Dark Page

The Cairn are a telepathic race looking to join the Federation, and helping them to learn spoken language is Lwaxana Troi. When she opens their minds, her own secrets start to come to the surface forcing her to relive deep, personal pain. Deanna is there to help, but her mother’s secret hits very close to home. Dark Page is next on Mission Log. And how does a species that does not communicate verbally have vocal cords? Perhaps they did once? Let’s give Lwaxana props for being able to teach a non verbal society how to speak. Having lost a few family members in tragedy, it never gets easier. And then Lwaxana took extra steps to completely erase her child from memory and existence. I totally get the desire to not speak of her, but to completely erase her gives me serious questions. Not a healthy way to deal. No, but we don’t always deal with these things in healthy ways. Maybe not healthy, but people don’t often deal with grief in a healthy way. I get the hesitancy to not speak of her death, but this was not an infant, this was a young child. Lwaxana took extra steps to completely erase her child from existence and memory. I’m gonna have to quote SF Debris on this one, because he puts it so much better than I can: Do you really think that the response of a character to guilt over their child dying because they weren’t paying her any notice is to forget she was ever born, expunge any sign of her existence and never mention it to anyone ever?. Guilt over negligence doesn’t sound like something you should double down on. I think that’s the biggest problem with the episode in trying to introduce a situation that we haven’t heard of before and we will never hear of again. NOt that Star Trek doesn’t do that as a matter of course, but… By the way, you guys should really have SF Debris on your show, he’s really good. Ya, it is not that she did not want to talk about her first child, it was the extra steps she took to completely erase her from memory. The trauma she endured is a real struggle for many in real life. I struggled to remember ever seeing this episode. I think that it was because it was so painfully boring that my subconscious mind blocked those memories. It’s not that I don’t like the actors, I do, it’s just that this was a preposterous story told in a sleep-inducing way. I wasn’t moved and didn’t empathize with the characters because it was a ridiculous plot. How’d this episode ever make it to production. This is part of my frustration with the Laxana Troi character. I like the character, I like the actor, they just didn’t do anything interesting with the character in the series. Wasted talent. Oh, let’s have her harass Picard, again, that will be funny, again. We would have to accept that Lwaxana is insane and has been for 30 years. She has just covered it up well until now. Ridiculous Deanna’s father was/is made of jello, and went along with this re-writing of personal history to forget that a 7 year old daughter ever existed and participating of ridding the family property and memorabilia of any hint that this girl ever existed. Ridiculous. Also compliant in this cover up are grand-parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends, neighbors, etc. This is like the moon-landing deniers. Ridiculous. Star Fleet records or Betazed records have been altered or locked and no evidence is apparent to Deanna that she ever had a sister. Silly. This wasn’t a baby that died briefly after childbirth, as has happened in my family. This was a 7 year old child that had lived a portion of a life, had an effect on several people. Preposterous plot. All that you mention, the lengths she went to to erase her from all memory is just inexcusable. Unless you’ve been in a mother’s shoes when she loses a child (no matter how old that child is when they pass away) you can’t begin to imagine what it would feel like. This wasn’t the episode I thought it was. I thought this was the one where Troi was mind probed against her will. I REAL