Time's Arrow, Part II

The conclusion to the previous time travel episode.

This is an enjoyable finish to a pretty good story.

I prefer the cleverness of the story detail to the character moments. It does not generate much in the way of suspense or tension, as the pacing of the key plot details are quite slow. However when the situation is resolved I look back upon it as a cool time temporal concept that uses the passing time of time to great effect.

The characters are pretty good though, especially Captain Picard, Data, Guinan, Samuel Clements, and Jack London. How much the historical characters actually add to the episode other than padding that makes it all feel very literate and high-brow, is a matter of debate.

Patrick Stewart and Caryn Johnson are both great. Jerry Hardin is entertaining, but his voice starts to get a bit tiresome to me by the end, especially if you watch episodes parts 1 and 2 back to back. I do though like his observations on the idealistic Trek future society.

Riker and the others are fairly good also. The scenes when everyone pretends to be part of a theatrical troupe to humour a nosey landlady reminds me a lot of "The Ladykillers".

Visually it all work very well with some cool effects, set design, props, and costuming.

There's a bit of Mark Twain in an episode that features his character. The whole crew finally ends up together along with Guinan. Data's dismembered head is the critical thing. After a narrow escape from the evil space cannibals, Data, driving a horse and buggy, drives everyone back to the aforementioned cave. There they are to meet their adversaries. All is going well until Mark Twain shows up and throws a monkey wrench into the works. All manage to escape to the Enterprise to continue pursuit, but Picard and Guinan are left behind along with the head of Data. Also in the cave is one of the dying aliens, who tells Picard that if the Enterprise attacks her planet, they will destroy themselves. Twain has caused huge damage to the process. He is going to cause more trouble so the crew beams him aboard. The way they ultimately get a message back to the ship is so far fetched that it is beyond the pale. Still, it is a bit of fun.

After arguably STNG's finest episode "The Inner Light", this two-parter continues the excellence, marred only by the performance of Hardin, an otherwise fine actor. His exaggerated Samuel Clemens, with its irritating, grinding old miner inflections and affectations, had me muting his portions after awhile. Too bad, because this episode is so cleverly written and so well performed, it is a flaw that should have been fixed. Otherwise I would have given this 9 stars.

Apart from the poor sit-com with the landlady, this was good, if contrived, fun. Those who complained about Samuel Clemens voice/accent have clearly not done their homework. He did make audio recordings (on wax cylinders) but none are known to have survived.) However, the actor William Gillette (best know as the first to play Sherlock Holmes) knew Clemens and used to impersonations of him on stage. He recorded at least one and it sounds like what we hear here.

He was from the South. Why is he talking like cartoon coal miner?