The Inner Light

Remember that time Picard had a wife and kids and mastered playing the flute? Except it wasn’t Picard – it was the entirety of Kamin’s life, played out on the dying planet Kataan. Find out what lessons Picard learns from walking a lifetime in someone else’s shoes when we put The Inner Light into this week’s Mission Log. This is in my top 5 TNG episodes. Also imagine the sheer agony of the government knowing full well what’s going on but having absolute no power to do anything about it, but opting for not letting the people know to avoid mass panic. What if the probe had been encountered and assimilated by the Borg? ‘Twas all for nought. Lol if they had mind probed Worf, by the time he was an old Klingon watching the rocket ship launch surrounded by his loved ones, he’d have them all yelling “today IS a good day to die!!” And given what just happened with our President Elect, yeah..I think we all need some distraction from the baktag show that’s going on. Give it about five billion years and our sun will, in fact, do that to us. And maybe there’s a mostly-obscured message there: “How’s your space program doing?” Kataan has advanced neurotechnology as evidenced by the probe, but only rudimentary missile technology; a lot more emphasis on missile technology might have made them a multi-planet species, which is the beginning of a hedge against extinction. Ya, this catastrophe was unable to be fixed. The first few years there were options to make things better, but the fate was sealed. This and the Patrick Stewart reaction to the prop auction are Youtube links; not sure why it wouldn’t be showing up. Good thing the mind probe did not just scramble Picard’s brain. They had no idea what kind of species they would encounter. Did the program adjust the characters of this world to look like humans, or is this just another example of everyone looks alike? I would have preferred them to do a few minor prosthetics to at least make them look a little bit different. For a society that is still developing rocketry, their neuro tech is top notch. And, (as is often the case with these episodes), I wish there had been some continuing thread of Picard’s entire other life lived as Batai. A-a-a-a-a, you’re thinking. Stop it. Stop it now. Not with this episode! Oddly enough, people were saying that about The Next Phase too, for entirely different reasons! Agree! Sometimes you just have to whistle past that naggy little thing and roll with the beautiful story the writer is attempting to convey. I think if a Klingon had found them, they would look Klingon, but not BE Klingon…just whatever makes the finder feel comfortable…. The guys mention this on the podcast. Would the whole town look and act Klingon?? As for our guest stars, I want to put a word in for a documentary called That Guy Who Was In That Thing. It is a good piece about working actors that includes a line “Everybody does Star Trek.” and shows all the featured actors in their Trek roles. Yes, a shame it was never referred to. Definitely would have been easy to refer to his parenting experience or marriage advice…sigh….1990s episodic curse Does Picard walk away from this with a better appreciation for carpe-ing his diem? I’d actually argue that no, he doesn’t, at least no more than in any other installment of TNG. Jumping the timeline just a bit, it seems like we’re at the series finale before he’s actually integrating that lesson into his life, finally showing Beverly his feelings and opening up to the rest of his crew. Arguably, he’s still espousing that viewpoint in Generations as well, at least in the very last scene. This episode hits me a lot differently than it did before I had kids. It’s a beautifully constructed piece of television, never overplaying its hand in any aspect, never quite descending into schmaltz or sentimentality. It’s interesting that the poll-toppers for the best Star Trek episodes ever were all so off-format. I’ve become a little self-conscious