Clues (S04E14)
Airdate: 11 February 1991
Written by: Bruce D. Arthurs & Joe Menosky
Directed by: Les Landau
Running Time: 42 minutes
By its fourth season, Star Trek: The Next Generation had firmly found its voice, delivering a remarkable string of sophisticated, ambitious episodes that expanded the franchise’s narrative and philosophical scope. This very success, however, created a peculiar paradox: the sheer volume of extraordinary instalments began to render merely good ones somewhat unremarkable, consigning them to a hazy middle ground in the memory of most Trekkies. A prime example of this phenomenon is Clues (S4E14), an episode that on paper fulfils all the criteria of a very solid piece of Star Trek—a science-fiction mystery, an ethical dilemma, and classic ensemble interplay—yet somehow fails to be counted among the series’ enduring highlights or essential classics. It is a professionally crafted, intellectually tidy hour that ultimately feels curiously weightless and forgettable.
The plot begins agreeably enough with the Enterprise-D crew at leisure. Worf instructs colleagues in mok’bara, a Klingon martial art presented with a distinctly Tai Chi-like serenity, while Captain Picard indulges his anachronistic passion for hard-boiled detective fiction by introducing Guinan to his Dixon Hill holodeck programme. This tranquillity is shattered by Data’s discovery of a habitable M-class planet orbiting a T-Tauri star, a configuration that apparently generates a temporary wormhole. The transit through this anomaly causes the entire crew—except, crucially, the android Data—to lose consciousness for thirty seconds. Upon awakening, they find the ship has been displaced 0.54 parsecs and is now surveying a gas giant, not the verdant world they were approaching. Minor inconsistencies begin to surface: Dr. Crusher finds a biological sample has grown a full day’s worth, Worf’s previously injured wrist has been perfectly reset, and Counselor Troi experiences disorienting dizziness and anxiety. Data, uncharacteristically, offers a series of increasingly contrived explanations, his usual pedantry shading into evasiveness. A suspicious Picard correctly deduces that the crew has lost an entire day of memories and that Data is complicit in a cover-up.
Ordering the ship back to the original coordinates, Picard is met by a strange energy pulse that temporarily possesses Troi. Confronted, Data finally reveals the truth: the “wormhole” was a sophisticated stun field deployed by the Paxans, a profoundly xenophobic race who inhabit the planet and zealously guard their existence. Their standard procedure is to stun intruders, erase their memories, and send them on their way. Data, immune to the effect, witnessed the first successful contact. To preserve the Paxans’ isolation and avoid a catastrophic confrontation, Picard had previously ordered Data to conceal the truth from the re-conscious crew. Now discovered, the Paxans threaten to destroy the Enterprise to ensure their secrecy. Picard ingeniously proposes a simple reset: let the Paxans stun them again and perform a perfect memory wipe, with Data once more as the sole, silent witness. The plan succeeds, and the Enterprise departs, its crew blissfully unaware of the mysterious species they have twice encountered.
The script by Bruce D. Arthurs and Joe Menosky technically conforms to Star Trek’s ethos as a thinking person’s science fiction, structuring the episode as a puzzle centred on the highly unusual concept of averted First Contact. Yet, it is the very insistence on this mystery—a word repeated with mantra-like frequency by the characters—that begins to feel routine rather than engaging. On a first viewing, the incremental revelation of clues holds some appeal, but on revisiting, the narrative engine sputters. The stakes are peculiarly abstract: no crew member is in lasting peril, no profound relationship is tested or altered, and the ultimate resolution is a tactical rewind to a status quo ante that erases all dramatic progress. The result is a story that feels hermetically sealed and curiously devoid of consequence, even for the usually consequence-averse format of episodic television.
Often labelled a “bottle episode” for its limited use of new sets or effects, Clues also suffers from rather workmanlike direction by the usually dependable Les Landau. The pacing is functional at best, and even the deployment of flashbacks—a relative rarity in TNG—feels like a perfunctory narrative shortcut rather than an innovative storytelling device. They illustrate the plot efficiently but add no emotional or thematic texture.
Seemingly aware of the episode’s dramatic thinness, the producers attempt to compensate with extra-textual colour in the early acts. While the introduction of mok’bara is a welcome bit of Klingon cultural detailing, the extended Dixon Hill sequence plays as unashamed, and rather clunky, fan service. The segment adds little to the main plot and is further undermined by Patrick Stewart’s inexplicable decision to adopt a shaky American accent for Picard-as-Hill, a vocal mannerism absent from his prior forays into the genre.
The episode’s reputation has also been slightly dented by an unfavourable, if coincidental, comparison with Thanks for the Memory, an episode of the cult BBC sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf that aired in 1988. Both narratives hinge on a crew discovering they have lost a day, with an android as the keeper of the secret. While Clues treats this as a straightforward procedural mystery, Red Dwarf uses the same premise to explore poignant themes of friendship, loss, and regret, yielding a far more emotionally resonant outcome. The comparison inadvertently highlights what Clues lacks: a human heart beneath its logical puzzle.
In the final analysis, Clues is not a bad episode; it is competently written, performs adequately within the show’s formula, and offers a neat, paradox-based solution. But in the stellar company of Season 4 its virtues are those of a capable technician rather than a visionary artist. It is the definition of a mid-tier entry: professionally executed, intellectually tidy, and ultimately so lacking in visceral punch or philosophical depth that it fades from memory, becoming a casualty of its own series’ exceptional standards.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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