both seemed convinced the other is some-sort of clone or alien impostor as the present window begins to close the away team beams back to the ship, they'll have a few other opportunities to retrieve the info they need in the coming days.
Crusher does a scan on Lieutenant Riker and concludes that he shows no signs of being a clone or alien impostor, his DNA, cellular structure and other biological aspects are all identical to Commander Riker's other than some slight differences in the brain representing their different experiences the last 8 years, Picard accepts this for now and insists Lt. Riker be treated fairly and equally as Commander Riker.
After an investigation, Geordi concludes that during the original evacuation the transporter operator tried to get around the difficult transport by using a second transporter beam on Riker's signal. This turned out to be unnecessary as Riker's "original" signal made it back to the ship, the secondary signal reflected off the planet's atmosphere and materialized a duplicate back on the station. Both are equally valid in being called "William Riker" as both originated from the same pattern, where they ended up -and made up of what matter- is irrelevant. There's now two William Rikers.
The crew decides to use Lt. Riker's experiences on the station to retrieve the data base since he's jury rigged some of the systems in order to keep the station habitable over the last 8 years. Crusher is unsure Lt. Riker is emotional capable of returning to the station so Troi offers to offer him some help. Upon visiting Lt. Riker he immediately kisses his "Imzadi" since from his perspective last time he saw her they were still in a serious relationship and is presently unaware of the more platonic relationship between her and Cmdr. Riker.
Regardless, Lt. Riker chooses to pick up where they left off and pursues Troi while Cmdr. Riker wrestles with these developments and trying to recover the station, even butting heads with "himself" in how to retrieve the needed info from the station. The relationship between Troi and Lt. Riker seems to get serious which seems to spurn some jealousy in Cmdr. Riker causing more friction between the Rikers.
On the last mission to the station the two Rikers continue their dick-measuring contest until a scaffold collapses in a cavern and Commander Riker works to rescue Lieutenant Riker from falling into a crevice. The needed info is retrieved from the base and both Rikers make it back to the ship safely.
Lieutenant Riker and Commander Riker seem to have reached a "peace" between the two and as an offering gives the Lieutenant "their" trombone. Lt. Riker has accepted another assignment on a ship and had offered to take Troi with him but she sees this as a sign that the Lt. is going to follow in the same footsteps as the Cmdr., put his career first. She opts to stay with her close friend, Commander Riker.
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This episode is pretty good and interesting in dealing with the notion of how we'd deal with ourselves. There's an interesting dialogue between Data (who, really, *has* met his "duplicate" but forget that for now) and Worf over how Cmdr. and Lt. Riker are so antagonistic towards one another and Worf supposes that it's because they see in the other things they don't like about themselves. Namely in this case we could say that this is Troi. Lieutenant Riker resents Commander Riker for turning down the happiness he sees the Commander turned down for the sake of his career, as well as the friendship he has with Troi and Commander sees in the Lieutenant the opportunity he now has to pursue Troi and as of then it seemed to be working.
Given the budget of a first-run syndication TV series and the time this was made in it does a good job of blending the two Rikers (Johnathon Frakes and a body double as well as split-screen photography) together. Particularly well done is a scene where Lt. Riker is working on a console on the floor and Cmdr. Riker works on the terminal while sitting in a chair. Good trick photography in using obstructions and good blocking in keeping the doubles from being fully seen on camera when both are seen at once. The few uses of split-screen shows the weaknesses of the process done on a TV-show budget in the 1990s, but looks better than other examples of similar techniques used in other episodes. The double used for Frakes also looks really good compared to doubles used for other characters in the past, notably Data.
Story-wise the show does a good job with the "dealing with yourself" angle and wish they played with it more, although Troi is a pretty big "node" in the Rikers' lives so it was a topic that had to breached.
I do have a problem with the "technobabble" used to explain the transporter duplicate. It's another case where it makes this all seem "too easy" and doesn't muddy it very much with a "this was a one in a billion shot, it'd never happen again." It seems radically... "simple" in how it happened. It also doesn't seem to explain where the matter for the duplicate Riker came from considering we'd be talking about trillions upon trillions upon trillions of joules of energy that'd need to be converted back into matter by *something* (we'll just assume the two transporters were linked together and it did the "hard work" but it still had to get a fuck-ton of energy from somewhere.)
But as a character piece it actually works pretty nicely.
It's too bad DS9 had to fuck it up. It would have been fine to just leave this "other Riker" out there somewhere furthering his career and so forth but DS9 decided to make him a Maquis sympathizer and Federation defector. I know a lot can happen when one lives by himself for 8-years but it sort-of suggests that our "own" Riker's loyalty to Starfleet is tenuous and easily tipped.
But, if anything else it does the "collision of clones" concept better than "Nemesis" did with Picard meeting his -true- clone in Shinzon.
It's small, but I liked our cold-open with the jazz-concert in 10-Forward. It just seemed like a fun little evening and thing showing what these people do with their down-time and it's something nice to see them bopping along listening to Jazz music -centuries behind them, but I digress- while wearing civilian clothing. Riker's fellow bad members also looked like a neat bunch, there's just something sort-of cool and it says something about the "integrated culture" to see an alien playing keyboard to a centuries old generic (public domain) Earth jazz song.
Overall, a pretty good episode and Lieutenant Riker was also, somehow, a lot more interesting than our own Commander Riker. I've heard before that it was "proposed" that Commander Riker would be trapped on the station and Lieutenant Riker would have taken over. I'm not sure how "true" this is or even how well it would have worked. First of all, it'd mean a lot of hand-waving to accept that Lt. Riker would be immediately given a promotion and allowed to continue on in Commander's place but also undo the last six seasons of any development or events in Commander Riker's life and character.
It *could* have been interesting but contrived and frustrating in someways too.
Hmmm.... I *do* wonder if they ever told the elder Riker that he now has two sons with bizarre chair-mounting procedures and who goes through doors like he wants to bat them down with his forehead.
