5.9 — “A Matter of TIme”
Plot: The ship’s mission of ecological rescue is interrupted by the appearance of Professor Berlinghoff Rasmussen, a historian time traveller from the 26th century, who has come back in time to study Captain Picard and the crew. The presence of the Professor proves a distraction, and a temptation for those who want to know details of the future, which Rasmussen is sworn to not reveal. But is there something else mysterious about him?
Thoughts: This episode is cute, and I like it. This is almost entirely due to the great casting of Matt Frewer as the cleverly written Professor R. Oddly enough, Frewer wasn’t TNG’s first choice–the part was written for Robin Williams!
IMBD has an unsourced rumor that Tom Baker was on the producers’ short list once Robin bowed out to film Hook (1991). I can’t believe that Tom, famously uninterested in reprising his turn as The Doctor, would have gone for the role of a time-traveling scoundrel, unless they caught him at just the right time between divorces.
Matt Frewer is most famous for creating the character Max Headroom, whose phenom, the Internet informs me, lasted from 1985 until the cancellation of his American TV show in 1987. I’m not sure how long his turn as pitchman for New Coke endured.[*]
Robin Williams would have been different in the role, probably bringing Rasmussen a fundamentally decent but shifty, unreliable sensibility. Frewer’s portrayal has an undercurrent of menace beneath a wealth of personal charm, which I really like. He’s more of a Jim Carrey type. Frewer seems to have had a solid film and TV career for three decades without quite becoming famous. He recently portrayed a recurring character in Orphan Black (2013- ).
The technobabble subplot is more interesting and grounded in science than usual, involving various concepts related to global warming and nuclear winter. We are reminded that nuclear winter hits Earth in the 21st century–so, after the Eugenics Wars, although Khan Singh is mentioned here as a historical villain on par with Adolf Hitler. Star Trek usually glosses over the future history of Earth/Starfleet (when was the Romulan War again? The other war with the Cardassians?), so my attention perks up when these kinds of references are made.
I’m wondering what, exactly, a time distortion is, and how do you detect it while passing by at warp speed? How do you observe time in the first place, except experimentally? Anyways.
Another thing I noticed watching this episode: it’s been a long time since we’ve been exposed to stupid jokes about how Data can’t understand simple Earth idioms whose meaning can be easily ascertained using Google.
3 of 5 timeships.
[*] New Coke was introduced in Spring 1985, with original Coke reintroduced as Coke Classic only three months later. Classic didn’t officially become just Coke again until 1992, but by the end of 1985 it was already outselling both New Coke and Pepsi. New Coke became Coke II in 1992, and was quietly killed off in the final international markets in which it was sold in 2002.
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