The TREKKER Reviews


SERIES
The Next Generation
EPISODE
109
TITLE
A Matter Of Time
STARDATE
45349.1


The Enterprise is on another mercy mission. An asteroid has hit an unpopulated continent on a Federation colony, and the dust cloud is causing global cooling. On the way there, Worf notices a space-time distortion. What he finds is a ship that he can't scan. Hailing it gets a response from none other than Professor Max Headroom on a jaunt back from the 26th century!

Max claims that he is a historian who has come back in time to visit Picard. Despite reasonable doubts, he is allowed free access to the ship. Don't they ever bother to do any checking of anybody? "I'm from the future and I'm here to help you" is one of the three greatest lies of all time. We've had imposters from the future before, so you would have thought that they would've been at least slightly suspicious.

Max has a secret time ring, and is waiting for something - Godot perhaps? Whatever it is, it's causing the crew to become edgy. Geordi is doubly so because he is configuring the Enterprise's phasers to penetrate the planet's crust, releasing a CO2 cloud. The global warming that this creates is supposed to counter the global cooling. The firing pattern seems to be a success...

The time-travelling twonk is trying to ingratiate himself on the female members of the bridge-crew. Troi thinks that he is trying to misdirect them and openly tells him that she doesn't trust him. Bev is far more receptive to his probing but subtly puts his sleaze aside as she reminds him that she could be his great, great... great grandmother. With a flick of his cloak he leaves, but not before borrowing a neural stimulator.

The planetary phaser fire did more than liberate some gas, it also liberated the tectonic plates from their previously stable existence, causing major earthquakes and volcanic activity. The dust created by this will totally block the sun in a matter of weeks. Looks like the party boys have stuffed up again!

Max is handing out questionaries for all of the officers to fill out. They deal with their perception of the last 200 hundred years. He claims that it is to help fill in the gaps for future historians. I wonder then why he pilfered a tricorder?

Picard is in a quandary. Geordi has come up with a solution to the planet's problem - it involves using the Enterprise as a lightning rod to sweep the upper atmosphere with an ionising phaser blast. The problem is that if it doesn't work it will burn the entire atmosphere off, killing everyone down there. If he does nothing, they will freeze, and if he does something, they may all burn. But that is why they made him a captain, so he could take the hard decisions. His decision is to try and get the information out of the historian as to what he should do. What a cop-out!

As he was unable to get anything useful from Max, he decides to burn them all - after all, he can't be hurt! He orders Geordi back to the ship before the firing, but once again it is ignored. Geordi wants to stay to see the light show from underneath. Picard finally relents and blasts the planet. Luckily it works. Yeah right.

Max is about to pop into his time-pod and go and annoy someone else. He is met by a greeting party of the entire bridge crew - they want to know where their pilfered items are. He tries to rebuff them, but when Worf says that he will open the pod with explosives if necessary, he finally relents. Picard orders Data to search the pod for the missing items.

Of course they are there, but at this stage the crew just thinks he is relic hunting. Like all stupid criminals he tells the whole plot before he escapes - he really is from the 22nd century and is planning to go back and reinvent them all. The pod really is from the 26th century, at least that was what its former occupant claimed! I don't understand why he didn't just ask a replicator for the items - then nothing would have been missed.

He tries to threaten Data with a phaser, which unfortunately doesn't seem to work any more. Data drags him out, and the pod beams away. Picard orders him to be taken to a StarBase for study by 24th century historians. Under what law? Does the Federation instigate time law? Isn't this a blatant abuse of the Prime Directive? Apparently not.

Roll Credits...

Yet more time-travelling troublemakers. It wasn't a good episode last time, and wasn't a good episode this time. Hopefully they won't make it three strikes in the future.


This review is Copyright © 1994, Phil Kernick.
Permission is granted for anyone to electronically distribute it - details available on request.