Oh boy, Q is back, and Richard Goodness and Eric Brasure are both so excited. While Richard is busy coming up with alternate titles for “Deja Q” (top candidate: “Oh, the Qmanity!”), Eric talks about how after this episode, Q really has diminishing returns. Meanwhile, in “A Matter of Perspective”, TNG does Rashomon. Plus! Eric doesn’t know what Rashomon is.
Stoek
-I like DejaQ a lot, and like you Eric I think this may be my favorite Q episode. I just wish the stakes had been higher. Delancy falling to the deck and creepy as fuck intoning “Red Alert” would have been a lot more effective if it had turned out that it was not himself that he was referring to but rather something like another visit from the Borg. The idea of watching Q and the crew forced to work together to keep from dying is to me much more compelling than what we got instead.
As for a matter of perspective, I really don’t care for it and it took some thinking to figure out why. The problem I realized is that there is waaaaaaay too much of a discrepancy between the wife’s story and Riker’s. In his she’s practically blowing him as soon as scientist hubby is out of the room and in hers he’s just one knuckle drag away from raping her. I’d have liked it better if both the writing and the acting for those scenes had been just a touch subtler.
Eric Brasure
-Yeah, this is the first episode that really starts Q down the road to being comic relief, and I don’t know that it’s entirely successful. Then again, like I said on the podcast, I’ve never been the hugest fan of Q in general.
Lee
-The thing that always struck me about “Deja Q” is how 20th-century the crew behaves with their outright hostility towards Q. Yes, his previous appearances have provided more than enough cause for them to dislike him, but aren’t they supposed to be “evolved” according to Riker circa “The Last Outpost?” Where’s that smug self-satisfaction at being morally superior beings now? Other than Worf, who can barely contain his Klingon disdain for his superiors at times, these people should be a bit more compassionate, especially Beverly. Instead, she takes great pleasure in hurting Q even as she’s providing medical treatment! Guess that Hippocratic oath goes out the airlock when the patient is recovering from chronic omnipotence. I would have preferred to see the crew wrestle with the realization that they’re not behaving according to their lofty Federation ideals, or even better, actually treat Q like the wounded puppy he is rather than keep kicking him.
Having said that, there’s no question this is the best Q episode, even with that bar set perilously low. Q’s line to Riker, “You weren’t like that before the beard!” always struck me as hilarious and a wee bit meta, since no one ever notices the beard otherwise (at least, not until Insurrection, and then ew).
As for “A Matter of Perspective,” I preferred TNG’s adaptation/homage of Solaris in “The Bonding” to this version of Rashomon. It’s a worthy effort, but the abundance of technobabble in the last act kills it for me, not to mention the holodeck simulation of the Kreiger wave converter being “fully functional” (boy, there’s a phrase that conjures up a completely different TNG context) is completely ridiculous.
Eric Brasure
-I was going to make a comment about “the beard scene” in Insurrection but I don’t want to spoil it for Richard. 🙂
And yeah that’s a great point–the crew really isn’t acting very “24th Century” with Q. Especially Beverly, because she didn’t even have that many dealings with Q! The show sort of forgets that she was gone for a year.
Lee
-One reason Beverly might be angry with Q is that Wesley died during Q’s second visit. Even though it happened when she wasn’t there, moms tend to hold grudges over those sort of things. 🙂
Eric Brasure
-That’s certainly true!