The Drumhead

One of the best episodes of thg

Jean Simmons masteclass

It's very apt now to heed the message in the program People being accused on social media and judged guilty and having to prove innocence rather than other way around.

Silence seen as guilt rather than any other reason.

Sounds familiar? Like many TNG-episodes, this one isn't driving its point home very subtly, but does a good job at it nevertheless. One of the main factors has got to be Patrick Stewart's magnificent acting, especially in his interrogation scene. This guy is in a class of his own.

Yes, the whole way the villain collapses in a fit of rage in the end and lets her real ideas and purposes be seen clearly is not very realistic and obviously designed to bring the plot to an end in the last 5 minutes of the episode. Like so many other TNG episodes, the writers seemed to want to squeeze too much into the 45-minute time-slot and then they'd have to rush the ending.

What surprised me most were countless lines of dialog that have a very eerie quality with regards to our current political climate and especially the shift in politics in the US since 9/11. Considering the air-date (1991), this only confirms how true Picard's statement about how quickly people are willing to blindly trade their liberties for "security" really is.

8/10

Phenomenal episode: one lacking in lasers and starship confrontations, but full of intrigue and drama. The arc of this episode is just brilliant, the creeping fear and doubt of the motives of various crew members. I will not spoil it, but suffice to say, some incredible acting here.

The Drumhead might be my favorite TNG episode. It certainly is my favorite episode that isn't regularly mentioned as a top 5 episode, such as The Inner light, or the good Borg, Q or Time Travel episodes.

The drumhead has the type of villain which really gets under my skin more than others due to the type's continued effectiveness and presence throughout history.

This episode's villain is so camouflaged that she uses one of the typically good characters, in Worf, as an ally in her corruption. And Worf follows along willingly, only seeing his errors at the end of the episode.

It's a phenomenon we can find often in people who get so swept up in an opportunity to create order and justice of some sort, that they end up resembling the very type of evil they're trying to fight due to their own tribal arrogance and exaggerated fear of the other. Often such villains gain power and test the norms slowly one step at a time until before many realize it, there's a completely new evil norm out of a promise for a miracle cure to a problem where a solution hasn't been demonstrated as much as asserted as a problem.

And just like Worf, the individuals who seem to get swept up in such mistaken causes are typically the people who seem unable to spot irony, hypocrisy or enjoy a joke or construct a joke because they're so serious and desperate for vengeance. Their good qualities get obscured by their lesser illogical desires to get their way in solving some issue regardless of the costs.

This episode should be required viewing for everyone studying history. In this episode we see exactly what can happen when fear is allowed to cloud judgement. This has been a recurring theme throughout history, the Salem Witch hunts, the McCarthy hearings, and too many more times to count.

I think people can learn from fiction, oftentimes more effectively than through documentaries.

The acting in this episode was great. My wife and I recently rewatched this episode. We had both forgotten how much we each grew to hate the character played by Jean Simmons. It takes a great talent pull that kind of emotion from an audience.