“Samaritan Snare”
Written by Robert L. McCullough
Directed by Les Landau
Season 2, Episode 17
Original air date: May 15, 1989
Star date: 42779.1
Mission summary
It’s Starfleet exam time again for Ensign Wesley Crusher. While Enterprise looks at some stars, he’s going to take a shuttlecraft to Starbase 515 to justify his existence on the Bridge crew. But the boy gets quite a shock when Captain Picard announces he’s tagging along. Everyone’s curious about his mysterious personal business, but he plays it close to his chest. Anyway, road trip! (Er… star trek?)
As soon as they leave, Riker and the others throw a wild party receive a distress signal and render assistance, even though the detour takes them farther away from the captain. They encounter a drifting vessel crewed by slow-witted Pakleds, who explain:
Our ship is the Mondor. It is broken. We are far from home. We need help.
Trying to get anything more out of them is an exercise in futility. Apparently, their sole mission is to “look for things that make us go.” Chief Engineer La Forge volunteers to fix their ship, though Worf objects to sending him over to a strange vessel. But they seem harmless and stupid, and hey, they’re far from home and need help. La Forge beams over and starts patching them up, with little assistance from the Pakleds, who seem to know precious little about how their ship works.
Meanwhile, on the slowest shuttle ever constructed, Wesley and Picard make stilted conversation. The captain would much rather read his book, but gradually his companion draws him out and Picard reveals that he is going to Starbase 515 for his 1000 light-year tune-up—he needs to get a new cardiac replacement. A parthenogenetic implant, of course.
Back on Enterprise, Counselor Troi expresses her own concerns for La Forge’s safety: She senses that the Pakleds are not as helpless as they appear to be. She might even use the words “grave danger” a few times to better outline the predicament he may be in. La Forge laughs it off, but he does run into some puzzling delays while trying to repair the Pakled ship. The worst of them occurs when he tries to leave and they zap him with his own phaser, then raise shields so he can’t beam away.
“Worf, Deanna, you were right.” No one says this.
While they sort that out, things are getting rather personal on the shuttle.
WESLEY: I guess you would have preferred Commander Riker as a travelling companion.
PICARD: What?
WESLEY: It’s okay. You’re not too comfortable with me. I understand.
PICARD: Ensign. Wesley, that’s not true. You’re a fine young man.
WESLEY: You don’t have to say that, sir. It’s pretty obvious how you feel.
PICARD: Is it? How so?
WESLEY: Everyone knows. You don’t like kids. That’s too bad. You’d have made a good father.
PICARD: Thank you.
WESLEY: Didn’t you ever wish you had kids of your own?
PICARD: Wishing for a thing does not make it so.
No, you have to say “make it so” to make it so. Soon Picard relates a heartbreaking story about a nasty run-in with some surly Nausicaans in his misspent youth, which left him on the wrong end of one of their swords. Eventually they reach the starbase and Wesley makes sure that Picard actually checks in for surgery. The surgeon actually says “I anticipate no complications… We’ll all be home in time for dinner,” thereby ensuring there will be complications.
Speaking of complications, Riker comes up with an elaborate trap for the Pakleds and communicates their true intentions to La Forge in code, counting on the Pakleds to be too dumb to pick up on it. La Forge barely gets it himself, but he dutifully plays along, preparing some photon torpedoes for the Pakleds while waiting for Enterprise’s cue.
Picard’s medical team starts shouting nonsense medical jargon like “metabolation occlusions” and “heterocyclic declination” with dour expressions to express the seriousness of his condition, which is serious. They need some kind of biology expert to save his life, stat. But where, oh where, can they find a specialist like that in all the known galaxy? In true O. Henry style, the closest candidate is one Dr. Katherine Pulaski, inconveniently located on Enterprise. They have to get La Forge back fast so they can deliver her to Starbase 515.
To that end, the Enterprise’s ruse unfolds: They pretend to attack by venting some harmless hydrogen exhaust from the nacelles, what La Forge calls their “Crimson Forcefield.” Convincing the Pakleds that they are outgunned, he disables the torpedoes he just built them and beams the hell out of there.
They get to Picard in time for Pulaski to save his life, to his utter disgust. So much for his pride. But at least all is well once again on the ship.
