Forest of Illusions

Pictured: Not Captain Picard.

With the show’s newfound brief to focus on character interiority, we’ve seen the creative team work hard to come up with a specific conception of who exactly these characters are. Now, it’s more than possible to argue that our main cast already had characterization, it was just characterization that was different then what this team eventually decided on and made canon (indeed, I think that’s precisely what happened), but regardless, the fact is the third season has had a series of episodes dedicated to nailing down a new set of personality traits for the Enterprise crew: We had “Evolution” for Wesley, “Booby Trap” for Geordi, “The Enemy” and “Sins of the Father” for Worf, “The High Ground” for Doctor Crusher, “The Ensigns of Command”, “The Defector” and “The Offspring” for Data, “The Vengeance Factor” and, uh, “A Matter of Perspective” for Commander Riker and, um, “The Price” for Deanna Troi.

Yeah, that doesn’t look so hot all laid out on paper now, does it?

The thing about this is that while this season in general and these episodes in particular get credit for “fleshing out” previously vague characters, I happen to think all that happened is that people like Ron Moore and Ira Behr got to completely reconceptualize the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation and they just happened to get lucky that theirs were the interpretations that wound up taking. Either way, perhaps surprisingly, the one character this team has had a particularly hard time nailing down has been Captain Picard. He’s been written particularly changeably this season, and upsettingly so as there seems to have been a trend to depict him as very tight-laced, stringent, stodgy and reactionary (I’m thinking particularly of “The High Ground” and “The Offspring” here, though he has had good moments in stories like “The Defector” and “The Hunted”).

To me, this is writing him horribly out of character. The Captain Picard I know, the one derived from the best moments of the first two seasons, is a boldly progressive and highly principled explorer infatuated with travel and the universe. He’s a romantic at heart, yet someone who is also in possession of a fierce moral code and still a bit socially awkward in places. Even so, Captain Picard should be the first person to stand up against the banal evil of the Federation and to remind humanity that its place is amongst the stars. He embodies all of the ideals the Federation lies to itself by claiming as its own. The Picard of “The High Ground” and “The Offspring” cannot possibly be the same person who stood firm against Federation neo-imperialism in “Too Short a Season” and “Conspiracy”, who made regular trips to the Holodeck to play games with his friends and who went to the hilt for Data in “The Measure of a Man”. He’s not even the same person who chatted with the crew about ships in bottles in “Booby Trap”, directed Henry V or took up painting.…

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What “The Enemy” was for the Romulans, “Sins of the Father” is for the Klingons.

This episode is frequently held up as an important turning point for the series and rightly so, as it defines a lot about what Star Trek: The Next Generation (and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine too, for that matter) is going to look like going forward. But “Sins of the Father” is also the kind of episode that’s exceedingly difficult for me to write about as it’s been extensively analysed and historicized by just about every major publication to cover the franchise. This is the kind of episode I hate because it leaves me with perishingly little new erudition to add to the glut of discourse that already exists. Yes, yes, this episode sets in stone pretty much everything we think of when we think of Worf and the Klingons, yes it’s a strong character piece and yes it’s a major step in the development of more explicit serialization in episodic Star Trek. Yes, the award-winning set design and matte paintings are all gobsmackingly good. And yes, it sets up “Redemption”, about which I have a lot to say, but I’ll save for the fifth season. That’s all true to be sure, but it’s also blindingly and bluntly obvious to the point I don’t even think it’s really worth taking the time to talk about.

But then what is there left to say about an episode like “Sins of the Father”? I could be my usual grouchy self and dispel some myths about the backstage stuff: This episode is frequently touted as being the moment where real characterization, serialization and world building was introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which would be true except for the minor fact it does none of those things. Maybe it’s just me and my judgment is clouded by over 25 years of familiarity with this show, but I haven’t had a hard time piecing down who people like Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Geordi or Data (or, much as I hate him, Wesley) are so far. The only characters who did seem to lack a bit of detail were Doctor Crusher (who got better) and Tasha Yar (who isn’t around anymore to complain and thus doesn’t matter anyway). So then the argument goes this is the first time a so-called “second tier” character like Worf got a large-scale story arc all to themselves, which would be a fine argument if you chose to conveniently ignore “Heart of Glory” and “The Emissary”. Yes, those particular story threads weren’t ever fully developed on after those episodes, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have been had the creative teams that worked on them stuck around for longer than one season apiece.

