DESCENT, PART 2


Well, I thought that part one was average, and part two was pretty much the
same.  Maybe a little worse.

"Descent" as a whole was a story which rested on several worthwhile ideas
(Data gains actual emotions; the Borg become individuals), but these ideas
seemed to be too much for the story to contain, and it ended up being
basically a simple adventure story, and a rather silly one at that.

The silliest part began in part one:  The Enterprise tracks Data to an
uninhabited planet.  They find the shuttle he stole, but no sign of him.  So
they beam down the majority of the crew (a thousand people!) to search for
him, leaving Dr. Crusher in command of a skeleton crew.  (I wonder if this was
in their job descriptions?  "Search unknown alien world for single person
while under probable threat from Starfleet's deadliest foe."  Hope they got
paid overtime...)  Of course, none of this makes much sense; if anything, Dr.
Crusher should have been on the planet (in case of injury) and Picard should
have stayed on board.  But, we're stuck with it.

In part two, the Borg arrive, as one would expect.  Dr. Crusher hurriedly
starts beaming people up to leave.  Having rescued MOST of the crew in only a
few tens of seconds, the ship departs.  But then Crusher decides to disobey
orders, leaving a log buoy to alert Starfleet, and heading back into danger to
save the remainder of the crew.

This succeeds, although it seems to me that it took longer to beam up the last
hundred-odd people than it did to grab the first seven hundred-plus.  (Oops.)
Then the Enterprise, its warp knocked out, goes off to dive into the sun,
hoping that an experimental metaphasic shield program that Geordi had been
playing with (and of which there just happens to be a copy lying around which
can interact perfectly with the Enterprise's shields) can protect them.  It
does (can you say "deus-ex-machina"?).  They then cause an explosion of sorts
on the face of the sun to destroy the Borg ship, just before the shielding
gives out (can you say "deus-ex-machina squared"?).

This whole sequence was just silly flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants (or
jumpsuits, I guess) adventure.  It's not even worth throwing anything at the
screen, since it's hard to believe it was meant to be taken seriously.  Oh,
and we also get some trite dialogue between a rookie ensign and a haughty
lieutenant; the sort of stuff I'd expect in a bad B-grade space fantasy.

On the planet, all our other heroes are coping with the Borg.  Riker and Worf
discover Hugh's faction of the Borg (the ones not conned into following Lore),
who are unwilling to help them defeat Lore.  This is somewhat understandable,
given their position.  They do offer to show our heroes a route to rescue our
other heroes (who have been captured by Lore's Borg), though it seems like a
lot of this discussion and scouting out the route takes place off-camera,
which is strange.

It's in here that we see elements of the Borg-as-individuals idea being too
big for TNG to handle.  That the Borg who rescued Hugh would suffer breakdowns
from being able to think as individuals is quite reasonable.  But except for a
token scene where Lore coaxes a soldier back to his side, it's not really
brought across very well in front of us.  For the most part the Borg are
acting as they always have.  It's difficult to understand what point all this
served other than as a plot device to place them under Lore's control, and
provide the standard-issue "coming out from under the yoke of oppression"
allusion.

And the elements of the story dealing with Data and Lore are also rather
shallow.  Our captured heroes (Picard, LaForge and Troi) contrive some way to
nudge Data out from under Lore's control, but we've seen all this before; it's
nothing more than the "trusted villain wrestles with doubts and finally
refuses to go along with the bad guys any more" bit.  Sometimes this can be
played effectively, but this offers nothing new.

We're also not given many new insights into Data's emotions.  He spends most
of his time snarling, and never shows any really dramatic displays of the new
"toys" Lore has given him. At the end of the episode, there's the clear point
made that Data already HAS emotions of a sort, since he's willing to forego
the use of the emotion chip because emotions almost cause him to kill his
friends.  (This brings up the interesting point that the TNG creators seem to
waffle a lot as to whether Data is "a toaster" or not.  "In Theory" seemed to
definitively state that he is, but "The Most Toys" and this last bit here tell
a different story.  The two approaches seem completely incompatible to me, and
lead me to believe - or, rather, reinforce my belief - that TNG doesn't really
have anything to say or any direction to go in, but just muddles around from
one gee-whiz idea to another.)

I think that the story would have been better served by cutting Lore out
altogether and coming up with some more inventive reason for why Data would
start gaining emotions around the Borg.  The emotion-laced Borg could have
splintered into several groups (one of them being the pirate-like group that
the Enterprise originally encountered), and somehow Data could be being
affected by their network communications.  This would have provided, I think,
a better foundation for exploring the effects of emotions both on Data and on
the previously emotion-vacant Borg.

I was also disappointed in Lore.  Mainly, something about the whole way Brent
Spiner played him seemed off to me, but I can't put my finger on just what.
Spiner's Data seemed fine (though less so in the Data-as-villain scenes), but
Lore just didn't.  Maybe it was because we never have much of a look at Lore's
character or motivations, either.  (Nor do we find out exactly what he's
trying to accomplish with his experiments, which serve no purpose in the story
than as a torture mechanism.)

The episode was at its best when it devolved into outright mayhem at the end -
like I said, I didn't feel it was much more than a simple adventure story, so
the "payoff" was the high point of the show.  The standoff between Data and
Lore was well-done, especially the staging of the moment where Data shoots
Lore.  (Did anyone notice that Data has essentially killed his brother here,
perhaps bringing to fruition his lethal capabilities hinted at in "The Most
Toys".)

On the whole, I can't really say that "Descent, Part II" was a disappointment,
because my expectations were not especially high after part I.  It was a
more-or-less adequate adventure yarn, docked a few points for the outright
ridiculousness of Dr. Crusher's misadventures in space.  Given a choice
between this and SeaQuest, it would be a tough choice.  (Maybe I'd just go and
finish the James P. Hogan novel I'm reading.)

Season cliffhangers just aren't what they used to be...

Grade: C-