LAFORGE: Looks like things are back to normal.
PICARD: I’m pleased to report that Ensign Crusher’s Starfleet exam results permit him to continue his studies onboard the Enterprise. Furthermore, any rumors of my brush with death are greatly exaggerated. Is that clear?
RIKER: Yes, sir.
Analysis
“Samaritan Snare” really takes stupidity to heart. Consider this scintillating dialogue:
LAFORGE: Relax, Wes. You’ll do fine on your exams.
SONYA: Yeah.
WESLEY: It’s not my exams I’m worried about. It’s Captain Picard.
SONYA: Why? He’s not taking the exams.
The demonstrated low intellect of the Pakleds, and Sonya Gomez, only reflects the dumbness of the overall script, which is entertaining at times, and even strives for some deeper meaning, but is ultimately as disposable as a broken starship–sure, you can fix it up, but why bother if you can’t keep it going? If you give a Pakled a photon torpedo, he can kill for a day, but if you teach a Pakled to build torpedoes, he can kill for a lifetime. Or something like that.
Once upon a time I enjoyed this episode, but on further inspection, there isn’t much to like here. “Samaritan Snare” represents a small stepping stone in Wesley’s maturation and allows him and Captain Picard to bond more closely than they have already, and it also fleshes out Picard’s character with a glimpse into his reckless past. His near-fatal encounter with the Nausicaans shaped the man he became, and we’ll actually see that pivotal moment dramatized in the sixth season’s “Tapestry.”
It’s interesting, perhaps even thematically appropriate, that a man who is ruled more by his mind than passion has literally lost his heart. It turns out his cardiac replacement was faulty, in fact, and now that he has a new one, perhaps he won’t dislike kids quite as much. Look at what fast friends he and Wesley have become already! It is perhaps unintentional foreshadowing, but I was struck by Picard’s comment to Wesley: “I learned a very hard, very painful lesson that day, but I learned it well. I hope you never have to learn it the same way.” Wesley does have to learn a difficult lesson on his own, though it doesn’t cost him his own life; the episode “The First Duty” will give us Wesley’s turning point, and Picard will be there to help him through it.
It may be a simplistic idea, that one moment can have such a profound impact on a person, but psychologically, it is our knowledge and experiences that form our character, and a life-threatening event would certainly leave its mark. Picard may be relaying this message, and indeed the shaky theme of the entire episode, when he says:
PICARD: There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy.
WESLEY: But William James won’t be in my Starfleet exams.
PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics of piloting a starship.
WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy–
PICARD: It takes more. Open your mind to the past. Art, history, philosophy. And all this may mean something.
The Pakleds have learned to pilot a starship, but without the intellect–beyond the ability to repair it–it doesn’t mean anything to them. They have perverted the real reason for space travel and are obsessed only with acquiring more technology and becoming more powerful. This is what often separates humanity and the Federation from everyone else: the desire to explore and help others versus the drive to gain wealth and expand territory. Or so they would have us believe.
And yet, there are undercurrents of meanness running through this episode. When Enterprise discovers the Pakleds, Geordi comments, “Let me guess. Their rubber band broke, right?” This could just be his weak attempt at humor, but there’s a kind of snobbishness inherent in that remark. When it becomes clear that the Pakleds are of limited mental capacity, a frustrated Riker growls, “Did you hear an echo?” on an open channel, no less. So much for diplomacy. When Troi is worried about Geordi’s well-being, he actually laughs at her. (That might be justified, considering what we’ve seen of her usefulness so far, despite Data’s valiant defense of her abilities. But still.)
There’s a lengthy video online in which someone has spliced together all of the scenes where Worf gets shut down on the show, making a good suggestion that is immediately rejected out of hand. Whenever I see them now, I laugh, but it’s an astute observation; Worf and Troi are the lone voices of reason in this episode—a frightening prospect—and Geordi should never have been in any trouble at all. Adding in the fact that Picard is inexplicably stubborn about having Pulaski perform what is supposed to be a routine medical procedure, just for the sake of the plot, and only to end up with her operating on him anyway, and it all feels a bit forced and slight, doesn’t it?
