2.12 The Royale

Rating: 1.5

The Enterprise discovers a fragment of debris from an ancient earth NASA ship. On the otherwise inhospitable planet’s surface, someone or something has duplicated a gambling hotel called The Royale – where Riker, Worf and Data are trapped and unable to communicate with the ship.

Comments

This episode makes it onto many people’s ‘top five worst episodes’ lists, and for good reason. It is slow-moving and has huge plot holes. Its only humor is labored gags showing Data gambling. It’s just a bad script.

The episode’s concept is reminiscent of the TOS episode A Piece of the Action, where a society was based on a gangster book left behind by a careless away team. The difference is, A Piece of the Action doesn’t take itself seriously and is played for laughs (and it’s funny), while this episode tries to be serious.

Nits

Riker, Data and Worf beam down to the planet and are faced with a revolving door. They do not know what is on the other side. Yet all three of them go through the door, and are trapped and unable to communicate with the ship. Perhaps it would have been wiser for only one or two of them to go through the door?

The away team enters the Hotel Royale and finds they can no longer communicate with the ship. (Back on the ship, Picard has no idea what is going on, although Troi can sense that Riker feels amused and in no danger). Yet, rather than go back outside to communicate with the ship that they are about to enter an area where communication will not work, Riker says they are not in danger and should just keep looking around. Why would he go against protocol like this?

Working from one book, how could an alien, with no other knowledge or specifications, so faithfully reproduce items like roulette wheels, crap tables, and slot machines? Wouldn’t one need a detailed book of specifications to do this? The same holds true for creating humanoid shapes. In reality, the humanoids should look like van Gogh paintings.

On the same note as above, think about this. Richey said (in his one and only diary entry, which is weird in itself) that the aliens accidentally infected and killed the rest of his crew, then recreated this place from the book because they believed Richey’s world was based on the book. It is inferred from Richey’s entry that there was no communication between the aliens and Richey. Yet – if the aliens could read and understand the book well enough to create a likeness, why didn’t they just recreate a pen and pad, and write messages to Richey to find out what he really wanted and needed? Or why didn’t they communicate with Richey through one of their humanoid creations?

Memorable Moments

•    Some of Data’s gambling scenes are slightly amusing.

Quotable Quotes

Riker: Looks like the poor devil died in his sleep.
Worf: What a terrible way to die.