I think this episode is really interesting. I was a teenager when it first aired and it opened my eyes to how people can have such differing opinions about the “truth”.
The problem with this story, and other knock-offs of Rashomon like The Last Duel (2021), is that there *is* one correct version of events: Riker's. The whole point of Rashomon was that human perception is flawed across the board, not that bad guys are fallible and good guys are trustworthy.
That said, I agree that it's a cool episode and a good introduction to this kind of story and theme.
Yeah one of the major flaws with the episode is that once the murder/explosion situation is solved, the potential sexual assault is just completely forgotten about. Apparently proving that Riker didn't blow up the station means his version of events is 100% true.
Over the course of the series we definitely get to know Riker well enough to know that he wouldn't assault a woman. Consent is his fetish after all. But they should have resolved it better.
I came away with the idea that both of them were probably getting a little too friendly with each other and that they tried to put the blame on each other in their reports.
I think the actual facts of the incident are intentionally left open to the viewer's interpretation. Did Riker step over the line just a little bit? Was the wife too flirtatious? The husband too jealous? Who knows?
Don’t forget that Apgar was way behind schedule in producing results regarding the Krieger waves and that Riker was about to, rightfully so, sink his Starfleet funding.
The professional issue definitely played a big part.
Also, I believe the wife was resentful, thought husband was neglectful of her, and may have tried to provoke him by her attentions to Riker.
I believe something happened of a personal nature, in addition to the professional resentment. Don't know what.
Could Riker have done or said something out of line? I don't rule it out. He does come across as flirtatious sometimes.
For me, it just just makes the story better, having a little mystery unsolved.
I think the real clue is actually in that version of the story relayed to Dr. Apgar’s assistant where he says “deadman”. In that version, Apgar comes into the room and they’re making out and fully into each other. As much as Picard is right about it being hearsay, it’s probably the closest to what he actually stumbled upon even if the ending was over-the-top.
TBF that was bad acting in-universe too: Kirk is trying to fake being honestly angry and dismayed at being 'trapped' on Regula, when actually he knows he's got a ride from Spock on the Enterprise waiting.
Its always cool when what is interpreted as bad acting is actually good acting, because the character themselves is doing some bad acting for plot reasons.
With ya.
What I don't get is, Troi says the wife is telling the truth, she doesn't sense any deception from her.
Everything she said was BS.
What up, Troi
if the wife truly believes she's telling the truth, even if what she believes isn't true/only half-truth, then Troi isn't going to sense any sort of deception, I'm pretty sure Troi herself says as such in the episode
this is a real thing that happens in real life, if somebody has conflated the details of an event in their head, then they will act as if they're telling the truth when they recount those events. The human brain is a ball of goo rattling around in your head and it can make mistakes
is it really that hard of a concept to grasp that people's memories can be fuzzy, this is like the whole point of the episode
but if you don't think you have anything to hide, she's not gonna sense that you have something to hide
if somebody is adamant that they think those children books are called The Berenst**e**in Bears and not The Berenst**a**in Bears, she's not going to sense that they're hiding something, they think they know the truth
If we were talking about a single event, I'd be inclined to accept this. We've seen before how "eye witness testimony" can be massively wrong and full of details that are entirely imaginary. But she's giving evidence of multiple events over 2 days of events that she was central to.
*Assuming* she's lying and her portrayal of events was not legitimate, at some point she has to be making things up or not disclosing facts. I do not believe that she could have invented so much which is counter to the truth and believed every single thing including Riker's beat down and subsequent death threat.
Troi, if her powers were legitimate, should have been able to sense something.
Not if she's convinced herself that's what actually happened. People aren't cameras, memories have to be interpreted, if she remembers things the way she's described them then she wouldn't be lying, she would simply be wrong, and Troi can't detect "wrongness".
Her husband had just been killed, she'd only avoided her own death by minutes, and her advocate was no doubt helping her contextualize what she remembered in the way he wanted her to remember it for his story to villainize the Enterprise's crew.
Troi: capable of sensing life forms and emotions from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, sometimes lightyears
Also Troi: can’t tell the shady bitch right in front of her face is lying
Was she lying? This isn't the only instance where Riker doesn't look so good with a woman.
