“Masks”
Written by Joe Menosky
Directed by Robert Wiemer
Season 7, Episode 17
Production episode 40276-269
Original air date: February 21, 1994
Stardate: 47615.2
Captain’s Log: Troi is guest teaching an art class, where the students are making sculptures that represent their feelings. Data is also in the class, oddly, and after he sculpts a perfect padd, Troi challenges him to sculpt music. He makes a G-clef, which Troi figures is a good start.
The Enterprise has found a rogue comet. As Data examines it, the Enterprise is hit with a bright light, which Data figures is a sensor echo. Meanwhile, Crusher and Troi stop by the latter’s quarters en route to the morning mok’bara class only to find a mini-obelisk that Troi has never seen before. They don’t think anything of it, at first, as they’re running late; Crusher theorizes it’s from a secret admirer.
Later, back in the classroom, Data has sculpted a mask that has a marking on it similar to that of the obelisk in Troi’s cabin. They soon discover that similar symbols are just showing up on computer displays. Something has been inserted into the computer core. Data recognizes the symbols, but he has no idea from where—he is able to translate the symbols, much to his surprise.
Phasers burn away the comet’s surface to reveal an object of some kind, and it’s definitely transmitting information into the sensors and replicators. Data has an intuitive understanding of it all, which has everyone concerned that he’s as compromised as the Enterprise computers. By the same token, this may be the device’s way of communicating, and this could even be a first contact, so they approach things cautiously.
The replicator starts producing many more objects like the ones Troi found in her quarters. Picard is collecting them in his ready room, and he theorizes to Riker that these have cultural significance, and that what they found could be an alien library of some sort.
La Forge examines Data’s positronic brain, but after they finish, Data has one of the symbols from the library etched on his forehead, and his voice has changed. “Masaka is waking,” he declares, and then sits on the warp core until Picard shows up. Data identifies himself as Ihat, and now has another symbol on his chest. Picard’s attempts to question Ihat are stymied by his impish nature. But when Troi walks in, Data takes on a different personality (the symbol on his chest having changed) and kneels before her, identifying her as Masaka and saying he’s hers.
Picard confines Data to quarters. La Forge theorizes that the library is placing multiple personalities into Data’s positronic brain. Picard goes to Data’s quarters, and talks with several different people—the chest symbol changing each time—one of whom is scared to death of Masaka.
The library hits the ship with a tractor beam, cutting power to the ship. Ten-Forward has been transformed into an altar of some kind—and other parts of the ship are being changed as well. The library is somehow altering matter, changing the ship into something else piece by piece.
While La Forge attempts a technical solution, Picard tries a diplomatic one. He wishes to talk to Masaka, so he goes to Data’s quarters, where he’s channeling Masaka’s father, an elderly gentleman clutching a lit brazier. Data pings back and forth among three different personalities—Ihat, Masaka’s father, and the scared one—but he learns how to summon Masaka: building her temple. La Forge technobabbles his way into sending the symbol Data showed Picard into the transformation program on the library, which changes an entire deck into Masaka’s temple.
Ihat told Picard that Korgano is the only one who can control Masaka. Picard, Troi, and Worf try to find the symbol that they think represents Korgano in the temple—which Picard has actually seen all over in small form amongst other symbols. As they do so, Data puts on the mask that he made in Troi’s class, takes down the two security guards posted to his quarters (seriously, why were the two guards so utterly unprepared to deal with him? it’s not like his sooooper android speed and strength is a big secret), and then shows up in the temple. He is now Masaka, but will not listen to anyone. La Forge finds the one instance of Korgano’s symbol by itself and plugs it into the transformation program, which provides them with another mask.
Picard puts the mask on and bluffs his way through being Korgano to confront Masaka, which does the trick, changing the ship and Data back to normal. Data feels oddly empty, as there were thousands of personalities inside him—but he still has the clay mask he made, which he has painted and kept as a memento of the incident.
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: The library somehow transforms parts of the ship into stone artifacts, masks, symbols, and, at one point, an entire deck into a temple that has a higher ceiling than the deck itself, and manages to do this without transforming the outside of the ship, nor altering life support or the structural integrity field or even the configuration of the ship, which is utterly miraculous.
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: Troi guest teaches a sculpture class where she tries to get people to sculpt what they’re feeling. She tells Eric, one of the kids, to go less for realism in his bird sculpture and more to convey the feeling of flying with what he creates. Similarly, she tries to get Data (whose presence in a class filled with little kids is never explained) to sculpt music, a concept the literal-minded android struggles with at first.
If I Only Had a Brain…: As an artificial life form, Data is the perfect repository for the personalities stored in the library, though he only channels four of them outwardly. Oddly, no parallel is drawn between that and the journals of the colonists of Omicron Theta that he also has downloaded into his positronic brain….
There is No Honor in Being Pummeled: Worf aids Troi and Picard in trying to figure out the symbology of the temple. He also immediately calls for the transporter when he and La Forge are trapped in engineering, and just generally is refreshingly competent in this episode. The same cannot be said for the two people he assigns to guard Data….
I Believe I Said That: “Worf says he’s gonna teach us some mok’bara throwing techniques today.”
“More like falling techniques. Last time we did that, I was sore for a week.”
Crusher and Troi dreading Worf’s class.
Welcome Aboard: This is the only TNG episode that has nobody listed in the guest credits whatsoever, jumping straight from the title to Peter Lauritson’s associate producer credit. The only guest is Rickey D’Shon Collins, who does a nice job with his brief role as one of the kids in the sculpting class.
Trivial Matters: The script was based on a concept Michael Piller had had to do a science fictional version of the Library of Alexandria. Menosky’s first draft had used archetypal forms, but that proved hard to do on television, so he went with actual characters. Menosky had left the staff of TNG at this point and was living in Europe, so Naren Shankar did an uncredited polish on the script.
Make it So: “Masaka is waking.” For the second week in a row, we have a Data showcase episode that I had no memory of. In fact, I had absolutely no recollection of any part of this episode, not even fleeting impressions, leading me to wonder if I ever watched it. In any case, this was a rare case of an episode that was more of a watch than a rewatch.
Joe Menosky is the guy, you’ll recall, who wrote “Darmok,” and his resumé has plenty of other stories that deal with symbology and archaeology and odd ways of communicating, often via possession of some kind (e.g. “Clues,” “Interface,” Deep Space Nine’s “Dramatis Personae”). This story is, in many ways, vintage Menosky, and it’s a delightful idea.
Unfortunately, the execution is a total disaster. I can—barely—suspend my disbelief that this millennia-old (at least) computer can effect full transformations of matter, but that it can do so to a spacefaring ship without causing any permanent damage cuts off my disbelief’s air supply. How is nobody killed or even hurt? How is the ship not damaged, except to plot-convenient parts of it?
