What Do You Get When You Have Three Funny People And One Crummy Script? "The Outrageous Okona"

The Good: Good actors, I suppose
The Bad: Horrible characters, Deathly unfunny, Ridiculously simplistic, Utterly nonsensical
The Basics: In one of the series' most obvious attempts to be funny, "The Outrageous Okona" fails miserably at bringing humor or character development, wasting both time and talent.


Weaker than the entire first season, the opening episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation's second season fail to innovate in any real or interesting way, nearly destroying even a die hard fan's appreciation of this classic show. Continuing that trend is a truly awful episode "The Outrageous Okona." To date, there are very few people who have not tried to exploit their relationship to Star Trek. Two people who have never made much noise about their presence on the show are Billy Campbell (later of Once And Again and The 4400 fame) and Saturday Night Live veteran Joe Piscopo. Both are featured in this episode.

Billy Campbell (credited as William O. Campbell) plays Okona, a rogue ship captain who owns his own vessel, keeps his own hours and is basically a star-bound swashbuckler. When he needs repairs, the Enterprise comes to his rescue. He returns the favor by flirting with as many female officers as possible and seducing them. I suppose it's a fair trade. The Saturday Night Live veteran plays The Comic, a holodeck comedian that is conceived to teach Data about humor. When two unfriendly neighbor planets come in search of Okona, things take a turn for the faux-menacing and everything gets resolved.

Okay, this is easily one of the low points of the series. You have the wonderful comedic resource of Whoopi Goldberg on the cast playing deadpan to the hilarious (out of character) Brent Spiner. The scenes with Guinan and Data are grinworthy amusing at best. The scenes on the holodeck where Data attempts a stand up routine are just plain horrible. Whoever wrote this episode had no sense of comedy. The character The Comic is using 1950s humor and delivering it poorly. It's flat out stupid to believe that the jokes he tells would be considered funny in the 24th Century; they're passe now. More than that, they illustrate a lack of imagination on the part of the writing staff. Such obviously dates and human-centric humor pulls us out of the time and place Star Trek The Next Generation creates and reminds us "this is just a television show." Great television never does that.

I think the reason Billy Campbell doesn't brag about his Trek affiliation is that his character is a caricature. Okona lacks depth, his words are cliches and his style is pretty much by the book of what one would expect for a space swashbuckler. There's a whole rivalry and annoyingly cryptic set of dialog between Okona and Worf that further detracts from both the character and the episode.

For fans of Star Trek The Next Generation this episode is a disappointment in that it trivializes Data and makes him seem stupid instead of just naive. This episode serves little purpose and the problem that finally presents itself (too late into the episode) is one that seems simple and is easily resolved. For anyone who doesn't watch Star Trek The Next Generation, this is just a 43 minute collection of absurd, un-funny lines without any real depth, character or meaning. In short, it's a waste of time for fan and casual viewer alike.

[Knowing that VHS is essentially a dead medium, it's worth looking into Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Complete Second Season on DVD, which is also a better economical choice than buying the VHS. Read my review of the sophomore season by clicking here!
Thanks!]

1/10

For other Star Trek episode or movie reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2010, 2008, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

There's A Reason Most Fans Don't Have Paris: "We'll Always Have Paris" Wavers.

The Good: Character development, Science fiction idea
The Bad: Overuse of science fiction plot, Acting
The Basics: A disappointing episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, "We'll Always Have Paris" uses the pretense of a romantic partner resurfacing to make a space anomaly episode.


I tend not to pay attention to fan lists of the best of any series. In the case of Star Trek The Next Generation, every few years, they do a survey and determine what people think are the top ten episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation. Usually, the people who publish the list give the top twenty-five episodes and the bottom ten as well. "We'll Always Have Paris" is an episode that never makes the top twenty-five and occasionally does make it to the bottom ten. Usually, it doesn't make the bottom ten by the order that no one remembers the episode exists, much less actively dislike it.

"We'll Always Have Paris" finds the Enterprise responding to a distress call from a remote planet where Professor Manheim is doing temporal experiments. The distress call comes shortly after the enterprise has experienced a moment of repeated time, where the crew experiences a moment of time replaying itself while they observe. Picard and company arrive, rescue the seriously ailing Professor Manheim and Picard learns two important things. The first is that Manheim's experiments are fracturing the fabric of time and space. The second and - I wish it had been more relevant - more important fact is that Manheim's wife is Jenice, a woman from Picard's past. The romantic involvement between Picard and Jenice ended when Picard did not show up for a meeting in Paris at a cafe he was supposed to make. The episode goes from this beginning to an almost exclusive attempt to rectify the temporal problem.

All right, to be fair to this episode, it does deal with Picard and Jenice in an intelligent, mature way. They both moved on from their childhoods and while this chance meeting sparks some genuine emotions and issues, the two deal with the issue like adults. That Picard left Jenice is somewhat mind-boggling, but as I said, they both moved on. The episode allows them a chance to experience some real closure with both Picard standing up and acknowledging his cowardice of his youth and Jenice getting validated by his apology.

Unfortunately, the episode spends less time on the emotional discourse between Picard and Jenice and instead focuses almost exclusively on the technical problem of the time ripples and the need to repair the fabric of space and time. The science fiction plot serves the episode less well than the romantic plot, especially considering the title of the episode refers to the romantic aspect.

This episode is very technical heavy and the science of it, while interesting - especially visually - is very distracting. It seems overbearing how much detail and attention is placed on the technical minutiae of the problem as opposed to the emotional impact of the past love coming back into Picard's life with complications.

In short, the real fault of the episode is not in what it presents, but how it presents it. A whole episode could - and should - be spent on the conflict between Picard and a former lover. In fact, it seems someone realized this later in the series by having Picard encounter another woman he could not have. While the circumstances are not the same as in "We'll Always Have Paris," "The Perfect Mate" in the fifth season better accomplishes an exploration of the human spirit.

As it is, what's missing from "We'll Always Have Paris" is spirit. This episode gets so bogged down in technical jargon and hammy overacting to get around the jargon that it loses all touch with real human emotion or have any sense of purpose beyond filling another hour of television.

There's a reason this episode doesn't chart. Time-space anomalies are done better ("Cause And Effect") and romance in Star Trek The Next Generation is done better ("The Perfect Mate").

[Knowing that VHS is essentially a dead medium, it's worth looking into Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Complete First Season on DVD, which is also a better economical choice than buying the VHS. Read my review of the debut season by clicking here!
Thanks!]

4/10

For other Star Trek reviews, please visit my index page for an organized listing.

© 2010, 2008, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




| | |