Lessons

Patrick Stewart is a great actor in any sense of the word. Here, his Jean-Luc Picard is smitten with an attractive woman who is multi-talented, both in her vocation and her avocation. She is a masterful musician, a pianist of great skill. One of Picard's few opportunities for artistic fulfillment, comes from a flute he was given in the episode where he lives an entire lifetime on a doomed planet. He plays along with computer generated music all by himself. He is immediately attracted to this woman and the loneliness of his position becomes a force with which he must deal. He is her superior on the Enterprise and there are understandings. Just because her role is research doesn't mean she may be required to perform a dangerous mission given the right circumstances. This episode is so beautifully done, with so much hurt and heart, that it really grabs us. Eventually, of course, those decisions are going to be made, and the role of Captain must be recognized. It's sad and poignant.

This episode gives Captain Jean-Luc Picard a little romance in his life. Wendy Hughes is the new head of stellar cartography a most important position since the Enterprise is first and foremost a ship of exploration. She likes classical music and she and Patrick Stewart find they have a lot in common.

Perhaps Hughes and Stewart hit it off too good. She's not the most disciplined of people. She kind of reminded me of Douglas MacArthur who could never quite grasp that whatever theater of operations he wa in was not the whole show. Hughes and Jonathan Frakes have a small blowup about that.

More important her knowledge is invaluable on an away mission to rescue colonists from solar storms. But will personal involvement impair Captain Picard's judgment.

Nice as always to see romance not reserved for just the young.

Picard, a disciplined and private person is human after all and falls hopelessly in love, in spite of his reserved nature. With true love nobody is immune. And if Wendy Hughes is around I don't know how anybody could resist her in a great role and beautifully written episode. Of course our Captain can't just walk off in the sunset and the connection with his other "life" from "The Inner Light" episode is another reminder that the Captain of the Enterprise is a lonely place to be and Picard had to sacrifice a more normal existence long ago.

In "Generations", instead of David Carson's wife Kim Braden...

In fact for a second in Generations, I thought that actually was Wendy Hughes when they first show "Picard's wife"... but it was in fact Braden (Carson had directed Generations...), who we originally saw in "The Loss"... when she was able to lie to Troi during a time when Troi had lost her empathic powers because of 2D Creatures...

I adore this episode mostly because of the music. I don't know if that is actually a Chopin piece played by Hughes, Spiner and the Cellist, but it was a very powerful, memorable piece of music.

Also, it should be noted that the portable piano she had was purchased from "Yonada", as the Yonadans ultimate destination was Daran V.

And it is great that Picard comes up afterward to complement her on a change in an arpeggio... even though the musical language he used was technically wrong.

I just thought that Wendy Hughes was the perfect woman for Stewart. They had quite a lot in common. Not just as characters, but as actors.

Maybe that could be a problem though, maybe they were too much alike. But for whatever reason, they never brought the character back even though they should have. She was much more interesting than Vash... and Vash did just fine on her own on deep space nine without Picard even being around...

This is another episode where Picard inadvertently treats his girlfriend rudely... The first time was in Q-Pid, but I don't think that was particularly his fault. Vash was being Nosy, asking everybody that she met if Picard had even mentioned her, which he would not have. Because of his own standards where he cannot let any crewmember see any kind of weakness or humanity, let alone any kind of romantic connection at all.

Darren was much better for Picard.

We get to see stellar cartography here, but it is not the huge set that they made for generations. In fact we see the globe that Darren is using to map the future constellations all the way back in first season episodes, it was just a prop that was floating around the Paramount lot since The Original Series possibly.

Darren inadvertently talks Riker into letting her lead a dangerous mission and it's too much for her to chew on... "Never eat anything bigger than your head".

There is one point where Picard believes the worst has happened, he is never going to play his Rissican flute again. The music that is playing at that point is very similar to a piece that was used in 2001: A Space Odyssey and also at the very beginning of Aliens when Ripleys escape craft is being salvaged.

It is not quite the same music, but somebody describes this piece in the trivia section and they are spot on.

Or words to that effect uttered by Captain Picard.

Totally wrong, at least for the Star Trek I knew. The Star Trek I knew had a strict military hierarchy with some comforts allowed for the crew that you wouldn't see on a regular naval vessel, because it's the future and there's more allowance for maturity.

But this episode really just tried to pull the wool over many a viewer's eyes, and how on Earth did it work? The captain getting romantically involved with another officer? Heck, this doesn't even happen on Cruise Ships, how in the world does it happen on a heavily armed vessel?

Once again, Star Trek the Next Generation was an examination of interpersonal relations with moments of plot interspersed within the dialogue and set as the background for the story which focuses on not interpersonal conflict per se, but character psychology and interaction.

"Didn't we agree not to let our relationship get in the way of our work?" Well, lady, if you were stationed on a US Navy destroyer or cruiser, you'd be in the brig right now in a cell next to the captain. And this would go for the Kirk and Spock era of Star Fleet, or so far as I know. But on the good mental hospital starship Enterprise-D, apparently the concept of an inferior officer sleeping with the ship's CO and the ramifications thereof, is a new and puzzling topic that needs to be explored and talked about.

Is there anything more inane? Oh, maybe it washed with the high school and middle school audiences, and possibly with the uneducated adult audience, but it strikes me that most people with any sort of nautical experience or even military experience, know why those rules and regulations are there. And yet the idea of officer favoritism in the 24th Century version of Star Fleet is a new one.

Again, a lot of soft horn, soft violin, synthesizer soft music, no real plot, an emphasis on character interaction and what most people already know about heirarchies of all sorts, and you got your "Lessons" episode.

The truth is I'm the stupid one here. But not without cause. Visual theatre is used as a deceptive tool to present people, usually criminals, a visual to relax their psychological defenses and to get them to open up about whatever it is they're hiding. And that's kind of the theory behind the supermajority of Hollywood offerings, including this television show. And so it is that when "Star Trek" was going to get new life old guard fans like me were expecting a new action-adventure in space program, and what we got instead was absolute garbage, the epitome of which was this episode, and all of the series to be honest. The idea is that because this is Star Trek viewers will be lured in, see something that gybes with their personal lives, and they might have the wherewithal to examine their personal lives, address it, and move on.

Meanwhile morons like me tuned in once or twice a year to see if the show had gotten any better, and it hadn't. And yet the top tier students and universities, their professors, and science and tech professionals kept tunning in because it had the Star Trek name on it. I quit watching regularly after the first season the show was so bad, and it hasn't been until the last seventy-two hours that I've discovered why. I had the wool pulled over my eyes, as did everyone else, but I recognized the poor and emphasis shift, I just couldn't nail what that shift was nor identify its signifiers. All the while the smoke and mirrors of this show being more intellectual polluted the Trek-social-sphere, while I was trying to figure out how to get my adventure in space show shot. Now I understand, and trying to painfully rewatch this show after thirty years, reminds me of why pursuing a career in film and TV was a bad move.

In the end the two characters separate ways in this episode after a lot of obvious exchanges of why the Commanding Officer should not be romantically involved with subordinates, especially if they're on the same ship. Whereas in adventure series prior to the 1980s nearly everyone understood why you didn't allow that on any vessel, much less one that had weapons.

And that, good people, is why this show is garbage and condescending. You may like the production values. You may like the characters. You may call this more intellectual (which it isn't), and call Captain Kirk all kinds of names and so forth, but you would be missing the basics of what I've put down in this review and others regarding this tragically formulate television show.

In the end it doesn't matter what I write, but it would behoove the casual or fan viewer to examine what it is they love, why they love it, and its actual substance.