I might be willing to forgive it if other elements were more compelling, but beyond the (very) vague archaeological fascination and Brent Spiner mugging for the camera, there’s not much to hang one’s interest on. Plus, that very lack of damage drains the suspense from it, because it eliminates the feeling of any danger. Adding insult to injury, the episode is oddly empty. When Worf checks the disturbance in Ten-Forward, there are only two people in the ship’s bar, which is impossible to believe. Worse, when La Forge and Worf are in engineering trying and failing to modify a torpedo, they’re the only ones there, and then when the senior staff has their meeting in the bridge thanks to the observation lounge being turned into a swamp, there’s nobody else on the bridge, which makes no sense. Where is everybody?
And again, this might all be forgiveable if the performances were strong, but this is a rare instance of Spiner letting us down. Putting this episode right after “Thine Own Self” is problematic enough from a story perspective—hey, look, Data isn’t himself again!—but Spiner himself has said that he had inadequate time to dig into these four new roles he was playing all at once after such a hefty amount of screen time in “Thine Own Self,” and it shows. He gives us caricatures rather than characters, really only scratching the surface. Of course, if these are supposed to be mythical, archetypal characters, surface characterization makes sense on the face of it, but that still gives us a performance—or, really, four performances—that are inadequate to watch on a TV episode.
It’s frustrating, because the concept behind this episode is an excellent one. But concepts ain’t stories, and as a story, this one fails.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido has two new books out, neither of which are actually SF/F: the novel Leverage: The Zoo Job, based on the TV series about criminals who help people, and the baseball book In the Dugout: Yankees 2013, which he co-edited with Cecilia M. Tan, all about New York’s American League baseball team.
I might actually give this one an even lower rating. What exactly was the point of it? This computer thing starts turning the Enterprise into a temple and having Data act out various people in its mythos (and how could they even have anticpated something like Data, anyway)…and then Picard acts like somebody else in the mythos and the changes all get reverted. What was the point? WHY was the ship transforming, and WHY did it transform back?
It is very likely I missed something (and I have a foggy memory of the episode at this point) but I just couldn’t figure out a reason for any of the things to be happening. What were the motives? Why did the ending work the way it did?
I think this is where I felt season 7 really started to go down hill -it’s the first of a few episodes where I felt like it had potential (I was interested at first in the mystery and really was hoping we’d learn more about this mythology and culture and why they were doing what they were doing) but the end or twist just fell flat to me. Actually, Sub Rosa might also be in that category. But at least from here on out, I am not sure we get a really good episode again until Preemptive Strike (which I really liked, curious to see what others think when we get there).
I actually liked this episode. Wait! Let me explain…
Part of it’s because when I watched this ep, I had recently played through Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, so I was already in the mindset for ancient computers and their ability to keep on functioning and doing bad things.
I’m also a fan of Lovecraft and his eldritch horrors, and (even tho I can’t pinpoint any one specific thing) for some reason, it really, really struck me as a Star Trek/Lovecraft crossover. I totally pictured Masaka as some kind of Cthulhoid being from the depths of the universe and that Data was channeling her entire cult.
Maybe it was the Lovecraftian thoughts I was having, but it made sense to me that NOBODY was around. If the ship was being changed bit by bit, it would make sense to keep non-essential personnel in their quarters and my brain-editor just made it so.
I figured I’d be in the minority with liking this one and I’ve been looking forward to getting this far along, just to put my thoughts out there and see if I’m actually in the minority or if I’m the only one who liked it.
Oh, and agreed, this is one of the few (maybe only) episodes where Spiner just annoyed me with some of the over the top rendition of some of the characters at times.
God I loathe this episode. Suspension of disbelief is impossible.
@2 – your description actually makes the episode sound more interesting than it was to me. I just want to know, to what end was all this supposed to be happening! I was never quite sure what the point was – was Maska somehow trying to take over the ship to revitalize her cult and be worshipped again? I still wanted a little more information about the nature of these beings/figures (if they were indeed real at all).
I view this episode as an ancient culture trying to teach us about themselves by teaching us one of their central myths. (So it’s Darmok crossed with Inner Light, maybe). The Masaka/Korgano bit is obviously a sun/moon mythology like Helios and Selene. (It’s fortunate that the culture that sent the library came from a planet with just one moon, like Earth, otherwise it might have taken Picard a lot longer to figure it out.) Masaka takes over the world every day and is banished by Korgano every night.
The episode’s greatest weakness for me is that it is yet another culture using mysterious means to tell us about themselves. And much like Inner Light and Darmok, now that Picard has figured out enough of the myth to give the proper response to the stimulus, what happens next? The library shuts down? Does the Federation send historians to check it out, or does the Big-E just fly away again?
I like this one a lot. I guess I’m more forgiving of the execution and more intrigued by the concept. I love these surreal Menosky scripts where the adversaries our heroes must battle are abstract ideas and symbols reified by technology, like this and Voyager‘s “The Thaw.” It gives them sort of a Twilight Zone flavor. And I liked the resonances with mythology and the archetypes that recur in it.
I don’t believe Masaka and the others were real entities. Rather, they were mythological archetypes. As Picard said, the builders of the archive were a ritualistic culture built around symbol and myth. Re-enacting the events of myth was presumably important to their culture, much as with Menosky’s other creations the Children of Tama (“Darmok”), and so they built their computer archive to embody the mythic personas and act out their story. Essentially they were like holodeck characters, simulated personalities programmed to behave in certain ways. Those character programs got downloaded into Data and ran on his positronic brain, essentially “possessing” him.
So the “why” of it isn’t some conventional motive about power or conquest. It’s the kind of motive you find in a lot of Menosky stories — the impulse to tell stories, to act out archetypes. In Menosky’s body of work, the act of storytelling is a powerful and important thing; this comes through most clearly in “Darmok” and in VGR: “Muse.” “Masks” is the kind of Trek episode where the “villain” is actually benevolent, or at least doing harm only by accident, and the characters take time to figure that out and realize what they have to do to resolve the situation peacefully. In this case, the library’s only motive was the motive of any library ever: to share the knowledge of its culture.
As for the transformations, I figured the software was manipulating the ship’s own transporter and replicator systems to achieve them. Maybe that’s why they didn’t do any structural damage to the ship — the transporter probably has built-in safeguards to prevent it from accidentally beaming away part of the hull or something. Then again, if the library’s only motive was to project its cultural knowledge, its own programming may have precluded damage to the ship.
Christopher: Great thoughts! I also love the Menosky episodes, but I’ve never been able to articulate why quite as well as you managed in your comment. I too have always been fascinated by this episode, as you say, more for the concept than the nuts and bolts.
The D’Arsay myth cycle is clearly a mere Campbellian recapitulation of the archetypal Celestia/Luna dynamic, albeit with a variation in that the level-headed moon-figure banishes the willful sun-figure, possibly indicating a corruption in the memetic transmission of the underlying concepts to D’Arsay culture. Also, they are not winged unicorns, so there’s that.
Seriously, the archive seems a bit odd to me. Okay, we’ve already seen the Kataan probe use a somewhat forceful method of educating passers-by about its long-gone culture, but at least the Kataanians were thorough. Here, the crew don’t learn much about the D’Arsay in the end. All they do is get the bare minimum necessary to get away from the archive. Somewhere, an ancient alien game designer is screaming “Dammit, they didn’t do any of the optional story content! They just read a walkthrough and critical-pathed my rich tapestry of narrative!”