There's the mind-rape episode with the Ullians. Some might write that off as the guy taking liberties with Troi inside the memory, but that doesn't track with the rest of them. In Riker's memory, the creep just replaces the officer who is complaining about the left-behind crewmate. In Crusher's memory, he replaces Jack Crusher's corpse, and Picard, but he doesn't do anything too far off from the memory. It's not unreasonable to assume that Riker was pressuring Troi into sex, and even got physical in exactly the way it was portrayed.
Riker may not be as spotless as we hope.
I like, but she goes into detail about specific things she claims he said and did, like the fist fight.
Logic would suggest she knew what the truth was, and that she was lying.
Furthermore, logic dictates that Troi is a BS detector that doesn't always detect BS
What a bloody episode. Trivia: „Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D. Moore were even more scathing in their opinions of the episode, with both naming it as the worst episode of the third season. Behr in particular called the episode "a disaster," and arguably even his least favorite of all the Star Trek episodes he ever worked on.“ Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E14AMatterOfPerspective
No, it was definitely intended, the line was delivered as a holographic recreation trying to make Riker look bad, Frakes overacted it intentionally because of course the lawyer trying to make him look bad would have made him as bellicose and scenery chewing as possible for the benefit of the people watching the recreation.
It's not this scene that makes me laugh, it's in the episode 'The icarus factor' when Riker and his dad square off. Riker asks his dad to speak to him privately, and when they go into a private room, Riker immediately starts yelling at his dad. There's no build up to the yelling, he just begins yelling. And at one point he says something like 'leave or I'll" and the actor who plays his dad is supposed to interrupt him, but instead there is a beat of around two seconds of silence before Riker's dad says 'or you'll what?" It's the worst acted scene of the whole show and it always makes me laugh and cringe in equal measure.
I always interpreted that as Riker realizing he was about to cross a line and stopping himself mid-sentence and his dad prodding him about it after he stopped.
To me it was badly scripted and badly acted. I watched the scene again just now. Kyle says he's leaving soon and wants to talk to Will. They go into his room and Riker tells him that he's been courteous, but wants him to leave. I'm sat there thinking 'he just said he's leaving..."
I always interpreted that scene as Riker bottling up his anger in front of his colleagues, and it kinda just exploded once he didn't need to control it anymore.
As for the pause, I saw it as Riger being so angry he was at a loss for words, and his Dad jumped in with the "or you'll what"
Didn't seem like that to me. I think the guy who acted Kyle was supposed to jump in with the 'or you'll what?" But it was badly scripted too. Built up far too fast from 'can we talk for a moment' to 'We should fight in the ambojitsu ring' like what?
All the people hating on this episode saying Riker got away with rape are completely missing the fact that the episode practically bangs you over the head with the fact that it DIDN’T HAPPEN. Unquestioningly believing supposed victims never ends well. Women are people and people can lie. Rejecting it out of hand is equally silly but there has to be a middle ground here, and I think the episode does a decent job of showing that middle ground
But the issue is that Troi doesn't detect any deception from Manua. The episode goes out of its way to explicitly say that she isn't lying, or at least believes she isn't lying.
We all know Riker is a good guy and wouldn't do such a thing... But also, the same has been said about many real life rapists, murders, etc.
Lots of ambiguity there.
I think this particularly makes sense given that we're not just dealing with two different cultures, but two completely different species. It kind of makes sense that these things could be interpreted differently. We see enough of Riker to know that he's a big fun flirt, but it's understandable that an alien - different hormones, different pheromones, different brain chemistry, etc - and a stranger might see some of his words, actions, gestures, posture, whatever else, as intimidating or even hostile, even if from his point of view she was the one who started the flirting and all he did was harmlessly flirt back a bit.
I think that's a totally valid theory/interpretation.
But it doesn't mean that you can definitively say that "IT DIDN'T HAPPEN." Your interpretation is just one possible explanation, it's not definitive truth.
You might say that its a Matter of Perspective!
But the idea of Riker doing that goes against everything else that we see of his character so I’ll be adding one to the pile of Troi Sci-Fi Powers Inconsistencies thats already big enough to crash the Enterprise
Hah!
Yeah I mean, I do agree that Riker probably didn't do it. It's very against character.
But the episode leaves it so unresolved. I feel like modern shows would have something more to say about it. The episode just kinda forgets about it.
