Forest of Illusions

Random Operations Crew Lady is my kindred spirit here.

Stable wormholes! Galactic quadrants! Trade negotiations! Sexy romantic tension! The Ferengi! Almost feels like we’re on another show, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, looking at “The Price” just made me wish I actually was watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine instead. Or really anything other than this.

I would have so many questions about this episode were I actually inspired enough to bother to ask. Why is everybody treating majestic celestial phenomena like natural resources under late stage capitalism? According to their own ideals, the Federation should be staunchly opposed to any kind of wheeling and dealing involving the Barzan wormhole unless they’ve been lying to us through their teeth which, OK, but the Enterprise crew at least shouldn’t be on board with this plan. I can’t think of a *worse* group of people to host these negotiations: They should be firmly arguing for the wormhole to be left in the galactic commons where it belongs. This isn’t even me just projecting my own ideology onto the show-The whole philosophical model the show’s universe is built on is one of post-scarcity where material wants and motivations no longer exist or apply. It’s *told* us this *explicitly* a number of times. Why do the effects shots all look universally cheap and unappealing? And why is the Enterprise crew still hosting negotiations of any kind in the first place? They’re supposed to be scientists and explorers, not diplomats!

Then there’s the episode’s crux, the one-off romance between Deanna and Ral. Oh My God. This might be, in all seriousness, one of the single worst television romances I have ever seen. There’s the obvious fact Ral is transparently a sleazy manipulative womanizer (one sort of gets that feeling when he makes his appearance prancing onstage with a model hanging off his arm) who bullishly strongarms Deanna into falling for him: She gets little to no agency in the relationship, simply being swept off her feet by overwhelming masculine guile. Ral is a 24th century pickup artist, and the mere thought that this was supposed to be a story to flesh out Troi as a character sickens me. Was something this rote, hackish and frankly offensively sexist really the only thing this team could come up with to give Troi something to do? Apparently so, considering they got rid of her suboplot in “The Enemy”. I guess the only thing women are good for is cheesy dimestore romance novel stories. Except no, wait, this isn’t even a cheesy dimestore romance novel story-This is a *parody* of cheesy dimestore romance stories that doesn’t realise it’s a parody and isn’t remotely funny: The dialog and plot beats are so stilted and cliche it defies belief and there’s an absolutely staggering, and deeply uncomfortable lack of irony and self-awareness at every possible level.

Aside from its general terribleness, “The Price” comprehensively fails at being romantic *or* sexy, and you kind of need to hit at least one.…

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Now that we’re living comfortably(?) in a post-“Q Who” universe and we all know who the Borg are, this leaves Star Trek: The Next Generation with the troublesome task of figuring out what to do with the Romulans. Their reintroduction in “The Neutral Zone”, after all, was not exactly the most graceful of affairs, and they are hampered somewhat by having their one big story arc scuttled by the writer’s strike. Even if it hadn’t been though, the simple fact is that decoy bad guys aren’t really needed anymore once the real bad guys show up.

The thing is though, we have to be extremely careful when we talk about the Borg in this context, because even this early the creative team was keenly aware that they were something you only bring in on very rare and momentous occasions to preserve the impact that goes along with their presence. More esoterically though, it’s still the case that even though they seem like they were envisioned as such and all the official literature will say they were, the Borg are not actually villains for Star Trek: The Next Generation: They’re villains Star Trek is fated to face not in this incarnation, but at some point far in the future, and the show makes this very clear at both diegetic and extradiegetic levels. So not only do the Borg have to be held back for special occasions, those special occasions *also* have to involve some element of metacommentary on the state of the show and its parent franchise. The problem is though that because Star Trek: The Next Generation is action sci-fi (I don’t actually think it is personally, but we’ll presume it is for the moment for the sake of argument because that’s how it tends to get read) it needs to have reoccurring bad guys. And with the Klingons out and the Ferengi a laughingstock (as ill-warranted as that may be and even though people will doggedly, and successfully, continue to redeem them), this means the show sort of defaults on the Romulans.

