The Resonance of the Ressikan Flute

It is good to reexperience culture, even (or perhaps especially) pop culture. Repeated experiences, whether viewings or listenings or what-have-you have the potential to reveal new insights to you, about the material itself, or perhaps your own self.

Fenya and I got to talking the other day about allegory, and I mentioned how good the various iterations of Star Trek have been at presenting insightful moral tales cloaked in a veneer of science-fiction adventure. I mentioned the Next Generation episode "Darmok" as a particularly good example - in it, Captain Picard is trapped on a planet with a starship captain from an enigmatic culture who speaks in metaphors. Picard can understand the words but not the meaning behind them, until, following an attack by a hostile creature, the gap is finally bridged.

"Darmok" is brilliant for a few reasons, not the least of which is it is one of the few episodes where an alien civilization actually felt...alien. And the phrase "Darmok and Jelad at Tenagra" has, in turn, become a referential shorthand for both the difficulty in reaching out to others and the rewards in doing so successfully.

We ended up at loose ends Saturday night and I suggested we watch "Darmok" on Netflix, and Fenya agreed. She enjoyed it as much as I hoped she would and asked if there were many other episodes of Next Generation as good as that one. "Very few," I said, "but one that always seems to come up in the top ten is 'The Inner Light'." 

She asked me to put it on, and against my better judgement due to the hour, I watched it all the way through with her. (Spoiler alert for the synopsis below, but hey, it's been a quarter-century now...)

Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is struck unconscious by an energy beam from an alien probe. While minutes pass for the rest of the crew, the probe makes Picard experience 40 years of lifetime as Kamin, a humanoid scientist whose planet is threatened by the nova of its sun. Toward the end of Kamin's "lifetime," Picard—who had come to accept his new life, though he never forgot his life on the Enterprise—learns that the purpose of the probe and the 40 years of virtual life it gave him was to keep alive the memory of Kamin's race long after the death of their civilization. Brought on board afterwards for analysis, the probe also contains Kamin's flute; Picard, having mastered it during his 40 years as Kamin, finds he retained the musical skills he learned and can still play it. He keeps it as a memento for the remainder of the series.

I am unsure if I have watched this episode since it first aired in 1992, but it has to been at least 15 years since I have seen it. I had always appreciated and respected it, but found it to be much more affecting and moving this time around. It is clear to me that the change has transpired in me, and not the episode.

The first time I watched The Inner Light, I thought how immensely clever it was of the Ressikans to transcribe their culture as a personal story instead of facts and figures. I thought of the Pioneer plaques attached to probes destined to leave our solar system and how they are allegedly designed to describe the humans who built them and where they reside. And I reflected on how haunted Picard must be by his experience and wondered how he felt about retaining a lifetime's experience of playing the Ressikan flute in only 25 minutes. He seemed at peace with it, but I wondered if a person might feel violated in some way.

Watching it now, the episode's impacts were emotional ones, not intellectual. Watching Picard as Kamin lean into his new life, start a family, play with his grandson, and rail against the injustice of young life brought forth on a doomed world, saying bitterly, "It breaks my heart to look at him," backed up by all of Patrick Stewart's Shakespearean-trained gravitas.

Where Captain Picard has made no secret of his discomfort when around children, Kamin instead says, ""I always believed that I didn't need children to complete my life. Now, I couldn't imagine life without them." I found myself wondering if he would mourn for the family he'd never actually had, lost a thousand years earlier.

Assuming I watched this episode when it originally aired in June of 1992, I would not yet have been married (but engaged to be that December), and was still seven years away from becoming a father myself. I would have been on summer break from the advertising and public relations program at Grant MacEwan Community College (at the time), before getting into loggerheads with the program chair and leaving the program that fall, wondering what career I might end up in. (And still do, in fact...)

It was a heady brew, watching that episode with Fenya, who was as entranced by it as I was, and that may have been the most profound effect of all -  the manner in which an episode of television that was in reruns before she was ever born could provide a bridge for us to share an experience, and to reflect upon what is truly important. Still largely isolated due to the pandemic, with uncertainty all around us, and certainly no more in evidence than current events in the U.S.), the words that Kamin spoke to his daughter resonated more strongly with me now than the notes of the millennia-old flute Picard plays at the close of the episode: "Seize the time, Meribor – live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."

And it is gratifying to see how an episode with no action, little adventure and no conflict to speak of has been so impactful as well. "The Inner Light" has been named as favourite episode by many of the cast and crew, including at least one writer who called it her favourite, despite not having written it. It won the 1993 Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation, an honour shared with the original series episode, "City on the Edge of Forever."

When props were auctioned from The Next Generation in 2006, many castmembers predicted that the Ressikan flute itself would be among the highest-bid items. The lot it was part of had a catalogue estimate of $800-$1200 but sold for $48,000.

The flute itself reappeared in future episodes, reflecting the impact the experience had on Picard (as well as viewers), with him playing a duet with a romantic interest and years later it even appeared on his desk in one of the theatrical movies. It is a tribute to the lasting impact of the episode that sharp-eared viewers were able to pick out the influence of the Ressikan flute music in the opening credits to the new Picard series (which is also quite good).

As both "Darmok" and "The Inner Light" have shown us, stories, both real and made-up, can show us things about ourselves that we might not have known, or have perhaps forgotten, and bring us together in a way few other things can.

Darmok and Jelad, at Tenagra.