108 – Unification, Part 2

Grade: C+

Summary

Captain Picard goes to Romulus to meet with Spock and find out why he is there. He also has to tell him that Sarek has died.

Commentary

This episode continues the storyline introduced in the last episode. There are some nice bits in this episode, such as when Data creates a holgraphic Commander Riker, but he doesn’t look much like him. When Captain Picard tells him he didn’t get the hair quite right, Data says he’ll try to be more observant in the future. OK, so it’s silly, but it doesn’t seem to be within Data’s character to miss details. After all, this is the android who can detect the chemical composition of every piece of metal he touches.

Another nice part in the episode is when Spock and Data are talking on the Klingon ship. Spock wants to reject his half-human nature, while Data aspires to become more human. I’ve always thought that Data was an updated character of Spock, so it’s only natural for this conversation to have taken place. I wish it could have been a bit longer and more significant, but whatever.

The rest of the episode is pretty bad, though. The acting is especially poor. In my opinion, you’d have to go to episode #80 to find one that was worse. Like I’ve said a dozen times before, Denise Crosby is a terrible actress – at least in this series she is. I haven’t seen her in anything else she’s done, so I can’t say if this is just her style of acting, but she certainly gives wooden performances every time she steps into a Star Trek uniform. But it wasn’t just her – nobody else in this episode acted as if they cared about this episode at all. They’re just going through the motions, trying to recite their lines without putting any effort into them or their characters.

Finally, the scene at the bar was pretty stupid. Overall, this was a horrible effort and a waste of a potentially great storyline. Watch it if you must, but I think you’ll agree that this could have been a lot better.

Of Note

Interesting that this episode dealing with potential re-unification between Romulus and Vulcan aired on the second anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. East and West Germany re-unified into one nation on October 3, 1990. I believe these events had some effect on this episode and the desire to create it in the first place.