When you get down to it, none of this should ever have happened, and when it does, it should be simple for Enterprise to disable the Pakled’s shields and recover Geordi with some precision phaser blasts, but instead they go overboard in outsmarting the simple Pakleds with a bluff that they want to be as brilliant as Kirk’s corbomite maneuver, but is really just blowing a lot of hot air. It’s overly complicated and doesn’t even make any sense, creating tension as artificial as Picard’s parthenogenetic implant.
The show should be smarter than this.
Eugene’s Rating: Warp 1 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: It was either the Pakled costumes or the Starfleet surgical scrubs, but we’ve seen those silly outfits before. There isn’t anything inherently wrong in the Pakleds’ design, and their uniforms actually kind of work: They look cobbled together from odds and ends, rather like this script. What gets me are their faces. Alternately dopey and creepy as hell, at first blush they sort of remind me of the makeup from the Twilight Zone episode “The Masks.” I doubt the similarities were intentional, but if they were, that homage would be a stroke of genius, as the masks in that episode changed the faces of the wearer to reflect their inner greediness. Deep down, the Pakleds too are caricatures of people, hiding their evil natures behind innocent faces.
Best Line: Picard: “Open your mind to the past. Art, history, philosophy. And all this may mean something.”
Trivia/Other Notes: This episode would have debuted the Captain’s yacht, the Calypso, but budget constraints forced Picard to travel coach.
The Nausicaans are named after Miyazaki Hayao’s manga and anime Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Actor Christopher Collins (Grebnedlog) returns to Star Trek as another weird-looking dude in DS9’s “The Passenger.” He previously appeared as Commander Kargan in “A Matter of Honor.” Collins built a career in voice work, famously as Cobra Commander on G.I. Joe and Starscream on Transformers. He was also the original voice of Mr. Burns and Moe on early episodes of The Simpsons.
This is the last time we will see Ensign Sonya Gomez.
This episode reportedly inspired writers Dennis Russell Bailey, David Bischoff and Lisa Putman White to write the third season episode “Tin Man,” which has nothing to do with Picard’s search for a heart.
Previous episode: Season 2, Episode 16 – “Q Who.”
Next episode: Season 2, Episode 18 – “Up the Long Ladder.”
This is one of those episodes that, back in the day, was kind of amusing but in retrospect is just lame. I remember my Star Trek buddy in high school thought this episode was hilarious, so when I watched it I was all set to laugh. Which I did.
Once you get to analyzing it, however, it just falls apart in the badness. I’ve been thinking, actually, that the problem with a re-watch is that one looks a lot more closely at an episode than one might otherwise do. If I was just watching TNG for the first time, solely for entertainment, I think I’d probably like it a lot more than I do now while analyzing every aspect. It’s amazing what a difference that makes.
So this episode, which was just sort of goofy and fun the first time, now looks like dreck. I can’t even like Picard’s Best Line as much because now it makes me think of Dead Poet’s Society, which wasn’t even out yet at the time this originally aired (though it was released less than a month later).
Anyway, despite all that, I kind of like the road trip part of the episode. It was one of the rare moments when Wes got to be a character that wasn’t just plain annoying. And though I can’t even remotely imagine Picard as a father (or even truly wanting children) I thought that the growth in his relationship with Wes here was a lot more organic than anything else that’s happened so far.
But seriously, needing Pulaski at the last moment? So lame.
Fuck Pulaski
That’s all.
No, you have to say “make it so” to make it so.
Hey, you stole my line!
This episode is so much worse than I remember it. Everything about it is so hokey: the “they won’t teach you what really matters in school!”, Picard suddenly wanting kids, the big heart surgery finale… The interactions between Wesley are too forced and too awkward. It feels wildly inappropriate and just plain uncomfortable for Wesley to spontaneously say things like “You would be a good father” and “So, what’s up with your medical issues?” (Also, did anyone else notice that Picard doesn’t use a bookmark!? He just closes the book when Wesley talks!) And Worf and Troi being there to say “THIS IS DANGEROUS” and everyone else a) pretending they didn’t say anything; and b) never acknowledging that they were right.