@9: Fire isn’t necessarily that dangerous on a spaceship; if you turn off the gravity and air circulation, the flame will smother itself in its own combustion products.
Then again, with a very few exceptions, Starfleet ships seem incapable of losing gravity under any circumstances, even when every other system is dead.
I have been looking forward to your review of this episode. I was hoping that you could help me make sense of it all. Alas, not so much. The first time I watched this I had a WTF moment. I get the Sun and Moon symbolism but the whole thing is a mess.
@1,
I loved preemptive strike. I think you’re right that most of the episodes between now and then aren’t that good – although I liked Journey’s End myself. Unfortunately we also have Genesis, Bloodlines, and Emergence coming up….
I liked this episode a lot when it aired (haven’t seen it since), but I was in a minority, as the rec.arts.startrek crowd didn’t care much for it either.
IIRC, the cast was reported as saying that, collectively, they had NO idea what the plot was supposed to be or what they were doing, so they were more or less winging it.
@2 and @7 – You’re not alone; I really like this episode. I am and always have been a history buff, but when this episode first aired, I think I was 14(?) so I was a less critical history/mythology buff than I am now; the suspension of disbelief wasn’t a huge problem for me. I also saw the episode as more of a set of mythological archetypes, so the lack of character development of those archetypes wasn’t a huge problem for me – I actually thought that was the point – as different as we are, we’re all pretty much the same underneath. I also thought that even if the files were deleted from the Enterprise computers, the library itself was still there so Starfleet would still be able to study the culture, which made the ending feel less abrupt to me.
Dude. G-clef. Most parental-controls filters will remove references to the G-cleft.
S
p.s. I’m enjoying the rewatch, looking forward to DS9 (at least the years while they still believe in shades of gray), keep up the good work.
[edited for typo]
I remember thinking it was an interestingly nutty episode. On that simple basis — as cumulatively bizarre spectacle — I somewhat forgave it the lack of believability that a poster upthread mentioned.
Arguably, too, the fact that Masaka etc. have no ordinarily comprehensible motivations is acceptable: all this activity is just the playing-out of an ancient alien program. In principle, indeed, there needed to be one episode of Star Trek — out of 175 episodes of just STNG, without mentioning the other flavors of the franchise — that was just bizarre, alien spectacle.
Still, given the fact that this episode is only bizarrity founded upon bizarrity, without any more logical thrust than that, God knows how patient I would be with it if I saw it today.
I always really liked this episode. I remember thinking that it was one of the stronger examples of what writers could do if they didn’t have to worry about appealing to the common denominator. Something new and creative, since they didn’t have to think about another season. I still enjoy it for reason Mr. Bennett already expresed. I loved seeing the alien mysticism. The idea that they would see there myths as a more important record then recordings of real life. You never can never know the alien mind.
@18: Exactly. Today we think of “myth” as meaning “something that isn’t true,” or at least something that’s widely believed but factually questionable (in fact I just finished rewatching an episode of Mythbusters). But traditionally, myths were the foundation of a culture’s beliefs and ideology. They codified how a culture defined the world and how it defined itself. So the idea of a culture, even a scientifically advanced one, choosing to present its myths and rituals as the essence of what it valued and wished to preserve about itself isn’t so implausible.
Christopher: While I agree that this was an excellent concept — as I said in the rewatch itself — a concept isn’t a story. A good idea is useless unless it leads to a good story, and this was very much not a good story. There’s a reason why I roll my eyes at wannabe writers who are so very scared to death that someone might steal their ideas, not getting that an idea is not a commodity worth anyone’s time to steal. There’s a reason why high school students study Shakespeare’s Macbeth and only a handful of scholars and nerds like me even know about Holinshed’s Macbeth, even though they’re both the same idea.
So it being a good idea was enough to bump it up to a 4, but not to actually consider it a good episode, nor worth my time to ever watch again.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Damn you KRAD for pointing out everything wrong with this episode. When I first watched it (in reruns), I thought Brent Spiner was great transitioning from one character to another. Now I see the flaws.
Krad, excellent point about the Enterprise feeling empty! I felt that while watching it before, but never really “noticed” it before. Another weird thing in a weird episode.
I would give this ine a 2 out of 10. It really is done lifelessly, boringly, and it took a great concept and puked on it. The only reason i give it 2 is because the first 10 minutes I thought were actually quite interesting. Everything after that is a solid 0 of 10.
This episode annoyed me from the get go. The idea right at the start that Data was unable to understand an abstract artistic concept, despite the fact that we have seen many times in the past that he has a firm grasp on nearly all concepts of art and has produced abstract works himself, immediately suggested to me lazy writing.
And I think that sums up what we have here. I agree with Krad, this is a fine idea let down by the fact that the writers never really thought anything through. It’s like a child’s writing. “This will be cool. Oh and this, and this.” Yes it will, but it won’t make any real sense.
Count me amoung those who enjoyed this episode and I agree with everything that ChristopherLBennett has written above.
As to the aliens’ motives, I read it as a Solaris type thing. They’re alien and their motives and actions are incomprehensible to us.
I have a memory that Michael Dorn cited this episode as a reason why TNG should have had just six seasons but as said above, I rather enjoyed the ‘end of term, let’s try this and see if it works’ vibe that this season has even though, if memory serves, the hit rate is considerably lower than the misses.
The only real substantive comment (and it it really substantive, Belaine?) I can make about this episode is that it is the inspiration for this absurd banter my husband and I have whenever we decide to head out for Greek food.
That’s right, you guessed it – one of us will say to the other, in a nasal done “Moussaka is waiting!!”
We’re really both dorks, you might have realized.
@24: The problem with the “incomprehensible aliens” idea is that their mythology as portrayed in the episode is based on some very common human mythic archetypes.
@25: I hate to spoil a good (i.e. bad) pun, but unfortunately the line was actually “Masaka is waking,” not “waiting.” Not sure how to make that work with Greek food. (“Moussaka is baking?” Is that something that’s baked?)
#7 – Thanks for that insightful explanation of WTF was going on in the episode. It makes perfect sense. Too bad the episode itself didn’t actually explain any of that…
All it needed was a few more scenes explaining that. Like we got the explanation of what was really going on with The Inner Light. Here, nothing.
Without that explanation the episode becomes just DUMB.
And what about the changing crest on Data’s chest? Where did that come from? How is it changing? It’s never actually pointed out that it’s changing with each character — as I recall, the first time I saw this I didn’t even notice that. There’s “nice” subtle, and then there’s “so what’s the point” subtle.
The fact that they never actually show it changing leads me to believe they never really figured it how it was changing either… It was tied in to Data’s mental procurement of the characters, so how did that cause a physical material change in the thingy?
Oh and whoever said lucky thing about it being a single-moon planet (for some reason I can’t find that in the comments now I’m just blind) – brilliant! I never thought of that.
Absolutely just a 1 or 2 warp rating.
And yes, G CLEF. No bloody Q, R, S, or T.
For some reason, this episode scared me. I don’t recall watching it in its entirety when it aired, and if I come across it I avoid it. Like the other two or three episodes I’ve mentioned in that category.
— Michael A. Burstein
I had an easy time understanding and enjoying this episode the first time around, for many of the reasons that Christopher mentioned. But I was an anthropology major at the time. The folks in my little corner of Nerdsylvania were atwitter with delight the next day, I can tell you. We went over to the classics department to high five each other smugly for being worthy of pandering.
I have to admit that I didn’t think that the device in the story was meant merely to pass on history. I figured it was meant to create a forceful conversion to both the religion and the culture. Its purpose may have been genocidal, to wipe out a space-faring culture that used to roam that particular area by means of forced re-education. Or it may have been meant to do something opposite, a violent act of cultural spread, used by a dying society to keep it afloat. The society of “The Inner Light” wanted merely to be remembered. The society of “Masks” wants to last forever.
@29: But how could a forceful conversion have taken effect? There was no real intelligence guiding the constructs; they were just acting out their preprogrammed scripts (otherwise “Masaka” wouldn’t have fallen for Picard’s Korgano act). Without conscious beings to teach and enforce their version of what the faith means and how it’s practiced, it’s nothing but a re-enactment of the myths, just a much more elaborate and computerized version of Egyptian wall carvings.
Maybe there was an element of that old Trek standby, the test imposed by powerful aliens. Masaka’s takeover is a challenge, a test to see if a species is able to deduce the necessary response, i.e. acting out Korgano’s part of the ritual. Those who show their understanding are granted access to the fuller range of knowledge within the archive.
Then again, it could simply be that the 87-million-year-old technology was malfunctioning and acting up in ways it shouldn’t have, so what was meant to be simply a cultural slide show played out more invasively.
Well, to some cultures recreation of a myth is the same as ritual. And in may cultures, participating in a religion’s rituals is what identifies someone as a member of the religion rather than a belief in that religion’s precepts.
I may have liked the mythology and mystery aspects of this when I first saw it, but I honestly can’t remember now.
The thing nowadays that makes me cringe with this episode is that multiple characters thing. That kind of exercise is maybe good for middle or high schoolers to do, but it is less than entertaining for me here, unless it were done exceptionally well. Spiner is a great actor, but I feel that playing the whispy-voiced old man and the stereotypically scared little girl are not a good showcase for his abilities. Like you said, it seems he didn’t really have time to develop them and so they become caricatures rather than characters. Same thing goes for SG-1’s “Lifeboat.”
I wonder why the thing had to transform the deck into the temple; when I watch this I keep expecting them to put the temple symbol into the holodeck computer to recreate it, like they seem to do on other episodes.
Also, thank you for sneaking a correct usage of “symbology” in there. On more than one occassion I’ve heard someone say “symbology” when “symbolism” was what was meant.
@32: The “stereotypically scared” character is identified in the script as “a frightened Boy.” What made you think it was a girl?
@33: Hmm…interesting. I just got the impression it was girl. But boy or girl, I still feel as though it’s not a well-developed characterization here. I can’t even really put my finger on why I think this falls flat…I definitely used to be into this kind of acting in the past. I think it’s just because it all seems a little too trite to me by this point. I definitely think that Spiner is capable of portraying characters better than this.
24. a-j http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Masks_(episode)#Reception
Say it with me…
Worst. Episode. Ever.
Sorry for the lack of a rewatch yesterday, folks. Real life, and all that crap. “Eye of the Beholder” should go up later this afternoon, and we’ll be back on track with “Genesis” on Friday.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@16, @27: Yes, it’s “clef,” but what parental filters are you using? I’m just curious. Googling “G-cleft” basically leads to a number of instances where they made the same initial mistake KRAD (or the editor?) did. While Wikipedia acknowledges the anatomical meaning that is why your filter blocks it, it is only one of several. Is this a Scunthorpe problem?
My impression of this episode wasn’t entirely negative, though I am wondering how they got the temple-deck back to normal, or did it just automatically return to normal at the end of the scene, I can’t remember now.
I thought this was dopey. But then I also hated “Darmok.”
But one question is easy to answer: How did they get the decks to transform and transform back with no harm done? Holograms, of course! Holograms can do anything.
@39: As I believe I said above, it could’ve been done if the archive had taken control of the ship’s transporter systems — reprogrammed them to dematerialize parts of the ship and rematerialize them in new forms, like a replicator.
I knew I’d missed this one back when it first aired. I remembered seeing the promos for it, but then wasn’t able to see it when it aired. So I didn’t get to see it until I watched S7 on dvd, but then I found out there was a buttload of other eps that I’d apparently missed as well
Regarding the guards placed outside Data’s quarters: they were in fact prepared for Data. Unfortunately he came out wearing a mask…
Wrong, wrong, and wrong, krad. This is probably one of my favorite episodes of TNG, if not my favorite. I thought Brent Spiner brought the characters and their civilization to life quite beautifully with his usual skill. I don’t know, I expected you to love this one as much as I have these past 19 years.
I loved this from start to finish, and could care less about the details of this or that. A superb performance from Spiner, as always, and a definite 10 in my book.
Long term reader, first time poster.
I had not seen this episode when it first aired, or anytime thereafter until just a couple of days ago during my wife and I re-watch of all of ST:tNG via Amazon. Overall, I concur with krad regarding the quality of the episode overall. I do want to thank krad for pointing out that this was originally based on a “Library of Alexandria.” This point helps me better understand what may have been at work here. I disagree with Christoper L Benett that the D’arsay’s roles were archetypes and therefor not real depictions of events.
It seemed to me that what the crew witnessed was a retelling of the end of the D’Arsay culture as they themselves interpreted it through their cultural context. A context that seems to me to be wholly pre-industrial and incapable of space flight. The story must therefore have been obtained by a third society, the builders of this ancient archive device. These watchers, if you will, collected the stories from other cultures they visited and archived them in this library.
However, I did want to chime with what I thought was the subject of this story, told in allegory/myth by the archive device. Korgano, the moon, has a crucial impact on the climate and environment of the D’Arsay planet. A celestial event of some sort caused havoc on the planet by significantly altering the orbit of Korgano or flinging out of orbit entirely. This meant that Korgano no longer spoke with Masaka, the sun. Without the moon’s positive effects on the planent, Masaka had severe and delitirious effects on the planet and the D’Arsay people. Some of Data’s personalities speak to these problems (e.g. dying of thirst, burning up from excessive heat) that come about when Masaka wakes (i.e. the sun rises).
I believe the myth is this culture’s attempt to understand this celestial event.
4? Seriously? Unlike Krad, I did have memories of this one — as being the biggest WTF episode in all iterations of Star Trek.
Here’s how I imagine the production discussions:
Let’s take “The Inner Light” and make it suck. We won’t worry about who the historical characters are; one can be some random child, and another will be the man who fathered the sun in the sky. For the climax, Picard and Data will wear masks and talk about being tired; that should be a compelling 45 seconds of screen time. And then, for an ending, we’ll hit the reset button and not even philosophize over what we’ve just experienced.
