Kevin Arnold’s sister is a Q?!
This is a review of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “True Q.” If you have
not seen this episode, and you don’t want to know what happens in it, be warned: spoilers
beyond this point!
And, I acknowledge that I already spoiled the fact that Kevin Arnold’s sister is a
Q, so hopefully that didn’t ruin anybody’s day.
The Enterprise is on its way to Tagra IV to help the people of that planet deal with their
severely polluted atmosphere.
But first, they stop off at a starbase to load supplies and to pick up Dr. Crusher’s
new intern, Amanda Rogers.
Picard welcomes her aboard like “I realize you’ll be an unpaid intern, Miss Rogers,
but remember: since Earth switched to a moneyless economy, we’ve all been unpaid interns!
Ha ha ha!”
Dr. Crusher’s like “He makes that joke every time, just smile and back outta the
room.”
Commander Riker escorts Amanda to her quarters, and Amanda seems to have the hots for him
right away — not that I can blame her, great galoot of mostly non-toxic masculinity that
he is.
She makes some off-hand remark to Riker about how the quarters are so roomy she could have
brought her dogs with her.
After Riker leaves, there’s suddenly a bunch of puppies!
How adorably unusual!
Amanda snuggles with the puppies for a second, then says “Okay, time to go.”
And the puppies are like “No, please, don’t send us to oblivion!
We only want to give you unconditional love!”
But the next second, they evaporate!
After some small talk in a science lab with Dr. Crusher, which establishes that Amanda
is adopted and that her biological parents were killed when she was a young child, Amanda
brings a couple of suitcases full of tricorders to the cargo bay for the Tagran relief effort.
While she’s there, she notices a barrel on a high shelf about to fall and hit Commander
Riker — oh no, he’s gonna get Worfed!
Luckily, Amanda does a little swish motion with her hand, and the barrel swerves in mid-air
and lands safely off-camera where it probably crushes a crewman who was crouching just behind
that shuttlecraft — who cares?
Later, Amanda is in engineering with Geordi and Data when all of a sudden alarms start
going off and it looks like they’re about to have a warp core breach.
And then they do have a warp core breach!
But Amanda holds out her hands like she’s about to summon her dinozord.
That doesn’t work — obviously — she doesn’t have her power morpher — but she
does succeed in stopping the warp core breach.
Picard, Crusher, Geordi and Troi discuss the situation in the observation lounge, and Q
pops in to inform them that the reason Amanda was able to stop the warp core breach is because
she is a Q. Crusher protests that Amanda’s medical scans establish her as being human,
but Q explains that her parents — her birth parents — were Q who had assumed human form
in order to live on Earth.
While in their human forms they conceived a child — in the human way — and the child,
Amanda, was born appearing for all the world to be an ordinary human, but holding the power
of Q inside her.
Now that she’s reached young adulthood and her powers are beginning to manifest, Q has
been dispatched by the Continuum to teach her how to control her powers and, ideally,
convince her to return to the Continuum with him.
After a private chat with Q in the ready room, Picard reluctantly agrees to introduce Q to
Amanda, and to pretend for her sake that he doesn’t despise Q.
Crusher explains the situation to Amanda, tells her about Q coming to talk to her.
Amanda asks “What’s this Q guy like?” and Crusher says “I mean, from an in-story
vantage point he’s pretty much the worst, but the audience mostly seems to really like
him.”
The first meeting between Q and Amanda doesn’t go well — he gets pushy, so she uses her
powers to throw him against a wall.
Q decides to take a gentler approach — but on his way to meet with Amanda again, he gets
stopped by a shade who has somehow briefly escaped from the underworld — actually,
it’s another Q, shadowtiming in from the continuum to check on Q’s progress.
Q says “There have been some complications, but we may not have to terminate the girl.”
“May not have to terminate” — that sounds optimistic!