Then… the Pakleds. It’s extremely disturbing to me that the show chose to express a lack of intellectual sophistication as mental retardation. I really can’t get over how unbelievably offensive this all is, and how little of it I picked up the first time I saw this episode. When Kirk & Co. go back in time and interact with people who don’t understand phasers–that’s lack of intellectual sophistication. But this? This is making fun of a race deliberately modeled after people with developmental disabilities TO THEIR FACES. The worst part is how well they get away with it. In most cases, someone with a developmental disability still knows when you’re making fun of them. FFS. It’s horrible and difficult to watch Riker and the rest strut about like schoolyard bullies. To make matters even worse, they parallel this with a story of how Picard has a defective fake heart, and how it makes him feel less than whole/ not like a Real Man(TM)/ as if he lacks authority and leadership for it. Granted, he’s supposed to be acting stupidly, but it’s just all kinds of wrong to have those two stories together.
There’s also no resolution of the Pakled dilemma. They’re still going to go around sticking up ships for their technology. Nothing is different at the end than at the beginning. They don’t even Learn a Lesson or Show That They’re Really Smart. I wouldn’t have liked those endings, but it would have at least felt like there was a POINT instead of just an elaborate way to repeatedly taze Geordi and make Pulaski late for her 10 o’clock.
Dead in space.
Echoing on Torie’s comments in #3–
…does nobody on the Enterprise think about how these Pakleds are still out there with mostly-functional photon torpedoes? That they were just given? Sure, they’re lazy — in that they’d rather steal functional technology than make the massive resource and time investment required to reinvent several hundred wheels so they don’t have to sit at the Federation-enforced Kids Table — but the episode makes it clear that they actually know how the tech works. They are running a con which relies on the smug arrogance of high-tech strangers. They’ll figure out the torpedoes! And then they’ll be back!
Also, given that everybody’s nominally communicating through a universal translator, any language problems the Pakleds have should probably be chalked up to that. Your universal translator being unable to convey the full nuance of your interlocutor’s expressions doesn’t mean he’s a moron, it means you need to go download the patches. If anything, one could easily assume that the Pakleds are doing the intergalactic equivalent of talking loudly and slowly to foreigners — if (as an English speaker) your off-board motor boat broke down off the coast of Indonesia, would you bust out with “the composites in my multi-stage reed valve have degraded” or would you maybe start with “my boat is broken”?
Rubbish. And yet I still find it interesting how much gold the later episodes could filter from this early dross. Tapestry is a great episode…
Oh, also. Wesley? Seriously passive-aggressive here. In a way that doesn’t fit his character at all. I can’t imagine anybody really tolerating that crap from some kid, let alone the captain of the ship doing so. Fishing for forced acceptance should not result in closer relationships and character growth.
Agree this is a poor episode. I do like, though, how intelligence is dissociated from cunning. The Pakleds are indeed cunning, they jiu-jitsu the superiority of others against their strengths, just as in the RW some of the most creative and innovative sharp minds are not at all formally educated and often bent on criminal activity.
The officers’ arrogance comes at their own peril, left them overconfident and unprepared, and I wonder if in some way this episode isn’t commentary on that—general commentary on the insufferable stuffed-shirtedness of TNG in general. (Anyone else notice that whenever Riker is in charge, the ship is nearly always at risk of invasion or destruction, a trend that continues all the way through Generations?)
The arrogant incompetence just doesn’t end with the crew, though. Picard goes to a starbase for a routine medical procedure, but the base is not equipped or prepared in case anything about that procedure is not routine? That is just malpractice.
I miss Pulaski.
Overheard in the writers room —
“We look for plots. Plots to make our show go.”
OK, the first half of the B plot gets this episode all the way up to Warp 1. This is actually where I started to accept Wesley at least a little. Contra DeepThought @4, I didn’t really find Wesley that out of character, nor for Picard. Wesley decided at some point that Picard was his father figure, so it’s natural for him to make some sort of attempt at a real connection given the circumstances. If it’s passive-aggressive, well that sort of fits Wes. As for Picard, we’re just getting a little more depth to his character.
The second half of the B plot is stupid. On top of which, why the hell did they decide to make up a bunch of new pseudo-medical jargon for what is supposed to be routine surgery? Couldn’t they have used normal medical jargon? Would it really have hurt?
The less said about the A plot, the better.
Oh, and another note on the medical plot: the death rate of this procedure is 2.4%. Statistically, that’s not exactly fabulous. 1 in 50 fail?!? When the doctor comes in and says “We’ve done this a hundred times,” that means he’s probably had 2 or 3 people die on his table this year…
OMG. You’re all just playing with me now, right? Really, the only good Trek after TOS was DS9, wasn’t it?
