“We’ll Always Have Paris”
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Season 1, Episode 24
Directed by: Robert Becker
Written by: Deborah Dean Davis and Hannah Louise Shearer
Original air date: 2nd May 1988
We’ll Always Have Paris is Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first time-centred episode. Despite that fact, it’s one of the few TNG episodes I’d not seen before watching it for this review. I now know why: it’s pants. The timey-wimey A-plot is thinner than Patrick Stewart’s hairline and the Picard romance B-plot is as compelling as a garden slug. The only moments worth watching are the ones where time goes a bit screwy, which constitute less than two minutes of the forty-five-minute episode.
I lie—another moment worth watching is a funny blooper, 23 minutes in, where you can see the recently deceased Tasha Yar’s arm and shoulder behind Troi and Picard on the bridge. This scene was filmed earlier, when Denise Crosby was still present.
Picard and his fencing partner experience a brief moment that repeats. The two of them aren’t sure what’s just happened, then Picard calls the bridge and Riker says, “We experienced some kind of loop where everything repeats itself.” Well, they figured that out quick! Geordi says it felt like déjà vu and if you’ve seen the later (and much better) TNG episode Cause and Effect, you’ll remember that it felt like déjà vu in that one, too. However, in Cause and Effect it kept happening, getting stronger and more profound with each repetition, but it still took the crew to a whole episode work out what was happening. In We’ll Always Have Paris, the crew experiences a single momentary instance of déjà vu and immediately assumes they got stuck in a temporal loop.
Talk about lazy (and illogical) writing. Why didn’t the writers play with this for a bit? Even if it wasn’t to be the focus of the episode (although it easily could’ve been if they’d excised the pointless romance plot), we could’ve had a string of repeated moments before the crew realised what was going on.
Alas, this crew apparently know time loops when they see them and rush to the aid of a nearby scientist called Paul Manheim, who’s sending out a distress call. As Manheim has been doing experiments with time, Picard figures that the time loop must be related. As the Enterprise D proceeds to Manheim’s coordinates, Picard visits the holodeck to reflect on the time when he was meant to have had a rendezvous with some woman in Paris and I’m literally too bored to write anything further about this scene.
They arrive at the planetoid where Manheim’s been doing his experiments and beam him and his wife aboard. We realise Picard knows the wife when she, Jenice, calls him Jean-Luc—right before sickbay explodes and Jenice gets blown out an airlock into space. Oh wait. Sorry, that’s what I was hoping would happen.
Since Mr Manheim is not compos mentis, Mrs Manheim explains his timey-wimey jiggery pokery. Apparently all the scientists working with him have been killed in an accident that resulted from his experiments with time. Experiments that are to with changing the constancy of time in order to open windows to other dimensions.
This is an interesting concept, but only if you do something interesting with it. We’ll Always Have Paris doesn’t. After Picard and co learn that immense energy emanating from the planetoid’s core is being directed at Manheim’s lab and experience another time loop in the turbo lift (one of those aforementioned ‘only moments worth watching’), Manheim is lucid enough to explain that he’s been successful in opening a window to another dimension. We get some discussion about how the portal needs closing—and in a certain way otherwise reality itself will fundamentally change—but we never even get a glimmer of the potential implications. We never see or understand what’s on the other side of this window, beyond vague ramblings from Manheim, nor do we see what might happen if the window isn’t properly closed. These are intriguing prospects that could’ve (and should’ve) been explored.
Anyway, the Enterprise crew have to close the window to stop the time distortions but there’s a big old security system around the lab that’s causing problems and they need codes and what-not. And the energy being directed at the lab is interfering with the transporters so it’s tricky to beam down. And Data has to go down because he’s not as affected by the time distortions, which haven’t been shown to be affecting anyone anyway. And it’s all about as dramatic as bunny rabbits hopping through a meadow.
Data goes down to the lab to close the window. There are a couple of action moments where Data’s attacked by the security system and has to phaser stuff. But it’s all lacking in dramatic stakes. I was wondering if there was going to be a cool villain twist involving Manheim or his wife, but no. That would be far too interesting for this episode.
The column of mirrors in the lab (the supposed ‘window’) and the moment when Data splits into three are cool, effects-wise. This scene surprisingly holds up given the episode’s age. In story terms, though, what a bore. All he does is put a cannister of antimatter into the mirrors and voila, the window’s closed and that’s that. Whatever was on the other side simply doesn’t matter.
We then get an utterly braindead denouement where Picard just allows Manheim to return to the planetoid with Jenice to continue his experiments—even though those experiments killed all his team, sent time distortions rippling through the sector and threatened to tear reality apart. Picard says something about the Federation wanting to help in any way that it can. No. The Federation would shut this reckless lunatic down.
The final scene gets back to the romance storyline and has Picard and Jenice saying goodbye in that unconvincing Paris café and I’m afraid I’ve fallen asleep.
Oh, and first-season-Troi is more annoying here than usual.
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