This wasn’t even phoning it in; it was probably scribbled on the back of a fortune cookie paper. Warp factor rating? How about giving it 1/8 impulse. Anybody writer worth employment can come up with a good idea; that gives no added score in my book.
One thing I will mention, about Ten Forward being empty: I would hope that Ten Forward would be empty during a Red Alert. I’m sure there are civilians looking to get drunk at such a time, but that’s what personal replicators are for.
@45: But these weren’t meant to be “historical characters.” They were mythological archetypes brought to life.
@46, I understand that was the intent, but then who was the scared child? For that matter, who is Ihat? What exactly are they supposed to represent? Fear is not a true mythological archetype, and Ihat doesn’t really represent anything other than the writers’ idea that it’s cool to have a character speak in riddles and then die right before explaining everything. Perhaps they were fictional characters (giving it a historical air, similar to the fictionalized portrayal in The Inner Light) created as a guide to the mythic figures, but then the father doesn’t fit. So yeah, we can sit here and say, “This is what they were trying to do,” but in reality it comes across as a mix of mythological and historical, and as such none of it makes any sense in the way it is presented. It’s as if the writers couldn’t figure out how to convey their message, so they came up with random characters to say whatever the plot needed at that moment. It’s lazy writing. It’s bad writing. It’s a bad episode.
(I’m not going to debate my use of the word “historical”. If it bothers you, then feel free to ignore it. I’m not married to it. My point does not hinge on that.)
As I think about it, I believe this episode would have worked a whole lot better if they had incorporated some elements of The Royale into it. That is, make it take place on a planet (perhaps the archive crashed there and activated when it detected sentient life forms). Then have a priest character who can serve as a guide for the visitors (not to spell everything out, but at least say things that make sense). And all the characters could be simulations instead of using Data. Make the whole thing like a mythological play, like something from Sophocles, that our heroes have stumbled into.
At the very least this would explain why and make it clear that the visitors were expected to perform roles and complete the story line. There are still other problems to be addressed, but that would have made a big difference.
Scott: Your suggestion would, if nothing else, have addressed one of my larger issues with the story, to wit, how all these changes to the Enterprise‘s phyiscal structure didn’t put the entire ship and its crew in mortal danger….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Interesting idea, bizarre and not convincing execution. I’ve watched this only once, during a TNG marathon. Data getting to do everything is disappointing to me, like in the movies where it’s the Picard/Data show and everyone else are glorifed speaking extras.
Along with the baffling Sela storyline from Season 5, this is one of the most confusing and incomprehensible episodes of TNG I’ve seen.
The concept of ancient alien figures altering current technology to share a mythological story is intriguing; the episode didn’t make it very clear whether all of these figures were real people in history, or whether they were avatars of deities in this alien culture. I lean to the latter explanation.
I agree with other posters who said the episode felt a bit hollow and meaningless. We don’t see how these figures from an ancient alien race have any consequence or importance for the lives of current Starfleet officers.
We don’t really even know anything about this alien race, so we aren’t very invested in its background, and we don’t learn anything new about the regular charaters (or see any character development) so I had no emotional response to the episode other than boredom
KRAD, the picture of the painted mask would have been a better one to end the synopsis on rather than the just sculpted mask; you do like to say “cuts off the disbelief to my air supply” a lot! KRAD, Ricky D’Dhon Collins was also in Liasions and later in Firstborn.
Korgano sounds like something on the spice rack! This episode prefigures Genesis, where instead of the crew devolving into something prehistoric, it’s the ship instead. Masaka’s Temple is an impressive set admittedly; they later used it as the interior for the Albino’s fortress in the DS9 episode Blood Oath; the one good thing that came out of the mess that is Masks.
The crest on Data’s chest reminds me of Superman: The Movie, with all the different Kryptonians with a family emblem. 47: Dungeon Master in the cartoon Dungeons & Dragons liked to talk in riddles and was that ever fun?
I’m way late to this, but just in case a straggler ever sees this: Troi’s condescending “it’s a start” really bugs me. If you type “music sculpture” into google’s image search, the results are pretty much G-clefs, depictions of instruments, or depictions of playing instruments– i.e., variants of what Data did or something similarly literal. What the heck did Troi have in mind? What was supposed to be the “human” answer to sculpting music?
Data was annoying and the masks were stupid…really stupid. Like, made me embarrassed to be watching stupid.
Not fun stupid like “A Fistful of Datas”
Negative fun.
Scott @48: This episode would have worked if they didn’t wear those childish party favor masks. Sheesh
I loved it. I loved the fact that they didn’t find out why it was out there. I loved Brent Spiner exercising his acting chops. To one of the commenters above, they don’t just leave it out there, it’s mentioned that a team of archaeologists are coming out to study it (it’s mentioned in a log report) And when Brent did his ‘I am yours, every part of me is yours’ speech, it gave me chills.
Were they saving money on extras? Did the sets cost too much? Lends a really weird feeling to the episode how the main cast really are the only people around! The bridge starts showing up empty for no apparent reason for a while before most of the equipment is transformed.
For being such a basic mythology, it’s interesting that it inverts expectations; the sun is the feared one and her banishment by the moon is the anticipated relief. Also that the sun is feminine and the moon masculine where I believe it’s usually the opposite.
I am curious about the mythological identity of the other characters. Who is the father of the sun? Who is Ihat, who successfully fled the sun’s tyranny?
@58/fronzel: “Also that the sun is feminine and the moon masculine where I believe it’s usually the opposite.”
In the Romanic languages (and hence in the corresponding religions), the sun is masculine and the moon is feminine. In the Germanic languages, it used to be the other way round. These days most Germanic languages have lumped together the masculine and the feminine gender into something called the common gender, and English has lost its gender system altogether, but in Norwegian and in my native German, this is still the case.
For many a long-running series, there is an episode which I love even though I think that it is pretty rubbish. For TNG, I have two in the space of three episodes: “Masks” and “Genesis”. I dislike the term “guilty pleasure” but, if I were forced into a corner, I would describe both episodes as such. This is probably TNG’s strangest, nuttiest episode which has many silly but highly memorable moments such as the snakes in the torpedo. Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?
I agree that the concept is good, even if the execution isn’t. It has shades of earlier, better Joe Menosky episodes. Ihat is quite a fun character who reminded me of a less psychopathic Lore. However, Brent Spiner’s higher pitched Masaka voice, which sounds as if it was altered in post-production, was unintentionally funny.
I like this episode. It’s imaginative and unusual and entertaining. It’s nice to see that there are some very old and incomprehensible things floating around in space, and to see Picard’s interest in archaeology come in handy. Brent Spiner’s acting is fine, and I agree with GusF in comment #60 that Ihat is a fun character.
As a German, I grew up with children’s tales about “Frau Sonne”, so a female sun feels quite natural to me. It’s perhaps a bit odd for a spacefaring civilisation to retain a sun/moon mythology, but on the other hand, why not? Religion isn’t always logical.
My only complaint is that we never see the aqueduct on deck twelve.
@61/Jana: “It’s perhaps a bit odd for a spacefaring civilisation to retain a sun/moon mythology, but on the other hand, why not?”
