This was by far my favorite early TNG episode as a kid. It had the mysterious door to nowhere, it had a dead astronaut in a very 2001 looking scene, and it has Data gambling in a cowboy hat, what isn't to love? Well, there are sadly some issues. The premise of aliens destroying a bunch of humans and making this construction to keep the survivor going is a bit silly. How they managed to recreate the locations and characters from this novel so completely but are unable to understand even the most basic things about humans is silly. Especially since they had to figure out how to make decades of food from nothing but the descriptions in a terrible novel.
The episode begins with the Enterprise investigating a report from a Klingon ship of rubble orbiting in the atmosphere of a planet. Lets just stop here and talk briefly about how poor the writers understanding of an orbit is. This debris is supposed to have been in place for at least a few hundred years, in orbit in the atmosphere. The best way to be sure something won't stay in orbit is to have it touch atmosphere even a little, let alone to be IN the atmosphere. But I digress, the beam a piece of debris over and it has a NASA logo on it! Further scans reveal a small area of the surface of the otherwise horribly hostile planet with a breathable air bubble and without the horrible winds on the rest of the planet. Riker beams down with Worf and Data and they find a featureless black void broken only by a revolving door with the letter R on the glass and light coming from "inside."
Riker decides to investigate and they go in and find a vibrant casino with gamblers and a manager who is eager to check them in. He recognizes them as the three foreigners he was expecting and gives them some chips along with their room key. Data goes and starts playing blackjack while Riker and Worf look around. They find they are no longer in contact with the bridge and when they try to leave they are back where they started. They ask the manager by he isn't helpful on the topic of leaving. There is also a subplot going on about the bellboy in a conflict with a gangster over a woman. Data detects human DNA in the floor above and when they investigate they find a dead astronaut. His diary explains he was there for 30 years before dying and that his crew was killed by the aliens accidentally. They made the casino from a novel on the spacecraft that Worf finds in a drawer.
Data scans the novel and they start trying to find a way out of there. On the Enterprise Picard is trying everything he can including reading the novel. The plot with the gangster plays out in front of them with the bellboy getting shot and the gangster leaving through the front door. Riker asks Picard how the gangster did it and Picard answers that it was in the book. Riker figures out that they are the foreign investors who buy the casino and leave in the novel and decides they need to play their part. Data breaks the bank at the craps table and they by the place and get the hell out of there.
Review: This wasn't quite the tour de force that I remembered, but it is still a lot of fun to watch. So many TNG episodes take place entirely on the bridge that having some change of scenery was really nice. I suppose this could have been a TOS episode and worked just about as well, but it would have gotten a decent rating there as well.
7 out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment