Aquiel is supposed to be something of a murder mystery. But it’s boring. Dull. Plodding. Uninspired. Drawn out. With a stupidly bizarre twist. Did I mention boring?

Boring.

A remote communications station near the Klingon border is not responding, so the Enterprise investigates. They find the station deserted, except for a dog. The two staffers, Lieutenants Aquiel Uhnari and Keith Rocha are missing, as well as a station shuttle craft. There are scorched remains of DNA on the floorplate. And Klingon DNA on board as well.

It’s not so bad of a setup, is it? But Law & Order this isn’t. The investigation proceeds at maybe 1/4 Impulse Power. There’s no suspense. No drama. No action.

Instead, there is the curious choice of introducing us to the “victim,” Aquiel, by way of fragments of her personal logs. Again it isn’t so bad as a character sketch. But it’s done by having LaForge spend a great deal of time fiddling with the staiton equipment just to get her image. And then we get lots of minutiae about relationships with her sister, mother and father, her dreams, and some conflicts with Rocha. And something about a Klingon officer named Morag who had been harassing the station.

Had this been given in a single scene, with more time for a dramatic investigation, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the discovery of these tidbits is the investigation. And it comprises a large bloc of the episode’s time. True, it allows LaForge to develop a kind of closeness with her (what’s with LaForge and falling for women in holographs or TV screens, anwyay?), but since the LaForge Aquiel relationship has nothing to do with the investigation, it’s utterly irrelevant.

Because we learn she was alive afterall. And in possession of a phaser that likely killed Rocha. So now the audience is led to see her as a suspect. We get some scenes between Aquiel and LaForge. And their relationship is plausible. But because it just doesn’t matter a whole heckuvalot we really don’t care all that much.

With both Aquiel and Morag suspects, the episode takes it bizarre twist in sick bay, with Dr. Crusher examining the DNA remains. The remains suddenly reanimate, touch her hand, then form into an exact replica — of her hand. And then Dr. Crusher explains to Picard and Worf — the culprit is some shapeshifting “coalescent” creature that feeds off of lifeforms and then adopts their previous form. You know it’s bad when you have to have one of your characters preface the revelation with, “It’s going to sound pretty farfetched …”

And it is farfetched. It’s a rabbit out of the hat kind of twist that is so esoteric that it’s stupidly irrelevant. And to push matters even further, the coalescent organism isn’t either Morag or Aquiel. It’s the dog. The friggin’ dog!

*sigh*

Aquiel is just not a very good episode. I’d rather watch paint dry. Or a snail jog. Or an episode of Battlestar Galactica 1980. And that’s bad.

Filed under: TNG Reviews