Review

This episode has bland plotting that seems to have been strung together from a series of totally unrelated threads. The episode's name is "Haven" and yet we see virtually nothing of the planet nor do we learn anything about its people beyond the fact that they're friends of the Federation. Then we have the Tarellians, an intriguing concept for what could happen to a civilization that employs biological weaponry and can't control the fallout, but we don't get any depth beyond surface details.

The worst and unfortunately most prominent feature of the story is Wyatt being summoned across the vastness of space due to some sort of psychic connection to Ariana. Aside from being yet another lame use of quasi-religious mumbo jumbo as a lazy sci-fi plot device, there is some additional oddness in the story caused by the fact that the only reason Wyatt could confuse the woman of his dreams with a Betazoid to begin with was due to the fact that Betazoids and Tarellians look identical to each other and also once again identical to humans as well.

By now it is quite odd that nobody seems to find it at all strange that so many alien species look exactly like humans. TOS had this problem too, but TNG's continual compounding of it adds layers of ridiculousness. The height of absurdity here is the fact that we can't actually conclude one way or the other whether or not the inhabitants of Haven are human. Is it a human colony not under the jurisdiction of the Federation? Are they a recurrence of one of the countless previous human-like aliens we've seen from past episodes of TOS and now on TNG too? Are they some new alien that also looks exactly like humans? Who knows! There's no way to know.

What does work well here is the drama surrounding Troi's relationship with Riker and Wyatt. Their scenes are all reasonably compelling and it was also nice to see Betazoid culture fleshed out more. Likewise, Troi's mother Lwaxana was certainly a memorable character for better or worse. Had their story been told against a less horribly lazy alien threat backdrop, it would've turned out better.