This week on Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s the crossover you’ve been waiting for
as the Enterprise is visited by one of your favorite characters from Star Trek:
The Original Series! . . . No, not that one. . . . No . . . Keep going —
This is a review of the classic Star Trek:
The Next Generation episode “Relics.” 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 know Scotty is lots of people’s favorite character from TOS — it was just a
gag — I love Scotty. Not only that, I love this episode. I know that may surprise some of you,
considering how objectionable I usually find it when a new work leans heavily on nostalgia.
But as the great Roger Ebert used to say, the important thing is not what something is about,
but how it is about it. “Relics” does have some pretty heavy doses of nostalgia, but what makes
it a great episode is how it approaches that nostalgia, and what it does with it.
The episode opens with the Enterprise detecting a distress call from a ship
that disappeared seventy-five years ago, the USS Jenolan. They locate the Jenolan crashed
on the surface of a Dyson Sphere, a massive space station built to fully enclose a star
so that the inhabitants could use the star as a virtually inexhaustible power source for
their civilization. When Riker, Geordi, and Worf beam aboard the Jenolan to investigate,
they discover that the transporter is still online and that someone is being held in the transporter,
dematerialized, where they’ve survived in a kind of suspended animation for seventy-five
years. Geordi energizes the transporter and who should beam in, complete with old
school Classic Trek sound and visual effects, but Montgomery Scott himself — hi, Scotty!
I just want to emphasize that everything I just summarized takes place in the first four and a
half minutes of the episode. That’s the teaser. Scotty beaming in is the beat that sends us to
the opening credits. I’m gonna spend a lot of this review talking about the smart character writing
and what this episode has to say about nostalgia, but I also want to note how perfectly paced this
episode is. It gets a lot done in a single hour, it never drags, it never feels rushed,
it’s a model of efficient and economical storytelling, and everything lands how it’s
supposed to land and means what it’s supposed to mean. Ronald D. Moore wrote this episode,
and it shows — Moore wrote some of the best episodes of TNG, and then went on to write some of
the best episodes of Deep Space Nine, and “Relics” deserves to be remembered among his finest work in
the Star Trek franchise, particularly for its impressively deft and effective storytelling.
Anyway. It turns out Scotty was on the Jenolan as a passenger, not a crewmember — he was on his way
to a retirement colony. But then, the Jenolan ran across the Dyson Sphere, stopped to investigate,
got caught in the powerful gravity well of the sphere, and crashed. Only Scotty and one other
person aboard the Jenolan — Matt Franklin — survived the crash. They both went into the
transporter, but Franklin’s pattern degraded too much and he couldn’t be rematerialized.
Scotty is momentarily bummed about Franklin’s death, but how could he stay sad for long on
this ship?! This marvel of engineering and technology that is the Enterprise
D! Oh, what a splendid vessel she is — I’m sure Scotty could never be depressed here . . .
Captain Picard welcomes Scotty aboard, then tells Geordi to start surveying the Dyson
Sphere — they’ve never actually seen a Dyson Sphere before, so it’s kind of a big deal.
Scotty follows Geordi to engineering and tries to help, but he’s an anachronism with a penchant
for telling old man stories, so he ends up just getting in the way. Geordi tries to be
accommodating but eventually loses patience and tells Scotty to get lost so the rest of
them can get some work done. Scotty goes to Ten Forward, gets drunk with some help from Data,
staggers over to the holodeck, and seeks refuge in a simulation of the bridge of his Enterprise.
Picard joins him for a drink, they bond over their memories of their old ships,
Scotty laments not having a purpose anymore, feeling out of place aboard this Enterprise,
and ends the holodeck program, calling himself an old man trying to hide in a fantasy.
Concerned about Scotty, Picard orders Geordi to take Scotty — excuse me,
not “orders” — asks Geordi to take Scotty with him down to the Jenolan to try and retrieve more
data about the Dyson Sphere from the computer — strongly suggests that it would be a nice thing
to give Scotty something to do, to allow him to feel useful. Geordi, accepting his role as
the Enterprise D’s Designated Friend, reluctantly agrees, and he and Scotty return to the Jenolan.
