Character – By the time of Starship Mine TNG has been running on all cylinders for a handful of seasons and knows exactly who its characters are and what they each bring to the show and that is why the cold open is such a delight. The Enterprise is being evacuated, Picard is trying to keep everything on track and his crew are constantly hindering him from getting from A to B in a West Wing style walk and talk sequence. Trust Data to have the best moment with his attempts at small talk (Picard’s ‘Mr Data, are you alright?’ is perfect). And look at the smug look on Worf’s face when he beats LaForge from being excused the Ambassadors reception. These characters have a wonderfully natural rapport at this point.
This is late enough in TNG’s run that Picard walking around the empty Ready Room and stroking the wood of the security station could be seen as a first step in allowing the audience to let go of this ship. Season seven would hardly see TNG go out on a high and so you can see this as the point where Picard acknowledges that we’ve had a lot fun here, but things are about to be wound up.
Data’s attempts to mimic the over the top small talk of ‘Hutch’ are delightful. Spiner truly gets how to play comedy on this show.
Think back to the early scenes of TNG and try and imagine Picard as an action hero. The two things just don’t correlate. He was always the envoi, the thinker, the arbitrator. Somewhere along the line Patrick Stewart saw his co-stars having an awful lot of fun playing hero and started making demands for more action and romance and less diplomacy. Stewart is a committed performer and manages to make the unlikely scenario of stepping into Bruce Willis’ shoes and taking down an attempted coup on the Enterprise with a gun seem perfectly natural. It is episodes like Starship Mine and Gambit that allow Picard to loosen up and play action hero that made the transition to the big screen and scenes such as his muscle man trawl through the Enterprise in First Contact to take down the Borg much more palatable. If Picard had been all talk on TNG and then all action in the movies it would have felt jarring but stories such as this truly help to bridge the gap.
Performance – It is a problem that Tim Russ turned up in several episodes as different characters before finally securing a regular part in Voyager. Whether he is growling his way through a Klingon part in in Invasive Procedures or playing Die Hard in Starship Mine, it is impossible to not think of Tuvok whilst he is on screen.
Terrible Dialogue – ‘Profit. This is all about profit’ – says Picard, disappointed, but really what was he expecting? Five minutes from the end of the episode and the villains of the piece needed some kind of a motive. A shame that it had to be something this unimpressive, but it is the de facto motive for anything in drama when nothing better can be thought of.
Production – An episode like Starship Mine needs a great lightning supervisor to bring the sets to life as atmospherically as possible to make the action as visually dynamic as it can possibly and Jonathan West is more than up to the task.
Alternatively, a criticism that you can aim at this story and the show in general is that the aesthetic is all a little too clean. The sets are all pristine and characterless. They never feel entirely lived in. Thank God dirty, grungy, falling apart at the seams DS9 came along when it did to represent a real workplace environment.
All credit to Cliff Bole. He cuts the latter half of this episode from scene to scene so well that I was perfectly convinced that Picard was traversing a real spaceship rather than just crawling about on some standing sets. It takes real skill to fix the camera in the right spots to suggest forward momentum and movement in these ship bound episodes and not all directors have the chops to pull it off.
The music is a complete disappointment but then it was throughout these middle years of Berman era of Trek. If you’re going to tell an action adventure you need a rousing score to get the blood pumping. Think The Way of the Warrior or The Adversary. But instead we get the usual dreary latter TNG music; orchestral, occasionally suspenseful but never threatening to bleed into the action and get your pulse racing.
Best moment – The Baryon sweep is kept in the background of the episode for added suspense but I loved how at the last minute when the thieves were defeated it proved to be one last hurdle before Picard could relax. You can feel the panic in his voice as he orders the base to deactivate the sweep.
I wish they hadn’t done that – Watch as Riker diverts Hutch and Data into each other’s paths so they can distract each other and save everyone else from both of them is funny, but it does highlight an issue that I have with TNG and how it views characters that don’t conform to the norm. Both in the writing, and in the regular’s performances there is an element of the regular cast treating people who are socially idiosyncratic as being beneath them or a chore to be around. Reg Barclay, Mrs Troi, Hutch…you can compile quite a list. How Riker and Troi and Picard look down their noses at these characters displays an conceit that is quite discomforting. This arrogance mostly dissipates on DS9 and Voyager, where characters differences are mostly celebrated rather than injured.
A reason to watch this episode again – I don’t buy it when people write off Starship Mine as a piece of action fluff alone because there is enough character work in the first fifteen minutes to give this piece a whole lot of charm. Voyager attempted to carbon copy this episode in Macrocosm but forget to add any of the delightful comedy moments and genuine dynamism that might have sweetened the pot. The Baryon sweep working its way through the ship means that Picard is on a timer to try and release his ship from the rogues on board, which adds a layer of suspense to proceedings. A lot of people might come to TNG as comfort viewing (especially if this was the show that got them into Star Trek as a child) and this is the kind of episode that you can relax into entirely. It’s not deep and meaningful, but it fills out 45 minutes with plenty of action and excitement and gives Picard centre stage in the most unlikely of stories. With Patrick Stewart at the helm, this was always going to be an easy watch. Looking at the episodes around it (Birthright, The Chase, Suspicions, Aquiel) this is one of the better entries in late season six.
***1/2 out of *****
Clue for the next episode -
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