Star Trek TNG’s Best Episode Ruined Its Greatest Character
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek: The Next Generation had many great episodes throughout its seven seasons, but none were quite as influential as “The Best of Both Worlds.” This ambitious two-parter showed how Captain Picard was assimilated by the Borg, causing Riker to take command of the Enterprise and ultimately keep the aliens from assimilating Earth itself. The thing about “The Best of Both Worlds” is that it’s the best Riker episode ever made. Unfortunately, after this episode, Riker never had much interesting to do on the show.
The Best Of Both Worlds & Riker
As RedLetterMedia has helpfully pointed out to more casual fans, “The Best of Both Worlds” is such a great Riker episode in part because the title refers to what happens to him. He begins the two-parter moping about whether or not he should finally go be captain on one of the ships Starfleet keeps offering to him or stay on the Enterprise where he is most comfortable. After the unexpected assimilation of Picard and a quick field promotion, Riker truly had the best of both worlds by becoming captain and getting to stay on the Enterprise.
After “The Best of Both Worlds,” though, Riker becomes far less interesting as a character. For example, he mostly becomes a viewer surrogate character who asks the questions that audiences would ask in his place. For example, when Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge tries to explain the time warp in “Cause and Effect”,” Riker follows up his relatively technical explanation by asking, “You mean we could have come into this room, sat at this table and had this conversation a dozen times already?”
Once you start noticing this, you’ll see it everywhere. After “The Best of Both Worlds,” Riker’s primary function as an audience surrogate is to dumb things down sufficiently for even the dimmest viewers to understand them. This phenomenon extended past the series: in First Contact, after Data says the Borg are using “chronometric particles” and Picard says, “they’re creating a temporal vortex,” Riker has to spell things out for whoever is still confused (they must not be academy material) by simply saying, “time travel.”
You might not think “The Best of Both Worlds” really killed Riker’s character because he still got funny lines that allowed actor Jonathan Frakes to fully channel his considerable charisma. But look past the cute quotes and sexy moments and you’ll see that Riker had become a bit like Troi and Dr. Crusher, a character going through the motions in almost every episode. Making matters worse is the fact that his arc effectively ended in failure. Riker never did get a captaincy of his own on the series, and his eventual promotion became an afterthought for Nemesis, the absolute worst of the TNG movies.
Before you take out your phaser and turn off the stun setting, we should emphasize that we love both “The Best of Both Worlds” and Commander Riker himself. But we hate to see good potential being wasted, and just as Riker should have gotten a command sooner, the TNG writers should have given him some decent writing as a kind of consolation prize. Sadly, this beloved character was stuck just going through the motions; even sadder, those motions aren’t nearly as entertaining as the Riker maneuver.