While Geordi and Scotty are away, the Enterprise gets into trouble,
accidentally triggering an automatic hatch that pulls them inside the Dyson Sphere using an array
of tractor beams. The tractor beams overload the Enterprise’s engines, meaning they can’t just turn
around and try to go out the way they came in. And, they have another problem: the star at the
center of the sphere is unstable. Data scans the interior and concludes that the sphere has been
abandoned because the erratic solar activity of the star made it uninhabitable. Which means the
people who made this were smart enough to build a Dyson Sphere, but not smart enough
to realize they were building it around a star that would make it useless — I love Star Trek.
Geordi and Scotty notice the Enterprise is gone, manage to get the Jenolan flying
again so they can look for it, and track it to the hatch where it entered the sphere.
They reason that the Enterprise triggered an automatic system when it hailed the hatch’s
communications array. So, they back off to a safe distance, hail the array,
wait for the tractor beams to activate and then deactivate once they fail to capture a ship,
then fly the Jenolan in and prop the door open with its shields. Geordi calls Captain Picard to
tell him to get his ass back here, and luckily the engines have been repaired by this point,
because Picard orders Ensign Rager at the helm to set a course and get ‘em the hell outta here.
The Jenolan is in bad shape and can’t be moved from its position wedged in the closing hatch,
so Picard beams Geordi and Scotty back to the Enterprise, then blows up the Jenolan
with a couple of photon torpedoes. Ensign Rager, the unsung hero of the episode,
turns the Enterprise sideways so it can squeeze through the hatch just before it slams shut!
Their earlier tensions forgotten after having bonded aboard the Jenolan, Geordi escorts Scotty
to the shuttle bay, where Scotty is presented with one of the Enterprise’s shuttlecraft — an
extended loan, Picard says — so that he can finally complete his journey to that retirement
colony that got interrupted seventy-five years ago. Or, he can go anywhere else he wants. There
are fond farewells from all the senior officers, Scotty tells Geordi that the Enterprise is in
good hands because a ship is only as good as its chief engineer, and that’s pretty much it!
So, what is it — aside from the damn near perfect storytelling and pacing,
which I already mentioned — that makes this such a great episode? Number one for me is the way the
characters are written. This is the Scotty episode, so let’s start there. Scotty takes
center stage here in a way that he never has before and never will again. On Classic Trek,
Scotty was an important character, just a notch below the big three of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and
we get a sense of who he is, he has some very memorable lines and moments throughout the TV
series and also in the movies, but he’s never the main character. Here, in “Relics,” he’s the main
character. And he’s terrific — and James Doohan is terrific, getting to show us both the Scotty
we Trekkies have known and loved for years, and shades of the character we’ve never seen before.
He’s still the engineering genius with a twinkle in his eye and a taste for the hard stuff — I’m
talking about booze, I can’t speak to his private life — but here, he’s also a man out of time. His
knowledge and skills are useless aboard the Next Gen Enterprise because that knowledge and those
skills are three-quarters of a century out of date. And we can see how much it hurts
him to feel useless aboard a starship. How can you not sympathize with the guy?
Yet, at the same time, Geordi’s perspective makes sense, too! He wants to be nice to Scotty,
he wants to make him feel welcome, he even initially welcomes Scotty to engineering when
Scotty shows up declaring he’s come to help. But, when it becomes obvious that Scotty is
in over his head and is actually becoming a distraction, Geordi does what he has to do
and tells Scotty to take a hike because the people who actually know what they’re doing
have actual work they need to do. Yes, Geordi is a bit rude to Scotty, yes it’s clearly hurtful
when Geordi tells Scotty that he’s just in the way, but we can understand Geordi’s frustration.
In between those two, we find Captain Picard, the diplomat, the peacemaker. Obviously he wants
Geordi and the engineering team to complete their work — Picard’s the one who told them to do it
in the first place! But, he also recognizes the situation Scotty is in, and reaches out to him.
Picard listens to Scotty talk about his fond memories of the Classic Trek Enterprise,
responds with his own warm feelings about his old ship, the Stargazer,
and it’s after that when Picard goes to Geordi and asks him to include Scotty in the effort
to retrieve the data from the Jenolan’s computer. Picard empathizes with Scotty,
and he asks Geordi, despite his understandable aggravation, to try and empathize with Scotty,
too, and it’s all driven by basic, universal human motivations that anyone can understand
whether they’ve seen a single episode of Star Trek before this or not.