Who says they retained it? The archive was a museum preserving their planet’s entire history and heritage. Our museums preserve lots of stuff from religions that are no longer practiced.
Besides, this is a Joe Menosky episode, so it’s not really about belief in the literal existence of these deities, it’s about their cultural power as symbolic archetypes. Many cultures act out ritual personas and roles, not out of literal belief, but out of an understanding that the archetypes and rituals are culturally useful and communicative. It’s not about whether a thing factually exists; that’s a value of modern, secular Western civilization, not a universal priority. In many cultures and religious traditions throughout history, the value of myths and archetypes as metaphors to convey values and ideas has been more important than the question of their literal existence.
So, no, the D’Arsay didn’t believe their sun and moon were gods. They believed that retelling the myths and acting out the archetypes of the sun and moon gods was meaningful as a way of preserving their culture and conveying its worldview.
@61 I don’t see why it would be unreasonable for a spacefaring race to hold onto sun/moon religion. Religion is inherently unreasonable, for example we are standing on the edge of being able to build space habitats and being able to rewrite our own genome, but some of the most powerful politicians in the world still believe that a big beard in the sky is intensely interested in people’s individual sex lives. Once you start pulling on that particular thread, then it all falls apart pretty quickly. Obviously the aliens in question decided not to pull on the thread and preserved their ancestral beliefs.
@63/random22: Again, you’re making the mistake of assuming that religion is merely about whether things factually exist. That’s not how it works. The concern with literal factuality is a concern of literate, secular cultures, of science and journalism. As I said, in many historical cultures, the factual reality of a religious metaphor was beside the point; the truth of it was in the emotional and spiritual and philosophical ideas that a story represented. Myths were understood as metaphorical narratives to shape behavior and values. People (including religious people) who think it’s only about the literal fact of how the universe or humans got created are completely misunderstanding the purpose it’s supposed to serve. They’re imposing a modern, secular way of thinking on something grounded in a different way of thinking.
Even those politicians you’re talking about are using religion as a symbolic tool, whether they admit it to themselves or not. They claim they’re doing God’s will, but they’re actually imposing their own personal morals and ideologies and shaping their concept of God to serve their agendas. I saw a pithy observation not long ago, remarking how convenient it is that whenever pious politicians and the like claim that God is speaking to them and telling them what to do, it’s always in support of what they were predisposed to do anyway.
There are many smart, enlightened religious people who understand that the letter of their beliefs is symbolic and metaphorical, that it’s just a convenient set of stories and images for encoding something more abstract and ineffable. And this is a theme you can find throughout Joe Menosky’s body of work on Star Trek — the power of metaphor, of stories, of things that are important not because of their literal truth but because of their emotional and philosophical meaning. “Masks” is specifically about cultural archetypes, and what’s important about cultural archetypes is what they reveal about the values and identity of the culture that employs them. The purpose of the archive was absolutely not to say “Masaka and Korgano and the others really existed.” That’s totally missing the point of the episode. The purpose of the archive was to say “The D’Arsay were a culture with a history and values and worldview that are represented by the stories of Masaka and Korgano and the others.” The whole point of the episode was that the archetypes were universal, found over and over in cultures throughout the galaxy. The specific names that the D’Arsay assigned to those archetypes were merely synecdoches for the more universal, recurring ideas. The D’Arsay used them to communicate with other cultures because they believed that other cultures would share similar archetypes, that the universality of such stories and symbols would facilitate understanding between alien societies.
The concern with literal factuality is a concern of literate, secular cultures, of science and journalism. As I said, in many historical cultures, the factual reality of a religious metaphor was beside the point; the truth of it was in the emotional and spiritual and philosophical ideas that a story represented
Plenty of pre-modern/non-secular religious people have been concerned with the factual reality of their religion. Much of early Christian history is taken up with passionate (and sometimes violent) debates and struggles about the true nature of Jesus and the Trinity, for example. (Or look at the whole
@62/Christopher: Do we know that it was a museum? Perhaps they were missionaries.
@66/Jana: It’s misunderstanding the episode to see these characters as gods. The dialogue refers to them more like historical figures, legendary archetypes. It stresses that what they’re dealing with is a “ritualistic culture based on symbol and myth,” and the figures are roles to be actively played and embodied by the participants in the ritual. Masaka is described as a queen, and Picard refers to royalty being symbolized by the Sun. The D’Arsay archive does not contain religion, it contains ritual roles and personas to be acted out. On Earth, ritual tends to be associated with religion, but it doesn’t have to be.
It’s basically a variant on the same idea behind “Darmok.” The Tamarians communicated through figurative language and allusions to myth, using the cultural vocabulary of known stories and legends as analogies for their own current thoughts and actions. The D’Arsay took that to a more literal degree, its program actually acting out the mythic roles and archetypes. Which is also what happened in DS9: “Dramatis Personae,” where the personas that took over the crew were not actual people but generic roles in a story that the crew were forced to re-enact. This is a common Menosky theme. He’s not interested in writing about cultures with literal takes on religion, he’s interested in writing about symbolism and stories and archetypes. I can’t think of any writer who’s come up with so many stories in which the antagonist was an abstract concept.
@67/Christopher: It seems to me that the episode is nicely ambiguous about that. Are Masaka, Ihat and the others gods, mythological figures, remnants of real people, all of the above? Who built the object so many millenia ago? For what purpose? Why did they hide it in a comet? Picard manages to save the ship with very little information because of his understanding of some universal concepts and a talent for improvisation. But he doesn’t solve the mystery. Truly alien aliens, despite the common ground provided by the sun and the moon.
@68/Jana: Picard said that the archive was older than the comet surrounding it, and hypothesized that the frozen gases had accumulated onto it over time. Which is certainly feasible, if it traveled through a nebula or protoplanetary disk or the like. At 87 million years old, it’s one of the most ancient prehistoric relics encountered in Trek history, and by far the oldest one seen onscreen in TNG (the next-oldest was the Tkon outpost at a measly 600,000 years of age). The only older artifacts listed on Memory Alpha are the insectoid ship from “Beyond the Farthest Star” (300 million years), the Slaver stasis box (1 billion years), the Tagus II ruins (2 billion years), and the Guardian of Forever (“since before your Sun burned hot in space,” implicitly more than 4.6 billion years). So there’s plenty of time for an artifact that ancient to have become “buried” through natural processes.
Krad wonders where the rest of the crew has gone. Maybe they’re hiding under their beds?
@69/Christopher: Oh, right.
The Vilmorans in “The Chase” were also very old, but they didn’t leave behind any artifacts.
@70/Roxana: I bet their beds have all been transformed into cairns.
@71/Jana: If you mean the First Humanoids, they weren’t actually from Vilmor II; that’s just one of the many planets that they seeded with programmed DNA, the one that had the last fragment the searchers needed to complete the genetic message. It was only the final piece of the puzzle because of the order in which the searchers happened to find the other pieces, not because it was any more fundamental to the sequence.
Anyway, I suppose you could say that the programmed DNA sequences they created were their artifacts, but informational artifacts rather than physical ones.
