One "style" of episode from The Next Generation is one that focuses not on the adventure, but on a particular character. Too Short a Season is one such episode, where the focus is not on what is happening on the planet but instead on the aged Starfleet negotiator Mark Jamison. The challenge of these episodes is that their success rides on that single character. But a prominent difficulty is that the story that is happening with the character often overshadows the apparent A plot of the away mission. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happens here.
The tension of this story line is provided by the one-man show of Jamison and his pursuit of eternal youth coupled with arrogance. And this proves to be a far less interesting story than Governor Carnass and the hostages. We talk about Jamison's wife, Anne, and the power struggle between himself and Captain Picard, but this all takes place within the conference rooms and corridors of the ship. What opened with the promise of a fully realized adventure, became a character study of someone who offered very little in redeeming features.
A character-focused story like this relies on the appeal of the protagonist. The audience needs to identify with the main figure, understand the internal struggle that drove them to make their unique choices, even to admire them in some ways. But Jamison wasn't particularly charming or witty or noticeably skilled. He just came across as faintly unpleasant. And we could see him heading for a fall as some kind of resolution.
Jamison had a side plot where he had obtained a counter-aging treatment that was making him young again. Ordinarily, such a revolution would have been hailed as a great development, if it had been devised by the medical staff on board. But in this episode, it was presented entirely as a negative, and we were made to look down on Jamison for wanting this. And this brings us to the secondary difficulty of this episode: TNG likes to present moral quandaries to the audience and invite us to work through them, but this story failed to adequately articulate what the moral quandary was about. It didn't give us anything to think about; it didn't clearly define where the moral dilemma was.
Jamison was getting old and had developed a disease of old age that limited him physically. Because of this, he sought out a dangerous treatment to reverse the aging process. He began the treatment and it was remarkably effective, though not without problems. While a bold move, nothing is presented as illegal or unethical. There's a faint overtone of things that "man was not meant to know" but the show never develops this theme at all. Dr Crusher discovers his condition through her unique busibody-ness, but can't really articulate why her nosiness was justified.
So far, there isn't really anything notably controversial in this story premise, so we had to add layers of complexity. First, he made this move without consulting his wife, and so she felt ignored and minimized. That suggests that the real struggle was in his relationship, but "helping Mark save his marriage" isn't exactly riveting science fiction. While we are deeply sympathetic with Anne, we don't really feel like Mark should remain confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his shortened life so that Anne can enjoy her much anticipated retirement. "Why didn't he ask me?" "Why didn't he tell me?" are questions that echo throughout the ships crew (Deanna, Beverly, Anne, Picard) but we never present a valid reason why each of these people should pry into the medical details of Mark's private life.
At this point in the show, the writers seem to realize that they haven't really developed an adequate conflict. Because of this, we add on some shady negotiating tactics that Mark reveals to Picard from 40 years ago. Instead of a pure verbal negotiation, Mark offered weapons to both sides in order to get them to release hostages. The planet then devolved into 40 years of civil war which cost the residents millions of lives. As Picard himself points out, the planet's civil war was not the fault of one Starfleet negotiator, and Jamison could not have known that the fractious planet would be unable to resolve their conflict. He did not cause the strife between warring factions. But his plan was not entirely ethical and so he was guilty of hiding its true nature from Starfleet for all these years. The show notes several times that Mark Jamison has had a long and successful career as one of Starfleet's top negotiators, who has risen to the rank of admiral on the strength of his diplomatic success and judgment. But the episode wants us to feel shocked and betrayed when we learn that it hasn't all been the result of singing campfire songs.
Next Jamison plans to lead a strike team on an away mission to liberate the hostages by force. This ill conceived plan is in some way an attempt by Mark to make up for his poor judgement in the past. This sortie is so short lived and pointless that it has no lasting impact on the story. Jamison remembers the tunnels beneath the city, but they have been sealed in places and alarms set to alert the military, so the raid is soon pinned down and hastily beams back to the Enterprise. Again, it was unclear why the writers included this scene. It was obvious that Jamison didn't know of modern developments on a planet he had last been to 40 years ago. In addition, he was unwilling to take advice from Data or Worf as to the changing situation on the ground. Was it his hubris that drove him to think he had it all under control? If his growing hubris was the emerging problem of the end of the episode, what was its cause?
At the resolution, Jamison's body couldn't handle the age-reversing treatment and eventually it killed him, but not before he was able to convince the evil Carnass to release the hostages. The moral lesson delivered by Picard in the denouement, was about age: "The quest for youth, number one. So futile." Apparently, that was Jamison's big problem. "Age and wisdom have their graces, too." Fine, but age had nothing to do with Jamison's diplomatic mistake in arming the fractious planet, which seemed to be the actual conflict of the show that needed resolution.
IN the end, that was the greatest shortcoming of the episode. The intrepid crew of the Enterprise actually did very little to resolve the conflict points of the story. Instead, they were bystanders and observers of the drama created by Jamison and Carnass. And, in fact, Jamison himself did nothing that actually resolved the conflict either. He did plenty to complicate things and lead us on red-herrings like the tunnel raid, and cause distress for his lovely wife Anne. But in terms of resolving the tension with Carnass, he actually did nothing but dying painfully which served to ameliorate Carnass' thirst for revenge.
And Carnass, the evil antagonist, received nothing in the way of correction, despite his deception and illegal imprisonment of the Starfleet diplomatic team. The guilty were not punished, the past wrongs were not restored, and those on the planet who were left to mourn were not given a glimpse of their goal at the end of the fight. We seemed to leave the planet in as much chaos as when we found it, glad to wash our hands of the whole messy affair and, like Picard, happy to break orbit for any other destination.
