By Chris Snellgrove
| Printed
Star Trek: The Subsequent Era had many nice episodes all through its seven seasons, however none have been fairly as influential as “The Better of Each Worlds.” This bold two-parter confirmed how Captain Picard was assimilated by the Borg, inflicting Riker to take command of the Enterprise and finally hold the aliens from assimilating Earth itself. The factor about “The Better of Each Worlds” is that it’s the perfect Riker episode ever made. Sadly, after this episode, Riker by no means had a lot attention-grabbing to do on the present.
The Finest Of Each Worlds & Riker
As RedLetterMedia has helpfully identified to extra informal followers, “The Better of Each Worlds” is such an incredible Riker episode partially as a result of the title refers to what occurs to him. He begins the two-parter moping about whether or not or not he ought to lastly go be captain on one of many ships Starfleet retains providing to him or keep on the Enterprise the place he’s most snug. After the surprising assimilation of Picard and a fast subject promotion, Riker actually had the perfect of each worlds by turning into captain and getting to remain on the Enterprise.
After “The Better of Each Worlds,” although, Riker turns into far much less attention-grabbing as a personality. For instance, he largely turns into a viewer surrogate character who asks the questions that audiences would ask in his place. For instance, when Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge tries to elucidate the time warp in “Trigger and Impact”,” Riker follows up his comparatively technical clarification by asking, “You imply we may have come into this room, sat at this desk and had this dialog a dozen occasions already?”
When you begin noticing this, you’ll see it all over the place. After “The Better of Each Worlds,” Riker’s main operate as an viewers surrogate is to dumb issues down sufficiently for even the dimmest viewers to grasp them. This phenomenon prolonged previous the sequence: in First Contact, after Information says the Borg are utilizing “chronometric particles” and Picard says, “they’re making a temporal vortex,” Riker has to spell issues out for whoever remains to be confused (they need to not be academy materials) by merely saying, “time journey.”
You won’t assume “The Better of Each Worlds” actually killed Riker’s character as a result of he nonetheless received humorous strains that allowed actor Jonathan Frakes to completely channel his appreciable charisma. However look previous the lovable quotes and horny moments and also you’ll see that Riker had change into a bit like Troi and Dr. Crusher, a personality going via the motions in virtually each episode. Making issues worse is the truth that his arc successfully resulted in failure. Riker by no means did get a captaincy of his personal on the sequence, and his eventual promotion turned an afterthought for Nemesis, absolutely the worst of the TNG films.
Earlier than you are taking out your phaser and switch off the stun setting, we must always emphasize that we love each “The Better of Each Worlds” and Commander Riker himself. However we hate to see good potential being wasted, and simply as Riker ought to have gotten a command sooner, the TNG writers ought to have given him some first rate writing as a sort of comfort prize. Sadly, this beloved character was caught simply going via the motions; even sadder, these motions aren’t almost as entertaining because the Riker maneuver.