And in spite of some roughness in “The Neutral Zone”, the Romulans have actually been depicted pretty well up until now, with Subcommander Taris and her crew being depicted as complete intellectual equals to Commander Riker and the Enterprise crew in “Contagion”. By “well” I mean “in keeping with the culture we saw established in the Original Series that values aesthetics and sensuality controlled by a crumbling empire”, or at least as a (n ironically) logical evolution of that culture given the span of a generation or so. With “The Enemy” though, we get the first symptoms of the Romulans drifting more towards the “programmatically shifty” characterization that will unfortunately come to define a lot of stories about them from here on out. Bochra stupidly refuses to trust Geordi at every turn, even when his life starts to literally depend on it, while Tomalak strategically withholds information from Captain Picard concerning the true nature of their venture on Galordon Core which accomplishes little but stalling the rescue of both crewmembers.…

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If Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s new mission is to explore utopian themes through the interiority of its characters, than it’s reasonable to expect one of the first things it would do with this new mandate is to try and clearly reaffirm and rearticulate who those characters and what their accompanying positionalities actually are.

“Booby Trap” then is a good example of Michael Piller’s philosophy is it pertains to the show going forward and is very indicative of the sorts of things that are going to define Star Trek: The Next Generation in general and the third season in particular. Although kickstarted under Michael Wagner’s tenure, it’s a script that Piller and his team comprehensively rewrote and it passed through an impressive number of hands before making it to screen which is going to be kind of the norm from here out. But because of this, it gives us a fairly clear look at the creative differences between the two third season teams: Wagner’s version of the story would have had Captain Picard be the one involved with the holographic woman, perhaps because in the Original Series it was always the leading man captain who would get the girl of the week. But the very first thing Micheal Piller did upon getting this script was nixing that idea outright, figuring that it should be Geordi instead and the real story should be about him. As Piller himself put it

“It just said to me, ‘Picard should be on the bridge, not chatting with some woman.’ I said to myself, ‘It should be Geordi, because Geordi is in love with the ship and this is a story about a guy in love with his ’57 Chevy.’ That played into Geordi’s character, who’s always been a fumbling guy around women, but if he could just marry his car, he’d live happily ever after. He gets to create the personification of the woman who created the engine he loves. It’s sort of a relationship between he and his Pontiac.”

This is interesting, and I’m going to extrapolate a bit from Piller’s explanation if for no other reason than “Booby Trap” has been the butt of a seemingly unending stream of unfunny mechanophile jokes because of this reading, not to mention the fact that the behaviour that tends to get projected onto Geordi here hedges uncomfortably close to that of a certain kind of broken male genre fiction fan that’s frankly unbecoming of any member of the Enterprise crew, especially him (indeed, Star Trek: The Next Generation will tackle the issue head-on in a story at the other end of the season). Also, one wonders if by the time of that interview Piller hadn’t gotten the chronology of his episodes confused, as it had never previously been established that Geordi was unlucky in love. Sure, the only person he’d ever been shown to be interested in before was Tasha Yar during his non-starter romance with her in the first season (which this team certainly knew about, as they give it a touching nod in “Yesterday’s Enterprise”), but that didn’t mean Geordi was awkward around women in general.…

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This is one of those marquee episodes that gets breathless amounts of critical acclaim, always tops fan lists for best episodes and is always held up as being a decisive sea change for the show. And all that praise is absolutely deserved. Oh yeah, this one is absolutely brilliant. More than that, it’s perfect. It’s about as perfect a blueprint for how Star Trek: The Next Generation should work and a self-demonstrating example of that structure in action as exists. But why precisely “The Bonding” works as well as it does and its true impact and legacy not just on this show, but on every Star Trek series to come, is actually surprisingly deceptive.

“The Bonding” is the end result of the early intersection of two forces new to Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s of course Michael Piller’s debut as head writer, and it’s also the inaugural offering from the first new bit of creative blood Piller brought onto the show: One Ronald D. Moore, future Dominion War architect and Battlestar Galactica brainchild who, suffice to say, is going to be something of a major figure from here on out. Although, as Moore quite aptly emphasizes, the success of both this story and his subsequent Hollywood career is due to quite a lot of luck: Moore was a die-hard Star Trek fan who practically worshiped the Original Series and, beyond excited about the prospects of Star Trek: The Next Generation, submitted an unsolicited spec script to the writer’s office while working as a gas station attendant between jobs after his law career didn’t pan out. Thing is, you kind of *don’t do* that in Hollywood-Writers need agents and publicity teams; jobbing in Hollywood is not the sort of thing the average guy can just walk in off the street and decide to do some day.

Unless, that is, you happened to want to write for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1989.