Which brings me to the way “Relics” handles its legacy elements — namely Scotty, but also that
holodeck scene where Scotty and Picard are on the bridge of the classic Enterprise. “Relics” uses
its nostalgic components for a purpose, to feed development of character. It doesn’t lean on them,
or present them as shallow feel-good moments. They aren’t there just to make us go “Oh, hey,
I recognize that,” or to evoke warm fuzzies from the most reflexively sentimental Trekkies
in the audience. “Relics” uses its legacy elements to tell a story, not to pander.
And most brilliantly of all, the story it chooses to tell is, in part, about nostalgia,
and the dangers of becoming too invested in it. Look at that scene with Scotty and Picard in the
holodeck. Yes, for long-time Trekkies there’s a certain superficial thrill at seeing the Classic
Trek bridge represented in an episode of TNG, seeing Scotty walk over to his old station,
seeing Picard in that setting. It’s neat. But what’s that scene actually about? It’s about how,
despite how much we may want to, we can’t actually live in the past. We can’t go back.
We can remember, we can fantasize and draw some temporary comfort from those fantasies,
as Scotty does when he takes solace in the simulation of his Enterprise, but ultimately,
nostalgia is a dead end. It doesn’t go anywhere. Scotty realizes that he has no choice but to keep
moving forward. And he does, and eventually he rediscovers his purpose — in the present.
That holodeck scene is, no shit, one of my favorite scenes from all of Star Trek:
The Next Generation, because it’s not about “oh my god, look, it’s the original Enterprise,
I’m gonna cry!” — it’s about things that mean something to these characters,
in this moment. It’s about the romantic, enticing, but misleading pull of the past. It’s about the
inevitability of change. It’s about the importance of remembering who you are and
where you came from, but also being strong enough to allow what was to be what was and move on.
And again, it’s a scene that can mean something to people whether
or not they’re lifelong hardcore Trekkies. Yes, if you’re a Star Trek superfan, you’ll
notice more things in the scene than someone going in totally cold — small but meaningful
details like Scotty going over to his old bridge station — but the significance of this setting,
the emotional content of the scene, is accessible and comprehensible to
anyone who has ever felt the way Scotty feels, which is most of us, perhaps even all of us.
The same can be said, in a different way, about the scene between Scotty and Data in
Ten Forward. Data fishing out a bottle of booze from behind the bar and struggling to describe
it to Scotty before finally settling on “It is green,” is a direct callback to a moment
in Classic Star Trek where Scotty does the same thing — but even if you don’t know that,
the scene works, because it’s funny in and of itself, not just because
it’s pointing at something familiar and expecting us to pick up on the reference.
I love that scene, too. Know what else I love about this episode?
The way the TNG characters, particularly Geordi, react to Scotty. Specifically, the way they behave
like people who live in the world of the show, not nerds who watch the show. Scotty is treated
with respect, but nobody fanboys, nobody rattles off a list of his famous missions taken directly
from TOS episodes — in fact, whenever Scotty tries to talk about one of those old missions, he’s met
with either indifference or impatient annoyance. This episode is smart enough to realize that
these characters would not necessarily feel the same way about Scotty as we in the audience do.
And yes, for those of you who have been watching Picard season three, as I say that I am thinking
of the scene where Captain Shaw meets Geordi and totally gushes all over him. I know a lot of you
love that scene — and honestly, I like that scene, too. But the reason that scene works is because
the giddy, nervously excited reaction Shaw has to Geordi is so contrary to Shaw’s much gruffer and
more cynical established character. And if you remember “Relics,” Shaw’s fanboying over Geordi
is even funnier, because you can imagine as Geordi is dealing with Shaw with grace and patience he is
thinking back to the time he met Scotty and kept his shit together. So, that scene is an exception
— as a rule, I don’t like it when characters in the show are written like fans of the show.
Overall, a fantastic episode, a series highlight for TNG, a show that should
be the model for how a newer project in a long-running franchise should handle legacy
characters and nostalgia — if and when it does so, which should be extremely sparingly — and
a showcase for both Scotty and James Doohan that is long overdue and richly deserved.
Those are my thoughts on “Relics.” What do you think of this episode? Please share it with me
in the comments. If you’d like to support this channel — and I sure wish you would,
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Don’t forget to watch for my review of the eighth episode of season three of Star Trek: Picard.
I’m teaming up with my best friend and podcast co-host Jason Harding to review
this final season of Picard, and our next review should be up sometime this weekend,
probably Saturday. And please join me again at this time next week for another retro review.
The next episode in this batch dedicated to guest stars from previous series will be an episode of
Deep Space Nine: “Defiant”! I’ll see you then. Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!