Q continues teaching Amanda about her powers — he shows her how to conjure a ghostly
image of her dead birth parents, he leads her on a game of hide and seek throughout
the ship that ends up with them standing on the outer hull of the Enterprise, he helps
her cheat while working on a science experiment for Dr. Crusher.
Amanda seems to be gaining more confidence and control of her powers — so much so that
when she’s in Ten Forward and spots Commander Riker arriving for a date at the next table,
she uses her Q mojo to whisk them both away to a romantic 19th century fantasy.
Riker’s like “Oh no, I’m back on North and South!
It wasn’t my idea to sell the army those defective canons — it was all my scheming
wife’s doing!”
Amanda walks up to him like “Want this?”
And Riker’s like “You’re nice, but nah, I don’t like you like that.”
Amanda’s like “Damn your selective horniness!” and uses her powers to make Riker love her,
but she finds it hollow — like, immediately, she doesn’t even take him for a test drive
first — and sends him back.
While all this is going on, Data has discovered something odd about the deaths of Amanda’s
birth parents: it seems they died in a tornado — a tornado that appeared directly over
their house, and disappeared immediately after they were killed.
That’s peculiar.
Picard confronts Q about this, asking point-blank if the Q Continuum executed Amanda’s parents,
and Q’s like “Yep!
We told ‘em if they wanted to live as humans, they couldn’t use their Q powers anymore,
but they kept using their Q powers, so we merc’d ‘em.
And if Amanda doesn’t want to come back to the Continuum and live as one of us, we
might just merc her, too, and what are you gonna do about it?”
What Picard does about it is tell Amanda what the deal is.
A pissed off Amanda calls out Q and demands to know what gave the other Q the right to
execute her parents — and what gives him the right to decide whether she gets to live?
Q’s like “Superior morality.”
And that sets Picard off, and he launches into an impassioned monologue about how human
morality is better than Q morality by default because as far as he can tell, the Q aren’t
guided by any moral principles at all!
Q shakes his head and says “You know, Jean-Luc, sometimes I think the only reason I come here
is to listen to these wonderful speeches of yours” — which is a great example of how
a show can do a self-referential joke without having the characters talk like fans of the
show rather than characters in the show — just saying — and Q also says “Relax, you two
— we have decided not to kill Amanda!
Say it with me: ‘Thank you, Q.’”
But there’s a catch — Amanda has to make a choice.
She can either come to the Continuum and exist fully as a Q, or she can remain here and live
as a human — but if she chooses to live as a human, she must refrain from using her
powers.
It’s more difficult to resist than she might think, and if she’s unable to resist . . . It's
mercin’ time!
Amanda says “I can resist!”
And then the Enterprise receives a distress call from Tagra IV, where their reactor is
about to blow, which would kill thousands of people and I guess doom the planet to permanent
environmental disaster.
So, Amanda uses her Q powers to fix the reactor, and then goes further than that, completely
cleaning the polluted atmosphere of the planet.
Amanda turns to the others and says “Yeah, okay, I can’t resist after all.
I’m a Q. I’m gonna go be a Q now.”
And that’s it!
“True Q” is a forgotten Q episode in a way.
It’s not a bad episode — but, it’s not a particularly good episode, either.
It’s kinda just . . . okay.
It goes on, it’s watchable, and then it ends kind of abruptly on an anticlimactic
but predictable note.
It’s a lot like an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, actually.
Nothing terrible, nothing remarkable, just kinda there.
Perfectly acceptable Star Trek.
It’s understandable that it’s been lost in the shuffle among the other, more notable
Q episodes, but, despite its overall mediocrity, “True Q” does have its moments.
John de Lancie is terrific as usual as Q, and this time around he gets to play with
a couple of fresh scene partners.
I love Q and Picard as much as anyone — I think they’re one of the best double acts
Star Trek ever came up with — but in this episode, Q also gets a lot of screen time
with Amanda, and that pairing has an entirely different dynamic.