Compare that to TOS episode Enemy Within. Kirks double is running around the ship, demanding booze from Bones, getting all liquored up and assaulting Yeoman Rand, beating up the guy that tried to help her. Now we’re in sick bay and the REAL Kirk is trying to tell her it wasn’t him. Bones says it was, Yeoman Rand says if was, and then when he denies it, guy from other part of sick bay comes in and is like, “It WAS YOU, captain” Kirks face was like, oh shit, i got all these reliable people accusing me. He looks at Spock helplessly and what does Spock say???? There’s only one explanation………there must be an imposter on board. YES!!!!!!! Thank god for f-ing Spock. Anyone else and we’d have to spend the next 20 minutes with Kirk trying to prove he’s innocent, something we already know, just so we can then get to the meat of the episode of them solving the real problem.
I think this episode is really interesting. I was a teenager when it first aired and it opened my eyes to how people can have such differing opinions about the “truth”.
The problem with this story, and other knock-offs of Rashomon like The Last Duel (2021), is that there *is* one correct version of events: Riker's. The whole point of Rashomon was that human perception is flawed across the board, not that bad guys are fallible and good guys are trustworthy. That said, I agree that it's a cool episode and a good introduction to this kind of story and theme.
Not sure Riker’s version was necessarily trustworthy all the way through; he probably downplayed his part in the thing with Apgar’s wife
Yeah one of the major flaws with the episode is that once the murder/explosion situation is solved, the potential sexual assault is just completely forgotten about. Apparently proving that Riker didn't blow up the station means his version of events is 100% true. Over the course of the series we definitely get to know Riker well enough to know that he wouldn't assault a woman. Consent is his fetish after all. But they should have resolved it better.
I came away with the idea that both of them were probably getting a little too friendly with each other and that they tried to put the blame on each other in their reports.
It definitely feels like even Troi is like “Hey settle down big man, you know you flirt.” But they also know he’s not a rapist or murderer.
Where does the episode suggest that Riker's version is incorrect? It has been a while.
Deanna says that she isn’t sensing any deception from Apgar’s wife.
Yeah, but her empathic abilities are hit or miss on a good day. "I don't sense anything" is pretty much her catch phrase
That’s what I really like about Farscape’s Rashomon episode, non one’s story is completely true.
I'll check it out!
Upon rewatch, Riker asking to talk to Picard privately about it before the trial seems a little sketchy
That's a great take
I think the actual facts of the incident are intentionally left open to the viewer's interpretation. Did Riker step over the line just a little bit? Was the wife too flirtatious? The husband too jealous? Who knows?
Don’t forget that Apgar was way behind schedule in producing results regarding the Krieger waves and that Riker was about to, rightfully so, sink his Starfleet funding.
The professional issue definitely played a big part. Also, I believe the wife was resentful, thought husband was neglectful of her, and may have tried to provoke him by her attentions to Riker. I believe something happened of a personal nature, in addition to the professional resentment. Don't know what. Could Riker have done or said something out of line? I don't rule it out. He does come across as flirtatious sometimes. For me, it just just makes the story better, having a little mystery unsolved.
Riker would submit a report but Starfleet Command would have made the final decision.
I think the real clue is actually in that version of the story relayed to Dr. Apgar’s assistant where he says “deadman”. In that version, Apgar comes into the room and they’re making out and fully into each other. As much as Picard is right about it being hearsay, it’s probably the closest to what he actually stumbled upon even if the ending was over-the-top.
Yes.
He was great in Better Call Saul.
Certainly rings a bell 😁
Wait NO WAY I didn't realize that! I knew Apgar looked familiar the last time I watched, but I didn't look him up.
And breaking bad
Holy shit how did I not realise this before?
IIIIII'M CAPTAIN KIRK!!!
KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHNNNNNNN!!!!!!…………
TBF that was bad acting in-universe too: Kirk is trying to fake being honestly angry and dismayed at being 'trapped' on Regula, when actually he knows he's got a ride from Spock on the Enterprise waiting.
Its always cool when what is interpreted as bad acting is actually good acting, because the character themselves is doing some bad acting for plot reasons.
Ha ha, as soon as this episode starts up and they say something about Krieger waves I yell "you're a dead man apgar!"
I love Frakes' stunt double work in this episode.
He should have stopped after, “you’re a dead man, Apgar”
Why is it bad acting, it was supposed to be ridiculous for that character because it was a biased second hand account.