Then there’s the argument that “Sins of the Father” was the first episode to introduce serialized, arc-based storytelling to Star Trek and that this was manifestly a Good Idea.…

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“The Offspring” sees us introduced to another new face who will become a reoccurring figure on Star Trek: The Next Generation and beyond. Not, perhaps controversially, Data’s daughter Lal, but the story’s writer René Echevarria. Like Ron Moore, Echevarria is another success story of the open submissions policy, discovered on the back of his spec script (this one) and then asked to come out to join the writing staff by Michael Piller. It just takes a little bit longer with Echevarria, who doesn’t come on full time until next year, despite having one more submission this season.

Indeed it’s a something of a miracle he managed to last even that long, considering he’s another in a long line of writers who, by his own admission, waltzed into the writer’s room convinced he was going to teach them how to write Star Trek because he was a die-hard Original Series fan unreasonably upset at Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ira Behr jokingly recalls his first impression of his future collaborator being that of a “pretentious” New Yorker whose only experience was in theatre. But, once aboard, Echevarria stays with Star Trek for the next decade, penning some of the franchise’s best and most memorable stories.

It’s somewhat endearing then to learn that his debut story is as much the result of early career jitters as it is his obvious talent: In regards to “The Offspring”, Echevarria recalls how Michael Piller openly called it the single best spec script he’d ever seen in his career to that point, but he was disappointed in the revised version enough to do an uncredited rewrite on it with Gene Roddenberry and the outgoing Melinda Snodgrass. The behind-the-scenes story is especially interesting here, as it reveals a lot about Michael Piller’s philosophy as it pertained to Star Trek: Piller recalls that his big issue with “The Offspring” as originally conceived was that it was all about Lal, her journey and her interiority, and since one of Piller’s big rules is that every story had to be fundamentally about the regulars in some way, it needed to be rewritten to be primarily about Data and his experiences with parenthood.

I both agree and disagree with this. While obviously I think it’s important to have the characters you actually get to see every week be involved in the action to some degree, I also think it’s important to not swing too far to the other side with this and remember that the regulars are ultimately ideals, and a big strength of Star Trek: The Next Generation to date has been its ability to help its guest characters solve their problems and grow in a healthy and constructive way. On the other hand, it’s both noteworthy and praiseworthy that neither Piller, nor Snodgrass nor Roddenberry put their names on the finished product: As Ron Moore would later recall, the attitude was always that the because the writing staff had far more power and money than the freelancers (not to mention better job security), it would be unbecoming to take their credit and residuals as well.…

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A volley of canon-fire and the future we had anticipated disappears in a cloud of cosmic dust.

A vision of my past life stands before me, its sparkling azure hue as vibrant and as clear as I always remember it to be. Memories wash over me as I’m reminded of the person I was and the way I saw things before. Hope for a future that never came, but perhaps should have.

My past, present and future exist at once together because time is not what we think it is. The grand cycle of the cosmos turns over once again and we find ourselves once more where it all began. We exist and we live. It’s not linear, but we live. We are defined by the power of the moment that can last both a brief instant and for all eternity at the same time. To remove or deny those moments is to deny identity, for it is through living in these moments that we learn who we are.

Symbols have meaning and power, but it won’t always be the same for every person in every context. I can try to explain the things I’ve seen to you, but language is merely a tool and there’s only so much of a discrete confluence that a tool can stand in for. But I try anyway. You may not have seen the same thing, as I, but I’ll wear a simulacrum of what I saw and put on a performance for you. And the fact remains you still saw something.

Memories of a time and place take on lives and identities of their own long after the moment of congress has faded away. Some call it a cheating distortion of reality, but reality is made every day through the act of people muddling by trying to read it. Seeing you again in this moment is like seeing you for the first time because our timelines diverged after you went away: The reality where we stayed together seems so very different from the one that I’ve forgotten.

A dream means something.

Is it bad that when I remember you, and even when I look at you now, I don’t see you for the way you were, but for the way I imagined you to be? That’s disingenuous I know-It’s certainly not relationship material, that sort of thinking. And yet neither are we: We never had the sort of relationship that would have required us to intimately know and trust one another, did we? It was always a matter of perspective; of me projecting things based on what I saw and what I felt. That’s the thing about heroes: We never see them for the people they really are, at least not all the time. We see them for the ideals and the qualities we figure they stand for and that we want to take into ourselves. And the act of meditation transforms spirit and shaman both.…

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Possibly the single most iconic shot of the season.

One common story structure going forward from here is what’s been described by numerous writing staff as, essentially “Let’s Do X”, where X is some non-Star Trek work of fiction that the show can bang out a more-or-less straightforward translation of with minimal edits needed to translate the story to a science fiction setting. Arguably the most prominent example we’ve seen so far could be called “Let’s Do Moby-Dick”, as the Original Series did that an astonishing three times over the course of its existence, the first two impressively even being in the same filming block, and the rest of the franchise promptly decided that wasn’t overkill enough and did it three more times.