Part of Moore’s self-described good fortune comes from the second of two edicts Michael Piller made upon becoming head writer (the first being his staunch commitment to characterization and character development we talked a bit about in “Evolution”). Piller was at an absolute impasse with Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s complete, actual, literal lack of material and he knew no matter how talented the writing staff he could pull together, there was simply no physical way he could keep up with the punishingly unforgiving schedule of weekly television on his own. So, after running it by Rick Berman and getting his endorsement for the idea, Piller made a decision so elegantly simple no-one had thought to do it before: He decided to instate Hollywood’s first, and to date only, open submissions policy. Thanks to Micheal Piller, Star Trek: The Next Generation became the only show on the block that anyone who was interested could submit a story to *sight unseen* with *no official representation or Hollywood backing*, a tradition that eventually carried over to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.…

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Oh look. Vasquez Rocks.

There should be an entire genre of Star Trek story called “Star Trek Does Not Understand How Anthropology Works.”

So the obvious problem with “Who Watches The Watchers” firstoff is that it’s a Prime Directive story, which means it sucks. It also has a kidnapping subplot, which means it sucks even more and I also hate it for that. But what really arouses my ire is that for the first time Star Trek explicitly connects the Prime Directive with anthropological fieldwork which…no. No, no, no, no. You know that one person who’s so specialized in a certain field they get irrationally upset when bits of pop culture misrepresent that field through innocent ignorance? Yeah, I’m pretty much that person when it comes to anthropological methods. I’m sure everyone has their own justifications for getting incensed over stuff like this: Because we’ve dedicated a lot of our lives to working with and studying it, we think things like particle physics or paleontology or thermodynamics or ballistics or whatever is The Most Important Thing In The World and that when TV shows get it wrong it will surely send society onto a path of utter ruination.

But here’s the thing. Pop culture is a shared language and is the first exposure roughly 99% of everyone is going to have with certain concepts, fields and ideas, and getting them wrong can in specific cases be actually misleading to the point of being irresponsible. And Star Trek has been as guilty on this front as anything else, being at times egregiously sketchy on things like history, legal jurisprudence, developmental biology and yes, cultural anthropology. There’s a certain political and social responsibility associated with these things that you can’t just cast aside and ignore in favour of squeezing more melodrama out of your script, especially if it’s particularly shitty melodrama. And call me biased all you want, I am casting cultural anthropology in that group because cultural anthropology is fundamentally about how people communicate with and understand each other. If you don’t know how to do that, or teach people how to do it poorly, you are provably being a toxic and counterproductive force in the world.

Cultural anthropology is first and foremost a framework for empathy. It’s an academic structure that facilitates talking to people and getting to know them and the way they think better. There’s a reason one of the field’s most sacred tenets is called “participant observation”: Anthropologists think the best way to learn about people is to live with them, talk to them and do what they do. There is a necessary sharing and exchange of of positionalities that happens when we do this, and both the insider and outsider perspectives are equally valued. This is how thinking and living anthropologically can help make the world a better place, because when positionalities meet people are exposed to truths and ideas they might not have been otherwise.…

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Our textbooks always generalize history and make it all seem much cleaner than it really is: A torrid cycle of life reduced down to big, monolithic, yet easy to digest bits and pieces. Here’s where this Age ends. Here’s where this Age begins.

Even though “Evolution” is the big watershed debut of Michael Piller, it’s nowhere remotely near the case that everything after it can be safely called part of the “Michael Piller Era” or that we’re now comfortably in the period of Star Trek where everything is Right and Good and Doesn’t Need To Be Talked About Anymore. For one thing, Piller isn’t even on staff yet: Michael Wagner is technically still head writer and co-executive producer, him having managed to get two other stories after “The Ensigns of Command” and “Evolution” into production before fleeing the scene-This one and the next one (as well as banging out an *extremely* early rough draft of “Booby Trap”). Essentially, even though we’re now in the period that’s frequently cited as the Big Star Trek Golden Age…None of Piller’s trademark innovations are actually visible yet, at least not as standard operating procedure, and won’t be for another month at a conservative estimate (there’s another episode coming up in a couple of weeks that’s similarly held up as a transformative milestone, but, as we’ll see, there was no reason at the time to see it as anything other than a complete fluke).