His scenes with Amanda show Q to be both creepier and more unlikable than we’ve ever seen
him, and also more of a patient mentor than we’ve ever imagined he could be.
He’s pushy, he’s demanding, he’s short-tempered, he flagrantly invades Amanda’s personal
space in a way that is a bit uncomfortable to watch sometimes.
But, when he’s in Coach Q mode, he’s also encouraging, reassuring, and effective — she
learns how to use her powers pretty quickly, though admittedly most of that is due more
to narrative expediency than to Q’s abilities as an instructor.
Still, as it bounces back and forth between antagonistic and pedagogical, the interplay
between Q and Amanda is always interesting.
We also get some amusingly tense exchanges between Q and Dr. Crusher.
We could tell from their scene together in the previous episode “Deja Q” that they
don’t like each other, and that mutual animosity is really on display here.
Crusher feels protective of Amanda and wants to make sure Q isn’t taking advantage of
her, and Q regards Crusher as an interloper who should stand aside and let him and Amanda
handle their business.
Q turns Crusher into a barking dog at one point, complains to Picard about how shrill
she has become, and yells at her for asking Amanda to perform menial human chores which,
Amanda being a Q, are beneath her.
It’s tense, it’s caustic, it’s sometimes funny, and it’s a reminder that Q is not
a cuddly teddy bear, despite the warm and nostalgic way in which many fans tend to remember
him — he’s an antagonist, he’s often very unpleasant — he’s funny to us, we’re
supposed to like him as a character, but he’s not a very nice person.
The other notable guest star in the episode, Olivia d’Abo, turns in a solid performance
as Amanda.
But, the writing of her character is an example of one of the things that makes this, despite
its strengths, a generally underwhelming episode.
The concept of Amanda is a lot more fascinating than Amanda herself.
She’s a human who is actually a Q, whose parents were also Q, who were executed by
the rest of the Q via targeted tornado.
That’s quite a backstory.
But in the present, Amanda’s just . . . kind of nice.
When Q tells her that Q are omnipotent and can have or do anything they want, her first
question is “Do you use your power to help others?”
There’s one scene where she indicates to Dr. Crusher that she’s considering using
her powers to bring her parents back to life, but other than that she doesn’t seem the
least bit tempted to use her powers selfishly.
The most questionable thing she does with her powers is to briefly indulge her innocent
schoolgirl crush on Riker.
She’s pleasant, and bland, and it never feels like a possibility that her Q powers
will change her or tempt her into becoming a less upstanding character, and because of
that the episode doesn’t really have any stakes.
Even the threat that she’ll be executed like her parents never feels like a legitimate
danger, and Q himself tosses it aside before Amanda is even presented with her final choice.
Will she become a full-fledged Q who uses her powers for benevolent purposes like purifying
polluted planets?
Or will she renounce her powers and continue being a smart and hard working young woman
with a bright future?
The suspense is killing me!
The plot unfolds more or less in a straight line, no twists, no reversals, no surprises,
no real point being made — there’s some half-hearted nodding in the general direction
of environmental consciousness with the situation on Tagra IV — Amanda wonders aloud why people
would allow their atmosphere to get so polluted when it would be so much easier to just regulate
the emission of the pollutants — good question!
Not what the episode’s about!
And, Amanda’s experience of realizing who she truly is and choosing ultimately to live
as her authentic self rather than as the person everyone, including her, thought she was can
be read as a metaphor for any number of real-life experiences, but the episode doesn’t seem
at all interested in guiding us toward any particular interpretation or relevant message
as far as that goes.
It’s an inoffensive episode with a few high points sprinkled in here and there, but nothing
much to say, and then it’s over.
Those are my thoughts on “True Q.” What do you think of this episode?
Please share your thoughts with me in the comments.
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Please join me again next week for another retro review.
This batch of Q-episodes continues as we hop over for a quick stop at Deep Space Nine to
review Q’s one and only appearance on that show: “Q-Less.”
See you then!
Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!