But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here: Nicholas Meyer (and a fair few Original Series creative figures, if we’re being brutally honest) leaned on Moby-Dick (and Paradise Lost, King Lear, A Tale of Two Cities as well as about a billion other things plucked from the reading list of a high school English class) because he pretentiously thought it made him and his work look intellectual and cultured. When Michael Piller’s creative team and its descendents do an adaptation, it’s largely due to equal parts money and time saving concerns (it’s much easier to take a script from pitch to screen in a week if all you have to do is take a familiar archetype and plug in the names of your characters) and a desire to pay homage to an existing work that they’ve found inspirational, formative, or just that they thought would handily fit the narrative and ethical sensibilities of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in a pinch.

We’ve already seen the team do something like this already with “The Hunted”, which is quite obviously “Let’s Do First Blood”-Even though it was a freelance submission, it was something that went through a (somewhat infamous) rewrite process. What we see this week is basically that but more so: The genesis of “A Matter of Perspective” is quite easy to identify as “Let’s Do Rashōmon”, and because this is another story the entire creative team worked together doing rewrites on, it belies a particularly knowing cinephile’s touch about it that befits the source material. Rashōmon is a 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa based on a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa about a samurai and his wife who meet a bandit travelling on a road. A series of events transpires, and then the samurai winds up dead. The bandit, the samurai’s wife and even the dead samurai himself (via a psychic medium) each come forward in turn to explain how the murder happened and, baffilingly, each claim sole responsibility for it. The film follows a commoner, a woodcutter and a priest sitting beneath the titular Rashōmon city gate in Kyoto, today known as Rajōmon, attempting to piece together precisely what happened as each story flatly contradicts each of the other ones.…

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A lovely effects shot and an apt visual allegory.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation goes wrong, it’s almost never due to incompetence or sloppiness (“The Price” would seem to be an exception). It’s almost always due to creative decisions that, while they may have seemed like good ideas in the moment (or were the only option on the table), in hindsight turn out to have been particularly ill-advised and regrettable.

And boy does it ever go wrong here.

There are bad creative calls, and then there are crushingly poor ones that manage to cripple the show’s entire ethos, dynamic and sensibilities. That’s what we’re looking at today. “Deja Q” is an episode that finally takes the metatextual voice of the universe who challenges us to justify our utopias, reminding us to constantly better ourselves and never settle for complacency in the process, and turns him into a complete mockery. Yes “Hide and Q” had already done serious damage to Q’s efficacy, but “Q Who” had managed to make significant inroads for the better in restoring a lot of that while also going some way towards restoring his original edge. “Deja Q” undoes all of that in one fell swoop by stripping Q of his powers to tell a hackneyed, hackish story about sacrifices and “inner humanity”. “Deja Q” is unquestionably near the top of the list of episodes I most dreaded having to cover, and it remains one of my least favourite episodes in the entire franchise. This is Star Trek: The Next Generation at its absolute most cloyingly unwatchable, from its sappy milquetoast humanism to its unbearably forced, tuneless, shockingly out-of-touch cornball “zaniness” and its dangerously slipshod grasp of utopianism.

The fact that this is the exact same story that we saw in DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation miniseries three years ago is concerning enough without the fact the licensed comic book tie-in, while histrionic and fluffy, actually handles the brief with far more nuance, tact and maturity than the offering from the professional group of television veterans. At least I can point to a definitive reason for why this episode turned out the way it did, as opposed to the inexplicable clusterfuck of “The Price”: Simply put, Gene Roddenberry was wrong. The original draft for this episode, according to Michael Piller, would have had Q pulling an elabourate feint on the Enterprise crew, *pretending* to have lost his powers to get himself onto the ship and acclimated with the crew so he could prove his worth to them during an imaginary standoff with the Klingons. The point of the story was going to be that Q was trying to show the crew why they needed him and the kinds of talents and skills he could contribute to their betterment, with or without his powers. It was a really cool sounding pitch, and would have built nicely off of the themes of “Q Who”, where Q was, at least on some level, trying to get the Enterprise crew to trust him.…

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A sizable portion of Star Trek fans would, if you polled them, likely state that the franchise’s biggest strength is in its ability to do so-called “social commentary” on the issues of today in a futuristic science fiction setting. When they say this, what they’re referring to is the interpretation of Star Trek that I’ve somewhat flippantly chosen to call “Roddenberry’s Fables”. This is the kind of story where our crew beams down someplace, encounters an alien civilization that either operates under a structure or is facing a situation that very closely mirrors a social debate in the real world. Back in the Original Series, this usually took the form of quite literally punching the moral of the week (typically Gene Roddenberry’s Opinion on something) into the guest cast, but with the advent of Star Trek: The Next Generation. we’ve by and large been more interested in helping our one-off characters work through their problems in a constructive way.

