“Encounter at Farpoint”
I wasn’t quite prepared for how much I’m loving this episode. I’m not quite done with it yet, but after 2 or 3 days of getting through this long episode, I wanted to get some of my thoughts down before I forget.
The episode is really exciting and riveting, even when I know what’s going to happen. It’s really written well in terms of getting the audience to want to know more about what’s going on. Q, as first encountered, is very menacing. He’s quite different from later encounters during the series. I love that he goes through a few historical outfits that the audience is familiar with, and then one that we’re not familiar with. He’s suddenly got bags under his eyes, he looks exhausted, and he’s feeding himself drugs through a tube while wearing this gray padded jacket with a padded hood. Whoever came up with this outfit really needs to get an award. We see this outfit later in the courtroom scene, and you can see that it makes sense that this sort of soldier outfit should look kind of shoddy and cheap. After all, these are soldiers from a post nuclear holocaust world where they “killed all the lawyers”.
I thought it was a pretty exciting sequence where Picard runs from the Q (I had forgotten that this was even possible!) long enough to separate the saucer section at dangerous speeds, and then to turn around and surrender from the battle bridge. I really like the little character touches. Worf not wanting to command the saucer section because he thinks he’s running away, and being reprimanded for it by the Captain. Yar being impulsive and making bad suggestions, and forced to think about that by the Captain. Counselor Troi looking scared out of her mind as she signals their surrender to the Q.
I really like the courtroom scene. The mostly dark scene, with a rabble mob. The judge approaching under a beam of light. The levitating chair that slowly approaches. We even get a chair cam from his perspective as he approaches the accused. “Shoot them if anything comes out of the Captain’s mouth except the world ‘Guilty’”. The low rent look of the drugged up prison guards, as mentioned above. It kind of reminds me of cheap post apocalyptic movies from the 80s like “She”. But I find that vision of post-apocalyptic earth to be much more interesting one than the crap we saw in the movie “First Contact” in the Zephryn Cochrane section of the movie, which wasn’t menacing or interesting in any way. Here we see post-apocalyptic Earth as something scary, and I appreciated that. The little eagle symbol on the wall seems very appropriately fascistic.
Now, it was mentioned above that this trial of humanity that Picard negotiates is kind of weak to be based on what’s actually going on at Far Point Station, which is not much. While that’s somewhat valid once you know what’s going on, but there’s a few things that I felt kept the Far Point mystery a decent one. The most important is that the show itself keeps the pressure on, with a visit from Q showing he’s watching their every moment. The stakes are high, even if without Q this would be just a trifle episode. But with the high stakes, it becomes a lot more interesting. But the other thing that really makes the episode shine in this section is the music score. This episode could have ended up feeling really cheap and amateurish, but it feels kind of epic and very exciting at times because of that music. When Counselor Troi is crying in empathy for the pain and loneliness she’s feeling from the station, they play a solo violin piece in the background that gives it the appropriate gravity. When a ship approaches the Enterprise in orbit before they cut to commercial break, the score jumps in enthusiastically with a heavy dose of drums and violins.
Last year I saw the “How they made this” special for how they made the movie Home Alone. And the most memorable part of that was when Chris Columbus admits that it was an okay movie the way they put it together, but when he lucked into meeting the great John Williams, and had the guts to give him the movie and beg him to provide the score: that’s when it went from an okay movie to a special movie, after the John Williams score got added.
I feel the same way about this opening episode. The Jerry Goldsmith score really elevates what could have been a very pedestrian episode without it. But with the combination of these good actors, and the decent script and excellent score, I feel this is a really great episode. Hopefully I’ll get to finish it tonight, and find out if Q gets a more positive look of humanity once he’s seen them resolve the situation at Farpoint.