@47. I thought it was pretty obvious, from his mannerisms and way of speaking, that Ihat was supposed to be the archetypal Trickster character. A lot of cultures have the Trickster as part of their mythology. Norse mythology has Loki. There’s Anansi the Spider from West African lore, often a master of knowledge but also frequently portrayed as a Trickster. You could read the Jester of European society as an embodiment of the Trickster archetype as well.
I actually find the alien mythology introduced in this episode fascinating, possibly even more so because we get so little of it. I especially find it interesting that their Sun figure is also seen as a bringer of death and destruction. Masaka’s stated methods of killing–leaving victims to die of thirst or burning them to death–do resemble the possibly deadly outcomes of sun exposure.
Most interesting to me, though, is that the sun in this instance is represented as an object of fear, doubling as the symbol for death, whereas the moon is not dreaded in the same way. In many human cultures, Death as a concept is associated with darkness, dark colors, and nighttime. This probably arises from the fact that early humans feared the dark of night–it’s when the predators come out, and our eyes aren’t made to see in the dark.
This actually makes me wonder if the people who originated these myths might not have been a nocturnal species. Or, possibly this culture originated in a desert or other region that experienced high temperatures and a lot of sun, where the coming of night might be seen as a relief from the dangers of the day. Obviously, these are hypotheses based on very limited evidence, but it does make me wonder.
@67 I agree with most of what you said, BUT–There’s that one thing that Ihat says, that Masaka chopped up her father and used his bones to build the world. That story suggests that at some point, Masaka was seen as some kind of deity, even if she is no longer perceived that way. There’s no reason she couldn’t be both (that is, both a god and an archetype).
@74, I think you nailed it, it’s archetypes and gods and legends. That’s part of what trips up the crew at first, trying to parse between them, until they make the final mask and Picard says “We may have been going about this all wrong.” He’s realized it’s a story and they have to take part in it. Before that he’s acting like a pure archeologist and just digging and digging – necessary to uncover clues, but it’s not ultimately enough.
What I didn’t see in any of the comments here – forgive me if I missed it – is the fact that the story is, deliberately or not, delivered incomplete. Data in his incarnations keeps saying that Korgano has stopped chasing Masaka: that should never happen in any kind of myth, unless (a) the data was corrupted coming over and Korgano’s symbol was omitted, or (b) the point of the story being told is that one of the listeners is compelled to take up Korgano’s role. Myths and archetypes are generally Informational – but when you add Mysteries into them, then you start getting into the realm of religion. Maybe the archive was just faulty and the crew had to do what they did to fix things; or, the archive was working perfectly and waiting for the listener to realize their role in it and take it up.
Side note: I know my wife and I are perfect for each other because whenever it’s Winter, we are always saying to each other “So hard to stay warm” in Data’s old man voice.
I’m ping-pong alternating S1 and S7 — my watch/rewatch started at S2 — and the thing about the ship becoming emptier and emptier is absolutely the real-life (ish) realization of “Remember Me”. Early S1 featured frequent (and doubtless, expensive) shots of a zoo of people everywhere. Everything that happened, loads of diverse randos reacted to all of it.
This decreased so gradually, like Fox becoming a hardcore porn channel, it’s hard to notice. But yeah, “Masks” is creepily empty. And not good creepy, which it super could have been.
I would totally have loved to see the episode where the crew viscerally experiences this story, complete with Data and Picard floating over the planet in balls of light, Riker as a mermaid, Troi as an old cold man, whatever. Geordi could have been incarnated as the Director.
I do think that there were indications that the sun and moon were malfunctioning and that may have led to the end of the society and their desire to send out the information in a probe. I liked that these things were only hints. But I mostly hated the ep, and agree so so much with krad’s analysis!
To which I would only add: “Look, it’s an ancient probe encased in an ancient sphere of unknown gases and ice! It’s got some enormously powerful ray beam inside! Let’s blow it up with weapons and see what happens! Oh it’s starting to be a real threat… well, it’s a shame but I guess we have no choice but to destroy it completely! Let’s not discuss it or anything… “
I think it was more disappointing in that the idea could have been so good, and instead, the moment Data gets the thing on his forehead, was super not any good.
never use these search terms: rewtch mask
Lockdown rewatch. Oh dear, I suppose the best I can say about this one is that it’s not as monumentally stupid as Sub Rosa.. but it’s not far off. Certainly up there in the..what the hell were they thinking? Category. On the rewatch I found it one of those episodes that ten minutes in I found my self scrolling through twitter and glancing back up at the tv. Not good.
While watching this episode, I vacillated between boredom and confusion. Some alien thing takes over the ship, Data does a bunch of silly voices, Picard improvises a solution and all is well in the end. It feels like something left over from seasons 1 or 2, before Michael Pillar came on and implemented his “every episode must be character based” policy. Except the art class in the beginning, and Picard’s fascination with the archaeology a bit later on, there were no real character moments or exploration of any of the characters and a story that unfortunately didn’t work. At least Sub Rosa was campy and fun.
@78: Yes I agree, this episode was one of the most confusing of the whole series. We don’t know anything about these people so whether these figures were actual people or avatars of deities in their culture is an exercise for the viewer to figure out. I disagree with Christopher; I lean towards the latter explanation. I think these characters Data portrayed were supposed to represent mythological figures in the culture and that is how they intended to share their legends with future generations.
The Inner Light did a much better job of telling a story about a long deceased civilization. It made viewer feel immersed into the life of a man by showing the different situations he encountered.
Masks by comparison feels very hollow. It’s simply telling a story of a people we never meet or see, and we are not emotionally invested in them in any way.
I do not know if the writers made the details of the characters ambiguous on purpose or not.
@79/RMS81: “We don’t know anything about these people so whether these figures were actual people or avatars of deities in their culture is an exercise for the viewer to figure out. I disagree with Christopher; I lean towards the latter explanation. I think these characters Data portrayed were supposed to represent mythological figures in the culture and that is how they intended to share their legends with future generations.”
That’s closer to agreeing with me than disagreeing. I thought it was entirely explicit that the personas were mythic archetypes in their culture — not necessarily gods, but characters in myths rather than people who actually existed. They were too broad and stereotyped to be real people; they were acting out the universal character types and story dynamics in a Campbellian monomyth.
I mean, it’s a Menosky episode, so of course it’s about myths, symbols, and cultural archetypes — see “Darmok,” “Dramatis Personae,” “The Thaw,” VGR: “Muse,” etc. Menosky loved pitting the characters against abstract concepts.
“I do not know if the writers made the details of the characters ambiguous on purpose or not.”
It was intentional. That was the point. These were broad universal symbols, thus lacking in specificity. The D’Arsay were leaving a message for future cultures in the medium of archetypes shared by the myths of all cultures, as a way of establishing common ground and a starting point for understanding. When we’ve sent SETI messages to the stars, we’ve included universal mathematical and physical constants encoded in the messages, something that aliens could recognize across the language barrier and use as a starting point for deciphering the rest. The D’Arsay were doing the liberal-arts equivalent, using universal cultural and mythical tropes. (I’m not at all convinced that cultural archetypes would really be that universal across species, but they tend to be in the Trek universe, where most aliens are just variations on the human theme.)
