The Good: Acting, Basic idea of the "Alien of the Week."
The Bad: Character development, Plot
The Basics: Altering the only significant thing about Troi - her empathic powers - makes for a dull episode that even the good acting cannot save.
Star Trek The Next Generation makes only a few permutations on the characters throughout the years. Picard is fundamentally altered for an episode as he becomes Borg ("The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"), Riker gives up his pursuit of command (which is permanent), and Data gets more and more human. But most of the permutations end by the end of the episode in question. With Deanna Troi, there's not much one may do. Well, you can remove her empathic abilities and in "The Loss" that is exactly what happens.
When the Enterprise encounters a strange field, Troi loses her empathic abilities and is forced to rely on her actual counseling skills as opposed to her minor telepathic abilities. Counseling a widow, she becomes more and more frustrated and more and more angry with her crewmates. Troi becomes increasingly distraught until Riker cuts her down to size and she resigns her commission. Meanwhile, the rest of the bridge crew concludes that the field is a two dimensional lifeform and its heading toward a deadly cosmic string fragment that will destroy the ship if it is dragged along.
"The Loss" has one thing going for it: the acting. Marina Sirtis and Whoopi Goldberg give great performances as Deanna Troi and Guinan, respectively. Sirtis is angry and upset as Troi, maintaining a consistent thread of frustration throughout that makes Troi seem very real in her inner conflict. That works wonderfully. Goldberg has a brief scene that she plays with great calm and inner peace, an excellent foil to Sirtis' maniacal dilemmas.
On the other side, the idea of the two dimensional creature is an initially clever idea. It makes sense, an idea that has length and width, but no height. Quite clever.
Unfortunately, the execution of the idea is disappointing and insulting to our intelligence. To believe there is only one main sensor array on the Enterprise and the two dimensional beings are on that exact plane is ridiculous. The secondary arrays pick up the creature and it seems silly that they take so long to do that.
Even more disappointing is the character development. Troi becomes both angry and distraught with little cause. Deanna seems to have little cause for the amount of anger she pervades following the accident. It doesn't makes sense that a trained psychologist would go as berserk as Troi does for the loss of a power that does not even get utilized that often. In fact, one might think an empath would enjoy the vacation from reading others' emotions. "Tin Man" (reviewed here!) from the third season would seem to support that.
Outside Troi getting angry and whiny for forty minutes, there's not much to this episode. The plot outside Troi is thin and poorly executed or conceived.
More than that, there's nothing here for the non-fan of the series. Troi's anger is incomprehensible to those who do not know the character well. Add that to a thin plot and you have an episode that is difficult for anyone to watch. But, Troi needed her permutation episode and they went with what they had. Sigh.
[Knowing that VHS is essentially a dead medium, it's worth looking into Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Complete Fourth Season on DVD, which is also a better economical choice than buying the VHS. Read my review of the fourth season by clicking here!
Thanks!]
3/10
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© 2011, 2007, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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