Haven - The Enterprise is at a planet named Haven, renowned for its great beauty and rumoured to have healing powers. I bet it's full of white people. Riker watches a hologram of two ladies playing harps in his quater while he sits there grinning. A metal box with a talking face on it (play by Armin Shimerman!) tells Deanna the day of her wedding has come. It's another stupid alien tradition we have to respect for some reason! Troi calls Riker "Bill" again as he's upset at her coming marriage. To make things even stupider, her arranged husband Wyatt is a human (played by Robert Knepper of every genre tv show ever) and his family are totally into this for some reason. We meet Deanna's mother Lwaxana (Majel Barrett, wonder how she get the part!) for the firt time and her servant Mr. Homm (Carl Struycken, the Giant from Twin Peaks) and Lwaxana makes Picard carry her heavy luggage because she's a bitch. Wyatt's a bit weid and has bad eighties hair and weird trousers. He's been painting a hot woman since he was a boy and thought Deanna would be her.
A Tarellian starship is approaching Haven at sublight speeds and everyone is scared. They carry a plague caused by a biological weapon unleashed on thier home planet (which gives Crusher a chance to be smug about how advanced humans are.) There's an engagment dinner for Deanna and Wyatt. Lwaxana and Wyatt's other start fighting right away, because that's just what woman are like! Data watches Mr. Homm drinking and asks if he's part human, which disgusts the tall chap. Homm keeps sounding a gong during the dinner. Lwaxana has a pet living plant for some reason. She tells Data about the naked Betazoid wedding ceremonies while Data grins. Brent Spiner is great, you guys. He aks them to continue the "petty bickering" as he finds it most intriguing. This scene was pretty funny!
Troi and Riker talk in the holodeck. He calls her "imzadi" a lot. Wyatt and Deanna have a moment where it seems like maybe this marriage won't be so bad! The leader of Haven wants Picard to destroy the plague ship but he won't. Then things get WEIRD as the woman from Wyatt's drawings is on the Tarellian ship. She recognises Wyatt too. Wyatt goes to Lwaxana and she explains that all life is connect through some kind of "Force." I mean, she might as well have, since she doesn't say anything that actually explains how all this happened. Wyatt says goodbye to Deanna and his parents and beams over to the plague ship. He finds the alien woman has been drawing him since childhood too. I should have mentioned earlier that Wyatt's a doctor and they think he can cure the Tarellians of the plague. That was his destiny all along! I guess! Lwaxana sexually harrasses Picard and Riker and Mr. Homm speaks(!) the end.
This episode is surprisingly not as bad as I remembered it being. I mean it's an episode about Deanne Troi's arranged marriage, with the first appearance of a character I will go on to dread appearances of. Yet Lwaxana isn't too bad in this episode. She's annoying, yes, but she's meant to be and there's a point to her being there. She doesn't completely take over the episode. I like Mr. Homm too and the dinner party scene is quite delightful with the best comedy yet from TNG. However for the first Deanna centric episode it's odd how passive she is in the story. She struggle a bit with the arranged marriage but is basically fine with it. It's really Wyatt who's the main character here as he's the one who makes all the big decisions and embraces his special destiny. And that's the problem here: what the fuck is this destiny stuff all about? Wyatt is human and there's no mentions of the Tarellians having telepathic powers. So how have they been seeing each other since birth? There's no explanation beyond something vague from Lwaxana and nobody really questions it much. At one point I thought "oh, did Lwaxana arrange this somehow?" but that wouldn't really make sense either. So what's this episode actually about? A guest character who finds out that his dream girl is real and he just happens to have the medical knowledge to save her from a deadly plague? That's a pretty weird plot and it's not very satisfying in the end. But there is some good stuff in here and I didn't really mind the episode so I don't know 6/10 probably.
SCORE: 6/10