24 – We’ll Always Have Paris

Grade: D+

Summary

The Enterprise is on route to take some shore leave. Captain Picard is practicing fencing, when he notices that about 3 seconds repeated itself. Later, while on the bridge, he hears a message from a scientist who was working on theories of non-linear time, and he guesses that the time shift had something to do with this scientist.

Commentary

This is not a very good episode. In fact, it seems more like a B-movie. It starts out OK, and I really like the scenes with Patrick Stewart who tells you everything without even saying anything. In my opinion, these are some of the strongest scenes of the first season. Stewart is obviously an accomplished actor, and he’s by far the only one in this series with much of any talent at this point. By the way, Picard never struck me as a Frenchman. I’ve always thought of him as British. But that’s not important here.

The problem is that these good scenes are few and far between. About half-way through the episode, the emphasis changes from Picard’s feelings of remorse to this scientist’s health and his obsession with non-linear time. But this actor is nowhere near as good as Picard. Unlike Stewart, this guest can’t make you forget you’re just watching an actor recite some lines.

I’ve rated this one so low because the episode doesn’t work for me. It’s like two different episodes, and the shift from Picard to Dr. Mannheim was too abrupt. Besides, we also have Troi in this episode, telling Picard that he’s dealing with emotions. Yeah, we can see that. Troi’s character was pretty worthless in this first season.

Of Note

When Captain Picard is on the holodeck, the background with the Eiffel Tower seems to change size. When he is facing it, it is a lot smaller than when he is facing away from it.

The title of this episode refers to a line in Casablanca. That’s the only thing this episode has in common with that classic film.