I recall wondering who the heck Masala was. And never getting an answer.
For me this is a case of the concept actually being enough to prop up a poor story. I do love Joe Menosky’s style and explorations of symbolic concepts, and the beginnings of an exploration into an alien mythology and how recognizing the forms of that mythology is what led to the solution is just cool stuff. Brent Spiner may have felt he couldn’t dig into the characters properly in so little time but I felt that it worked in the same way the rest of the episode did, that this is the very tip of a vast iceberg of cultural information in the archive that would take years to explore. Throughout the episode I get the sense of skimming along the top of something huge and deep, that I can’t yet understand but can try to grasp at least the shape of it. A comment here from years ago mentions that “Masks” seems Lovecraftian in a way, and I think this is what they meant. It’s an experience that I truly love getting out of the fiction I consume so this one does a lot for me despite the faults in the actual story and construction of the episode.
I always thought of the archive as another version of what the Kataanians did in “The Inner Light.” Not necessarily to preserve a dying culture but to put out into the universe a communication of the essence of their existence. Maybe they even aimed it at a distant star with the hope that it would reach someone there who could appreciate it. They probably didn’t anticipate finding a being like Data that could literally embody and enact the archetypes it presented, but when the archive managed to interface with him it began playing out the major mythological mode through him. It was likely intended to immerse the people it found in their most important myths, hence the physical transformations, and to impart the information into whatever computer system it could, and with Data around it just had the opportunity to be more direct and interactive.
As for the ship missing the extras: I never noticed that, but my first thought is, maybe that’s where all the obelisks came from? :)
It’s clear pretty early that Data is full of deities and possibly other mythological beings. Masaka is the sun and death. Ihat is a trickster, and quite possibly another celestial object, as he referred to being chased. The scared character is fear itself, maybe? The old man is the first deity, who was very cold, so he created the sun. The stuff about the chase ending made me wonder if they would discover the moon blew up or was knocked out of orbit.
I like to think that this culture, after becoming advanced and exploring its solar system at a minimum, found out what its deities really were. However, instead of rejecting its old myths, they just made things right by building Olympus in the sky and putting their deities into it. That’s what they do. Instead of changing their mythology, they change the world to match it – even the Enterprise.
Unfortunately, the episode does nothing with this. They just give the slightest hint that they know what’s going on, and the archive sets everything back to normal. It’s a terrible episode. Even at the very end, it’s disappointing when Picard says that Data had a civilization inside of him. He had thousands of personalities, not billions. He should have said that Data had a pantheon inside of him. As krad mentioned, he already has one small civilization inside him anyway.
@83/GeordisWingman: The idea was that the characters in Data were the mythic archetypes of the civilization — the essential recurring personas and symbols that were shared universally from culture to culture (or so the D’Arsay believed). So in that sense, he embodied the essence of the civilization — the core of how they thought, how they perceived themselves and their world.
Season 7. >sigh< Homeward was infuriating, Sub Rosa excruciating… this was just monotonous, from plot to pacing and everything else. There was a moment near the end where Troi was walking up the stairs of the temple that had materialized, and off camera you can hear Picard and Worf talking, and they almost sound like two people sitting in a Barnes & Noble bookstore reading a book to children for emphasis, slow and stilted.
The only cool thing about this episode is that it’s at least the second time Picard has disabled an adversary using sleep as a weapon (the first time with the Borg in BOTW). Actually, probably count a third time, because I fell asleep in the middle of this too.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think Spiner’s Ihat performance served as the template for his performance as Puck on Gargoyles?
@86/Mr. Magic: I would assume that Spiner based both performances on the character types he learned to play over the preceding quarter-century of his professional acting career.
Spiner made his name as a stage actor on Broadway before he became known as a TV actor. So I daresay that when he was cast to play the Shakespearean character of Puck in Gargoyles, he probably had prior familiarity with the character from his theatrical training and had no need to draw on his Star Trek work.
@87,
Ah, good point.
I remember it was weird first hearing him as Puck in Gargoyles back in the day (as I’d grown up with him as Data).
Then again, it was no different than hearing Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis as Xanatos and Demona.
(If anything, the Frakes of late TNG was clearly burned out whereas the Frakes of Gargoyles was re-energized by getting to play such a multi-faceted villain).
@88/Mr. Magic: Well, for me, it was odd in 1987 to see the dimwitted Bob Wheeler from Night Court (and the comic-relief coachman Franz from Sunday in the Park with George) as a brilliant android on a Starfleet bridge. Not to mention Gurney Halleck as the captain and Kunta Kinte/Reading Rainbow guy as the helmsman.
@89/CLB: And Stanley Hazard from North and South as the first officer.
@90/notinuse: I don’t think I ever saw that miniseries, though I was aware of it.
Michael Dorn was also known from a stint in CHiPs, and Wil Wheaton had been in the movie Stand by Me, but I wasn’t familiar with them myself.
Not to mention that kid from Stand By Me…………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The ironic thing about Spiner’s Night Court role is that the 1986-7 season had ended with Bob and June Wheeler buying the courthouse concession stand and being positioned for an increased, semi-regular role. But then Spiner got cast as Data, so along came the ’87 season and the Wheelers had vanished without a word of explanation. You’d think they’d at least have worked in a joke about Bob being abducted by aliens or something.
I actually remember this one from the first time I saw it, although rather vaguely. There’s some creepy fun in it, but boy, does it fail to go anywhere. The idea of ancient but super-advanced technology – so advanced it can subsume and transform something more “modern” – can be a fun plot device. The trouble is, you have to sell the idea that it’s more powerful and advanced, and there’s hardly so much as an attempt here. You could forgive that if some intriguing characters were part of the mix, but all we get is a couple poorly-defined deities and even more vague bit characters, almost totally played out through Data.
In a way, this episode reminds me of “The Arsenal of Freedom.” You have the ancient-but-powerful alien technology, and it’s defeated by a rather implausible hack that simply shuts it all down. At least there was some good action in that one. “Masks” just plays out so poorly that I can’t even say if there might have been a good story that could have come of the basic idea. I might give it a 4 for the initial watch, but I have to call it a 2 overall. There’s just nothing I can point to that makes this one worth watching again.
I’m definitely of the minority that considers this episode to be a work of unappreciated genius. I think that the very vagueness of the alien mythology is a strength: the Enterprise is caught up in mythopoeic fixations of a culture that died out while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, and of course they don’t understand it; they’re left just improvising and hoping it works out for them, and I think that’s brilliant.
My only problem with it is that the alien archetypes are too similar to the kinds of things that humans put into our mythologies: the sun, the moon, the hunt, the trickster, cosmogenies based on patricide, etc. It would be more interesting (but probably prohibitively difficult to write) if the aliens had a completely different archetypical language.
This episode is another one of my guilty pleasures. I absolutely LOVE the creepy, mystical atmosphere and the background music is perfectly fitting. Yea yea it’s not believable blah blah. Love this, despite Spiner not being stellar as usual, through no real fault of his own.