How interesting it is than that the one time the creative team did explicitly decide to Say Something Important about a major social issue of their time is largely considered to be a disaster.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann compare “The High Ground” to “The Hunted”, by saying both involve a dangerous, violent man whom the Enterprise crew nevertheless find some manner of sympathy for, but point out that “The High Ground” was far more controversial, being banned in several countries for varying lengths of time. What they’re too polite to say is that of fucking course “The High Ground” was more controversial, because it deals with terrorists and openly, diegetically draws comparisons to several real-world terrorist campaigns. It’s a brazen move to be sure, and the show comes dangerously close to endorsing violent uprising as a valid form of material social change, even while it justifiably tries to stay ambivalent about the ethical underpinnings of it. Where things go wrong, naturally, is that the script ends up a little *too* ambivalent and, apart from making the dramatic crux of the plot hinge on yet another kidnapping of a female main character, basically just ends up reciting a bunch of vague platitudes about terrorism and violence that don’t actually *say* anything. As Michael Piller says:

“Another show that I wasn’t particularly happy with. We set out to do a show about terrorists. What was the statement we made about terrorism in the show? Was it the point where the boy puts down the gun and says, ‘Maybe the end of terrorism is when the first child puts down his gun?’ It was effective in the context of that show, but is certainly not a statement that provides any great revelation. You must be prepared to say something new about social issues.”

While Ron Moore puts it more bluntly when he calls it

“an abomination.

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“Welcome aboard. Now rewrite act three for me and have it on my desk by this evening.”

That’s how Ira Steven Behr was welcomed to Star Trek: The Next Generation by Michael Piller on his first day as producer and staff writer. That gives you an idea of what this show’s behind-the-scenes climate was like during the third season: Behr recalls how even though he was a veteran writer and producer, this was like no other show he’d ever worked on before. Everyone was frantically writing and rewriting stories, absolutely nothing was ready to go, and it stayed like that for the entire year. The insane workload eventually burned Behr out so badly that he walked away from Star Trek after only one season, and only came back to the franchise at Michael Piller’s personal request four years later when he and Rick Berman were drafting up what would become Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s sister show. We’ll talk more about Behr and his influence once we get to the fist story he actually wrote himself (as opposed to ones he did an uncredited rewrite of at the eleventh hour to get them into a marginally filmable state), but that script that Behr rewrote the third act of on his first day happens to be this one: “The Hunted”.

“The Hunted” is perishingly easy to explain. It is straightforwardly First Blood on the Starship Enterprise and, in spite of its positively ridiculous production history, it works and is a solidly watchable hour of television. There are moments in which it reveals its functionality as a work, and, frustratingly, when it does it’s at its most Original Series-esque: Even that third act Ira Behr worked on is one big chase through a bunch of pre-existing sets with a lot of flying fisticuffs and choreographed doofy fight scenes (Which isn’t altogether surprising as Behr, for a number of reasons, was never entirely comfortable with Star Trek: The Next Generation, being much more familiar with the Original Series). That’s not to say it’s entirely without merit, as the gambit our John Rambo analog, Roga Danar, pulls off is truly laudable in its cleverness and sophistication, even if he does kinda end up making the Enterprise crew (save Worf) look like a bunch of idiots in the process. Also memorable to me are the scenes where Danar is clomping around the Jeffries Tubes trying to misdirect the crew: The sets are some of the best interior designs of the year, exuding a palpable sense of being a sprawling, labyrinthine maze of corridors. Furthermore, Marvin Rush’s use of subtle red mood lighting really sets the tone for these scenes and also happens to look really cool. Actor Jeff McCarthy’s presence and swagger compliment this splendidly; he really sells the tension and walks around like he owns the place.

Which leaves examining the wisdom of doing First Blood on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the first place, which there is, even if it’s not entirely intuitive.…

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The worst parts of “The Defector” are what it inherits from “The Enemy”.

I mean that very sincerely in a number of different ways. This is another story dealing explicitly with Romulan culture and politics in an era of heightened tension with the Federation, and while it’s a more than decent one of those, it is hamstrung by its attempts to wed its continuity to “The Enemy”. What this does is reveal both how much of “The Enemy” actually really was a misfire, but also the dangers of relying too much on continuity in the first place as, you know, simply ignoring “The Enemy” wasn’t an option here (both in terms of common sense, as we’ve just done another Romulan runaround two weeks ago that I suspect most people are fonder of than I am and also because that’s never something this team, who much prefer to link new episodes back to old ones if the opportunity to do so presents itself than not, ever would have done).

