4.10 The Loss In her office, Deanna contacts Crusher complaining of dizziness, but Crusher has a tonne of minor injuries to deal with so she tells Deanna to hang tight. On the bridge, the Enterprise crew are probing their situation and realising that they may well be stuck. Without Wesley to solve the problem, Geordi and Data get down to some serious computer modelling and reveal that the sensor ghosts weren’t ghosts (disarm the Oujia Torpedoes, Mr. Worf) but a swarm of 2-dimensional beings that have trapped the Enterprise in their wake due to some science. An urgent meeting of the senior staff is called, but part-way through Troi realises that she can’t sense the usual mixture of boredom of confusion from anyone. Her empathic sense has disappeared! She’s mind-blind! Crusher wastes no time in declaring her situation probably temporary, but also maybe not, and Troi enters the first stage of grief: denial. She insists she’ll be fine. Since Picard’s attempt to appeal to her failed, Riker turns up to essentially make fun of her condition while she articulates how hard it is for her to operate in a world of cyphers. In sick bay she tells Beverly that it’s probably the Doctor’s fault for not getting to her sooner, then she heads to Ten-Forward to have it out with Guinan who claims she’s planning to apply for her old job. Clearly Troi has entered the next stage of grief: dickishness. Back on the bridge Picard decides it’s time to try and figure out an exit strategy because the 2D thingies are about to drag the Enterprise into a “cosmic string” (essentially an off-brand black hole). Worf convinces a reluctant Captain to let him shoot the thingies, but it doesn’t work. With no alternatives left, Picard asks Troi to collaborate with Data and figure out the psychology of the beings. After Geordi some science the 2D thingies move, allowing the Enterprise to break free of the phenomena. As it moves away, Troi’s mind-powers return. She was just overloaded by the number of lifeforms out there! She tells everyone how happy the 2D thingies are that they can go to the cosmic string, which is where they live. The newly restored Troi apologises to her friends for shouting at them all, and Picard reinstates her at vastly reduced pay. A happy ending for everyone! TNG WTF: Troi’s counselling remit apparently extends to secreting the personal items of dead crew members around her… office? Studio? Surgery? Whatever the hell that place is. Seems… odd. And speaking of odd, Riker’s attempt to comfort Troi involves calling her “aristocratic” and bragging about how the playing field has finally become level. I guess that’s why the ship needs a Counsellor at all, if that’s the level of empathy Starfleet’s finest show. TNG LOL: Troi gives Crusher an ice cold burn about how she was in sickbay “treating skinned elbows” while Deanna was lying passed out on her office floor. Except when she contacted Crusher she described her symptoms as “a little dizzy” with no mention of the extreme, crippling pain she experienced. Also, a truly immortal moment: As platitude-spouting feeling-observer Deanna Troi suggests to Data that “we have to get two dimensional.” Troi, we can safely say that if anyone knows anything about being two-dimensional, it’s you. (This isn’t entirely fair. She also has a bad relationship with her mother and a good relationship with chocolate, and that means she has more characters traits than all of the Voyager cast combined.) Mistakes and Minutiae: This is the only episode in which Troi does anything useful for anyone other than herself. Who’s That Face?: Ensign Brooks is played by Kim Braden, who also appears as “Elise Picard”, the Captain’s Nexus-wife in Star Trek: Generations. Captain’s Log: Troi episodes don’t have a great reputation, and this is probably why. She spends most of the episode veering between wildly inconsistent emotional states and acting hugely unreasonably to everyone, so it’s tough to feel much empathy for her (ironic, right?) It’s good that she comes up with the solution to the problem, and it’s not so dumb that it should’ve been obvious to anyone else, but at the same time it’s wildly out of character for Troi to actually solve a problem, much less be asked to do so. But hey, when Wesley’s gone, where else can you look? And while it’s not an awful episode, by the standards of this season it represents a pretty big drop in quality. No-one acts very sympathetically towards anyone else and the threat to the ship lacks jeopardy for a lot of the story. Troi’s lack of empathy could’ve been conveyed better, too – at one point she says something like “you can’t know what this is like for me” and she’s right. We can’t. And no-one has even tried to come up with a way of showing it. My kingdom for an ambitious director. Read James’ review of the previous episode, Final Mission, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