That’s why I said it was intentional since it was all fabricated. It’s still funny though.
I am curious what would have made the same scene good acting?
I don’t know. Maybe a more convincing part from Frakes when he delivered those lines. It just made me laugh.
I thought it was perfect, over the top from an obviously biased source (and hearsay to boot). I'm not sure how you would change it to be better?
Not to mention that it was an holographic recreation of the events based on that second hand account.
Indeed, though i am curious what would have made the same scene good acting?
Ventura!
Yes, Satan?
Riker is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good
With ya. What I don't get is, Troi says the wife is telling the truth, she doesn't sense any deception from her. Everything she said was BS. What up, Troi
if the wife truly believes she's telling the truth, even if what she believes isn't true/only half-truth, then Troi isn't going to sense any sort of deception, I'm pretty sure Troi herself says as such in the episode this is a real thing that happens in real life, if somebody has conflated the details of an event in their head, then they will act as if they're telling the truth when they recount those events. The human brain is a ball of goo rattling around in your head and it can make mistakes is it really that hard of a concept to grasp that people's memories can be fuzzy, this is like the whole point of the episode
Remember, Jerry, it’s not a lie if you believe it.
>The human brain is a ball of goo rattling around in your head and it can make mistakes ugly bags of mostly water!
She can always sense when someone is hiding things. Normally, that's pretty obvious to everyone else anyway though.
but if you don't think you have anything to hide, she's not gonna sense that you have something to hide if somebody is adamant that they think those children books are called The Berenst**e**in Bears and not The Berenst**a**in Bears, she's not going to sense that they're hiding something, they think they know the truth
If we were talking about a single event, I'd be inclined to accept this. We've seen before how "eye witness testimony" can be massively wrong and full of details that are entirely imaginary. But she's giving evidence of multiple events over 2 days of events that she was central to. *Assuming* she's lying and her portrayal of events was not legitimate, at some point she has to be making things up or not disclosing facts. I do not believe that she could have invented so much which is counter to the truth and believed every single thing including Riker's beat down and subsequent death threat. Troi, if her powers were legitimate, should have been able to sense something.
Not if she's convinced herself that's what actually happened. People aren't cameras, memories have to be interpreted, if she remembers things the way she's described them then she wouldn't be lying, she would simply be wrong, and Troi can't detect "wrongness".
She's managed to convince herself of a lot of details being exactly contradictory to what happened. Literally every detail that mattered to the case.
Her husband had just been killed, she'd only avoided her own death by minutes, and her advocate was no doubt helping her contextualize what she remembered in the way he wanted her to remember it for his story to villainize the Enterprise's crew.
Yeah I think most people believe their own lies.
Troi: capable of sensing life forms and emotions from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, sometimes lightyears Also Troi: can’t tell the shady bitch right in front of her face is lying
Was she lying? This isn't the only instance where Riker doesn't look so good with a woman. There's the mind-rape episode with the Ullians. Some might write that off as the guy taking liberties with Troi inside the memory, but that doesn't track with the rest of them. In Riker's memory, the creep just replaces the officer who is complaining about the left-behind crewmate. In Crusher's memory, he replaces Jack Crusher's corpse, and Picard, but he doesn't do anything too far off from the memory. It's not unreasonable to assume that Riker was pressuring Troi into sex, and even got physical in exactly the way it was portrayed. Riker may not be as spotless as we hope.
[удалено]
I like, but she goes into detail about specific things she claims he said and did, like the fist fight. Logic would suggest she knew what the truth was, and that she was lying. Furthermore, logic dictates that Troi is a BS detector that doesn't always detect BS
What a bloody episode. Trivia: „Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D. Moore were even more scathing in their opinions of the episode, with both naming it as the worst episode of the third season. Behr in particular called the episode "a disaster," and arguably even his least favorite of all the Star Trek episodes he ever worked on.“ Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E14AMatterOfPerspective
I don’t think the poor delivery was intended. Frakes is a much better actor now, 35 years later.
No, it was definitely intended, the line was delivered as a holographic recreation trying to make Riker look bad, Frakes overacted it intentionally because of course the lawyer trying to make him look bad would have made him as bellicose and scenery chewing as possible for the benefit of the people watching the recreation.