So the Romulans are once again generically and programmatically shifty, manipulative backstabbers scheming to stir the pot just because they can. Even Commander Tomalak is back to puff out his chest and rattle his sabre at us, though don’t get too used to him-Dude barely shows up again after this. And yet apart from that there’s a lot of good stuff here, most notably in the character of Admiral Jarok himself, who immediately engenders our sympathy: His rank and the things we can extrapolate he did with it aside, here’s someone who’s been “on the ground”, so to speak, and understands firsthand the full consequences and repercussions of the Romulan Star Empire’s retrograde and destructive neo-imperialism. He’s the first real clue we get that Romulus isn’t a monoculture and that the cartoonishly bloodthirsty jingoism of Andreas Katsulas’ Tomalak does not speak for every Romulan. In fact, the folly of reducing an entire people down to crass generalizations is something of a theme, with Jarok needing to learn to trust the Enterprise crew and set-aside the in-built prejudices he’s internalized from living in such a xenophobic climate. And how great is it that this all comes together in one of the single most beautiful bits of lore-building in the show to date, when Jarok poetically reminisces to Data about the Valley of Chula, which is later brought to life on the holodeck through a breathtaking bit of set design from the art department?

The only concern I might raise is that Jarok becomes so sympathetic through all of this (I dare you not to get choked up when he starts talking about his daughter to Captain Picard) he actually runs the risk of upstaging the Enterprise crew at various points, which is something Michael Piller of all people should have caught. This episode does not portray the crew in the most flattering of lights, lining them up to get punched down by Jarok though having their first instinct to be to strip the scout ship (although do note how the episode pulls the genius sleight-of-hand of having Tomalak force Jarok to eat his words during the climax when he promises to do the same thing to the Enterprise: What was that about Jarok was saying about humans being inherently shortsighted, and what were we saying about the Romulan Star Empire and the Federation being the same thing?)…

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Another episode that tends to go curiously underappreciated during the otherwise fan-favourite third season, “The Vengeance Factor” has always been one of the most memorable episodes of the year for me, and this time for good reasons. It’s partially because this is another episode I saw quite a lot of and have very fond memories of, but also because I happen to think it’s fantastic.

It starts out with what is, for my money, one of the most unforgettable opening sequences in the series: Commander Riker, Doctor Crusher, Worf and Data make up an away team beaming down to an imposingly alien looking planetary settlement. There’s a palpable sense of mystery and foreboding perfectly accentuated by the terrifically eery green stage lighting as the team picks through the rubble of the bombed-out research centre. There’s no Captain’s Log to provide blase exposition, just a cold open with the team already on a head-start to a situation they know more about than we do. “The Vengeance Factor”’s opening moments really are a design triumph: That matte painting actually has a famous pedigree, as it’s the same one used in the science fiction classic The Forbidden Planet. Mike Okuda had wanted to use it in Star Trek: The Next Generation for a long time, and when he finally got the opportunity, he rented the physical piece for this episode. And the research centre really feels like it’s been built around that painting: The set design matches it so perfectly and so seamlessly it’s a shock to learn they don’t come from the same place.

From this point “The Vengeance Factor” doesn’t let up on the visual front, but like all good Star Trek: The Next Generation episode it’s got a solid story to tell as well. One perhaps gets a little worried early on upon learning we’re going to be dealing with a group of displaced people who’ve become nomads forced to plunder remote settlements to get vital supplies: This is an area of politics Star Trek is historically shaky on, and while this episode maybe doesn’t go quite as far as we’d really like, it does manage to take a stand that’s admirably not a reactionary default. The Enterprise crew, especially Captain Picard, are the most overtly sympathetic to the Gatherers’ plight and are in the position of constantly reminding the Sovereign to keep her decades of bitterness over the conflict between the two factions in check by reminding her that were she in their place she’d be demanding the same things (there’s even a terrific bit of 1980s design on display when we first meet the Gatherers, who apparently reside in world of fantastic postmodern cyberpunk urban decay and who resemble a cross between 1980s chain gang street punks and Mad Max-esque road warriors-I absolutely love it).

Then there’s Commander Riker’s plot, which is lovely. The episode plays an interesting sort of skip when it comes to diegtic information: At first, the characters know far more about the situation than we do, but, as soon as we move the action to Gamma Hromi II, they suddenly start to know far less as it’s revealed to us in one shot how Yuta is an assassin whose actions will work against peace talks and that she kills using some kind of biotech interface.…

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