2.12 — “The Royale”
Plot: The Enterprise is sent to investigate a debris field in orbit around Theta VIII. The debris appears to come from a strange vessel. In a moment reminiscent of TOS 2.23 — “The Omega Glory,” the crew finds a panel of a starship emblazoned with an American flag and NASA logo. After a series of disconnected events, the crew finds a strange building on the supposedly uninhabitable surface of the planet. Riker, Worf, and Data beam down to investigate, and find themselves trapped in the Hotel Royale. The Royale has as casino in the front lobby, and is constructed by unspecified aliens based on passages from a bad American novel. So that explains why the dialogue is bad and the situations are trite. Or doth the series protest too much?
Thoughts: The second to last line of this episode is “None of this makes any sense!” The review writes itself, doesn’t it?
I was dyspeptic watching this episode, which amounts to a fish out of water character piece for Riker, Worf, and Data. In the plus column, as sunny jim pointed out to me, these characters have become much more defined since first season, and it’s fun to get them on a different kind of set, and watch Data play craps and 21. There isn’t much else that happens, however. Very few ideas, and an almost complete lack of jeopardy for the crew and the ship. Are we supposed to care if the bellboy gets shot? The landing party certainly doesn’t, and we’ve already been told he isn’t real. It’s filler, and Mickey D is ridiculous.
So the episode drags. You can see it in the bridge scenes, where we spend a lot of time to watching Picard pace around and take pregnant pauses. They have to fill the time somehow.
There are howlers and curious moments. Picard reasons that something must be wrong, because Riker would never disregard protocol and fail to return directly to the beam down point after losing contact with the ship. Actually, he isn’t in danger, that is exactly what happened. The landing party didn’t even know they were trapped yet. This seems irresponsible. Spock would have quoted the regulations by decimal number and lodged a protest if he were present.
The temperature of the planet is described as negative 291 Celsius, which various online sources point out is below absolute zero. Yet the crew barely remarks upon finding a building with a breathable atmosphere around it. The idea of discovering an impossible oasis on a hellish, inhabitable world comes to us straight from TOS 1.17 — “The Squire of Gothos.” Which I guess explains why the crew seems to be over it already before the investigation even starts.
Prop fail: Data remarks on the lack of advanced decomposition on a body which looks like it was taken straight from a tomb set in Indiana Jones. The phaser props look terrible. The communicators don’t work, until they do, based on nothing but plot contrivance. Picard asks “Is any intelligence causing this interference?” I don’t even know what that means. No Jean Luc, it’s just the writing staff.
Is this the first mention of Picard being an amateur mathematician? The reference to Fermat’s Last Theorem is unfortunate, as a proof was discovered six years after the episode aired in 1995. I’m sure R. Alex Reutter can explain it for us.
It’s hard to believe that no more effort was made to explain the casino. Brother, can you spare a plot complication? There is still a fatal lack of ambition in the production staff to create interesting stories.
Warp 2 out of 6.
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