The Loss

The Enterprise is beset by two-dimensional beings... and by an astonishing coincidence, the aliens are 2D too

Our less than riveting teaser involves Counsellor Troi forcing a member of the crew to break down in tears and cry on her shoulder. Meanwhile, Captain Picard is talking about riding horses, which is considerably cheaper than showing him doing it. Suddenly, Troi is struck with a look of intense torment, agony, discomfort (see: pain) and passes out in her cabin. Are we thrilled yet? Well we’d better be because it doesn’t get any better than this. I mean, our old friend random Enterprise malfunctions is back (for at least the the third time) but for the most part this story is Troi dealing with the loss of her empathic powers, hence the episode title.

The Enterprise ends up being dragged towards a cosmic string fragment by two dimensional aliens, while Troi shatters into a million pieces, before rebuilding herself just in time to save the ship from its unremarkable plight. It’s almost enough to make you wish Wesley was still here to solve all the crew's problems... Almost.

Words

Remember back in “The Survivors” when I heralded the new cliché of ‘Troi in agony’? Well here we are again.

And unlike that episode, there’s so much less to be interested in here. Apparently, Rick Berman pushed heavily for this episode thinking it would be fascinating to be the ‘one eyed counsellor in the kingdom of the blind’, and then lose your sight because, hey, nobody can really understand why you’re so upset! Michael Piller, it seems, was less interested, and observed that the idea of Troi losing her empathic powers had been pitched every season (a neat trick given that this is only Piller’s second season, but let’s set that aside). Piller admitted the only reason this story earned a green light was that “we needed a Troi show”. In other words, the production crew can still not be bothered to give Troi a good story at this point in the run.

Actually, it seems the writers toyed with the idea of making Troi's loss of powers permanent, but they chickened out. As Piller recalled:

The bottom line for me was that these shows work because the journey is interesting and that what she learns and what she goes through has to be interesting and involving and, ultimately, educational in that we are showing off the stages of someone who has a serious disability, and what they go through when they are suffering this.

Honestly, they have enough trouble with Troi at the best of times, I can’t imagine ditching her one interesting feature would have helped.

For a story with three writers, it would be nice if any aspect of this came out strongly, but it’s a bit of a mess from top to bottom. One of the writers, Hilary J. Bader, was an intern, and she was given the lacklustre sci-fi plot, while the other two writers are something of a mystery to me, and their work on this story is rather unimpressive. I’m particularly disappointed in the 2D aliens, because Flatland is such an incredible book that I feel that much more could have been achieved here.

Acting Roles

“Right now, I feel as two-dimensional as our friends out there...”

Marina Sirtis has to carry this episode, and if she doesn’t succeed it’s not entirely her fault, since the screenplay doesn’t quite give her the scaffolding to make it work. I also have to point out, pretty much every other member of the regular cast has been given some solid material to hone their acting skills on up to this point - Jonathan Frakes is finally coming into his own as Riker, for instance. But Sirtis has been kicked to the floor again and again and given nothing. I really feel that she was handled very poorly by the writing team, although it does start to get better after this.

Also, she has a few good scenes in this one. Although she doesn't quite sell her conversation with Riker it’s still a great exchange, and her scene with Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan works nicely and Sirtis delivers the emotional content of this material very well.

It’s not just good chemistry with Goldberg, it’s that the writers are always asking Sirtis to act hysterically, which she’s not good at (and why should she be?), while she is understandably much better at behaving credibly. There’s a lesson in this performance that the writing team needed to learn much quicker.

All that said, Sirtis got a lot of love from people with disabilities for this episode. She later remarked:

The handicapped people came up and thanked me. That’s exactly the way they feel, it’s the way I expressed their emotion. “The Loss” was very, very popular.

Another fan was the episode’s director, Chip Chalmers:

An episode with some character conflict. There was that scene where Deanna went storming into sickbay and really got it on with Beverly, “If I were you, I wouldn't have sat on my butt and would have been trying to do something about this”, and she goes storming out. People who saw that scene loved it.

Apart from the final appearance of Mary Kohnert’s Ensign Tess Allenby (remember her? She was in the last episode for the first time)…

…the other guest star this week is Kim Braden’s Ensign Janet Brooks, who has to prop up Sirtis as counsellor.

I really wish they’d used part of the regular cast instead, but Braden is okay in this role. If you’re old enough, you might remember her playing Anne of Green Gables in the 1970s adaptations. As for Star Trek, she will be back to play - of all things - Picard's fantasy wife in Star Trek Generations!

That’s quite the promotion!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

This is a bottle show, of course, so there’s not much to enjoy in the special effects. Even the animated Okudagram to show off the two-dimensional aliens is pretty unimpressive.

I quite like firing the spread of photon torpedoes in Predator-vision, though.

On the whole, this episode isn’t about special effects, it’s about Troi. But that’s not why it doesn't work. It doesn’t work because the writing team can’t write Troi when she does have powers, and have no idea what to do with her without them. There is, however, lurking in the corners of the episode, a few signs that better things will come for poor Marina Sirtis, but we still have a long way to go.