The only redeeming thing about this show is the “fun” of saying in that totally imitable Pakled “accent”: “You are smart. You make things go.” to people. And while that is fun, it’s not fun enough to be worth watching this peck of pickled Pakleds.
@Caitie #10
Really, the only good Trek after TOS was DS9, wasn’t it?
Of course not. Most of DS9 was terrible. (Don’t get me started on Vic Fontaine…)
This episode reportedly inspired writers Dennis Russell Bailey, David Bischoff and Lisa Putman White to write the third season episode “Tin Man,”—-wow–how did that happen?–
I’m sure those red medical scrubs had been designed for and used in a movie but I don’t remember which it was that I had seen them before seeing this episode. (I want to say it was something with Jeremy Irons.) I remember saying to a friend that I recognized those costumes while we were watching this on its first airing.
While I like the idea of a race being given or stealing space travel technology that is still beyond their understanding and causing problems due to their lack of practical knowledge, I found the ‘A’ plot here completely lacking any entertaining value the first time I saw it. And, it hasn’t gotten better with age. Had they avoided this approach and went with a less advanced culture (think Grand Fenwick as in The Mouse That Roared and The Mouse On The Moon) they might have made the idea work.
@4 DeepThought
Your thoughts on the problem being with the universal translator made me think of the following line.
“Please fondle my buttox.”
Hopefully someone will know what that is from.
#13. Ludon, I think you’re thinking of the David Cronenberg film ‘Dead Ringers’? Jeremy Irons playing twin gynaecologists?
@10 Caitie
It really does get better. Next week is awful and there’s a Lwaxana episode after that, but the following two episodes aren’t bad. “Shades of Gray” simply never happened. Season 3 is a real upswing. Yes, there are some stinkers, but on the whole it’s as good as either of the first two seasons of TOS and the finale is a jaw-dropper.
If they hadn’t decided to make the Pakled developmentally disabled, they actually might have been able to do a decent “this is why we have the Prime Directive” story. Borrow heavily from Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade or something and give us a culture that doesn’t really understand the universe or how their tech works, but are out there stomping around the star lanes causing problems. You could play it for laughs, either broadly like “A Piece of the Action” or as satire like The Mouse that Roared, or you could be serious.
@14 Chris`
Dead Ringers is it. Thanks. In the images I found doing a Google image search, I saw that there were some differences in the head coverings but the costumes are so close that there has to be a connection.
““Please fondle my buttox.”
Hopefully someone will know what that is from.”
I would have to answer you with,”My nipples explode with delight!!!”
My hovercraft is full of eels!
That’s from the Monty Python sketch, ‘Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook’ which exists in two versions. My use of the word ‘buttox’ (I now realize I misspelled it) is from the version in the movie “And Now For Something Completely Different. In the TV show, the word ‘bum’ was used.
I just wanted to drop a note that “Up the Long Ladder” won’t be up until next Thursday. It’s a combination of my life being absolutely insane right now and the utter travesty that is that episode… I so wish I could just do a re-watch of those Monty Python sketches instead of this crap.
Think of it as a blessing because you’ll have this week to read Eugene’s new book! :)
Thanks for letting us know, Torie, glad to know it’s just life being life that’s the problem.
Well, and the long-running dreckitude that I am becoming morally certain that TNG will turn out to be, when we reach the end. ;D
Be well, looking forward to your next post, when you’ve got the spoons to spare.
I find myself really missing 3rd season classic trek.
Oh well I have my crappy novel to keep me occupied.
@21 bobsandiego
I’m glad you didn’t say “I have Eugene’s crappy novel to keep me occupied.” I can at least say with some certainty that it’s better than the vast majority of TNG seasons 1 and 2.
@22
oh no, this is entirely my crappy novel, where I discovered that writing a poker scene was almost as hard as a massive space battle. (I’m sure I failed at both.)
What does Grebnedlog’s name signify in the context of this episode? Turn it backwards.
@24 Russ
Whoa. I’m surprised I never noticed that before! But I’m still not sure what its significance is, other than as a cute in-joke, perhaps.