A Matter of Perspective gives us an interesting enough premise that is poorly executed. The notion of examining an event from several points of view, in order to determine the truth, is certainly a worthy enough topic. But the episode becomes mired in the details and the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Essentially this episode repeats the same sequence of events from three different angles for the benefit of a courtroom-type hearing. The individual events are not engaging in and of themselves. So, despite their intent to give the audience multiple perspectives, repeating these events over and over gives the episode a feeling of unnecessary redundancy.

Furthermore, the episode’s resolution, like much of the episode itself, is much too contrived. The fact that the crew solve the mysterious radiation waves, connect them to the Apgar experiments, connect them to the explosion, and manage to clear Riker’s name — just in the nick of time before Picard is about to be forced to turn Riker over to the authorities — feels entirely disingenuous. And to make matters worse, in order to present these new facts at the hearing, we’re once again forced to sit through selections from each of the already shown repeated scenes.

And finally, on the matter of contrived outcomes, the fact that Apgar’s experiment is able to be perfectly replicated on the holodeck seems rather unlikely. Also, the fact that Apgar was developing the new technology as a weapon is presently merely to provide more evidence to clear Riker’s name. Such a revelation should have been a crisis in and of itself, but again, this information was contrived merely to save Riker’s neck and, once used for that purpose, was simply discarded.

In the end, all of this leads to an episode that just doesn’t make the grade. A Matter of Perspective gets credit for its premise, but it is hardly a must-see episode.

Filed under: TNG Reviews