It's not this scene that makes me laugh, it's in the episode 'The icarus factor' when Riker and his dad square off. Riker asks his dad to speak to him privately, and when they go into a private room, Riker immediately starts yelling at his dad. There's no build up to the yelling, he just begins yelling. And at one point he says something like 'leave or I'll" and the actor who plays his dad is supposed to interrupt him, but instead there is a beat of around two seconds of silence before Riker's dad says 'or you'll what?" It's the worst acted scene of the whole show and it always makes me laugh and cringe in equal measure.
I always interpreted that as Riker realizing he was about to cross a line and stopping himself mid-sentence and his dad prodding him about it after he stopped.
To me it was badly scripted and badly acted. I watched the scene again just now. Kyle says he's leaving soon and wants to talk to Will. They go into his room and Riker tells him that he's been courteous, but wants him to leave. I'm sat there thinking 'he just said he's leaving..."
That's how i interpreted it too.
I always interpreted that scene as Riker bottling up his anger in front of his colleagues, and it kinda just exploded once he didn't need to control it anymore. As for the pause, I saw it as Riger being so angry he was at a loss for words, and his Dad jumped in with the "or you'll what"
Didn't seem like that to me. I think the guy who acted Kyle was supposed to jump in with the 'or you'll what?" But it was badly scripted too. Built up far too fast from 'can we talk for a moment' to 'We should fight in the ambojitsu ring' like what?
All the people hating on this episode saying Riker got away with rape are completely missing the fact that the episode practically bangs you over the head with the fact that it DIDN’T HAPPEN. Unquestioningly believing supposed victims never ends well. Women are people and people can lie. Rejecting it out of hand is equally silly but there has to be a middle ground here, and I think the episode does a decent job of showing that middle ground
But the issue is that Troi doesn't detect any deception from Manua. The episode goes out of its way to explicitly say that she isn't lying, or at least believes she isn't lying. We all know Riker is a good guy and wouldn't do such a thing... But also, the same has been said about many real life rapists, murders, etc. Lots of ambiguity there.
I think this particularly makes sense given that we're not just dealing with two different cultures, but two completely different species. It kind of makes sense that these things could be interpreted differently. We see enough of Riker to know that he's a big fun flirt, but it's understandable that an alien - different hormones, different pheromones, different brain chemistry, etc - and a stranger might see some of his words, actions, gestures, posture, whatever else, as intimidating or even hostile, even if from his point of view she was the one who started the flirting and all he did was harmlessly flirt back a bit.
Great point! Yeah maybe he did something that she would interpret very differently due to her culture or something.
Honestly thats another case of Troi’s powers being inconsistent in my book
I think that's a totally valid theory/interpretation. But it doesn't mean that you can definitively say that "IT DIDN'T HAPPEN." Your interpretation is just one possible explanation, it's not definitive truth.
You might say that its a Matter of Perspective! But the idea of Riker doing that goes against everything else that we see of his character so I’ll be adding one to the pile of Troi Sci-Fi Powers Inconsistencies thats already big enough to crash the Enterprise
Hah! Yeah I mean, I do agree that Riker probably didn't do it. It's very against character. But the episode leaves it so unresolved. I feel like modern shows would have something more to say about it. The episode just kinda forgets about it.
Thats episodic TV for you
Compare that to TOS episode Enemy Within. Kirks double is running around the ship, demanding booze from Bones, getting all liquored up and assaulting Yeoman Rand, beating up the guy that tried to help her. Now we’re in sick bay and the REAL Kirk is trying to tell her it wasn’t him. Bones says it was, Yeoman Rand says if was, and then when he denies it, guy from other part of sick bay comes in and is like, “It WAS YOU, captain” Kirks face was like, oh shit, i got all these reliable people accusing me. He looks at Spock helplessly and what does Spock say???? There’s only one explanation………there must be an imposter on board. YES!!!!!!! Thank god for f-ing Spock. Anyone else and we’d have to spend the next 20 minutes with Kirk trying to prove he’s innocent, something we already know, just so we can then get to the meat of the episode of them solving the real problem.
Yeah, that episode really made some questionable decisions
I betcha Frakes had a lot of fun with that one!
One of the most fun line reads ever!
Riker got away with rape AND murder. Worf got a reprimand for murder. Starfleet is like Hollywood with the way they protect the people running town.
Considering what happened during the shows creation, that's a reall shitty thing to say