So what we get with “The Survivors”, and for the next two weeks or so more generally, is a curious dead end: This is as close to a glimpse at the abortive “Michael Wagner Era”, or as much as such a thing can be said to exist, that we can get. If we’re going to try to tease out any sort of influence, if any, Wagner might have had on the unfolding text of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this is the most opportune moment to talk about it with him not only still technically on the payroll, but writing the script for “The Survivors” as well. This episode is also interesting for me personally, as it’s one I actually have no recollection of: “The Survivors” is among a handful of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes that I at once never saw when it originally aired, but also somehow managed to miss whenever it was rerun during any of my numerous revisits of the show. So finally seeing this on Blu-ray was an education for me in a number of respects, as it both filled a gap in my personal history of Star Trek and also gives me insight into how Michael Wagner and his team might have conceptualized Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Unfortunately, that seems to be “A very TOS-like sci-fi mystery superficially updated for modern sensibilities”. It’s a bit uncanny how well this ticks the necessary boxes: The Enterprise shows up somewhere where something weird is happening, the away team beams down to discover a baffling mystery with locals who are being suspiciously obtuse and evasive, more stuff happens including, but not limited to, at least *one* major space battle and ship-shaking scene, some telepathic chicanery, the captain bluffing his way to victory on an assumption while leaving his co-workers in the dark, something deeply shocking and unpleasant happening to one of the female crewmembers, and it all ends with a trademark Hyper Evolved Being of Pure Consciousness engaging the captain in a philosophical debate about a weighty moral dilemma that’s entirely removed from anything that there was the slightest chance of being construed as applicable to actual terrestrial morals and ethics.…

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Natural selection is not teleological. A species does not evolve from an inferior state to a superior one, it changes in response to new environmental circumstances. There are no “higher” forms of life, and to claim otherwise is tantamount to race (and species) essentialism. Species adapt to harmonize better with nature, not to surpass and dominate it.

It’s with its third season, fans always claim, that Star Trek: The Next Generation finally got good and started to become the show we know and love. Older accounts would breathlessly emphasize how the show was apparently on the verge of cancellation because of how terrible the first two years were, and it was only “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1” that saved it and guaranteed it would go on to have a prosperous future. Nowadays, especially with mainline fandom’s re-evaluation of the Dominion War arc and the success of Battlestar Galactica, it’s become trendy to say that not only was Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s third season the beginning of “the good part”, it was unambiguously the best year of the entire series *by far* because it was the only time both Ronald D. Moore and Ira Steven Behr (the former being responsible for the reimagined BSG while both helmed the Dominion War) were on staff together. The true story of this fan-favourite run of stories is a bit more complicated then either of those accounts would lead you to believe, however, and there’s one very important person whose positionality always seems to get swept up in the torrent of the Master Narrative and overlooked.

Star Trek does not have the patriarchal neo-auteur construction of the “showrunner” that’s so common in modern parlance about TV shows: Cult of Gene Roddenberry notwithstanding, there’s no one person who it can be even pretended holds ultimate sway over any individual era’s look, feel or quality. Although Roddenberry is always keeping watch, always hovering around making sure his specific (though small) set of requirements are being met, his job is and always has been basically that of a sort of quality control analyst-He’s not, strictly speaking, an auteur or a creator. But it can be said Star Trek has had, over the years, people whom we might call primary creative figures-A creator or group of creators whose voice was strong and compelling enough that it shaped or facilitated a great deal of the tone of any given period.

To overgeneralize for the sake of argument, during the first two seasons of the Original Series, this was obviously Gene Coon, along with D.C. Fontana and Bob Justman, with John Meredyth Lucas taking over Coon’s role for the tail end of the second season. For the final year of OG Trek we had the somewhat infamous duo of Fred Freiberger and Arthur Singer butting heads with Justman, with Fontana coming back to hold the majority of the Animated Series together by herself.…

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It’s become accepted fandom opinion that Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s third season was when the show first “got good”; the beginning of the series’ golden age, if not the show’s single best year by far, *period*. This is, obviously, far more complicated than testimony this glib would imply it is. For one thing, I maintain that Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s early years were not entirely without merit, especially the first season. And while things most assuredly change this year and there are a number of reasons for this we’ll discuss in turn as we go along, the third season’s import and legacy comes mostly when taken together in restrospect. In the moment, the show’s production was no more or less chaotic and turbulent than it had always been.

Nowhere is the gap between the fan-esposued master narrative for what the supposedly near-”legendary Season 3 was and what it actually felt like for those who were in the trenches working on it more apparent than in the season opener “The Ensigns of Command”. Though aired after the story that actually went out as the year’s first episode, “Evolution”, “The Ensigns of Command” was actually put into production first, and it feels for all the world like an uncertain time of transition. Onscreen we get a number of fairly noticeable changes: There’s a new intro sequence, new costume designer Bob Blackwell, (hired at the recommendation of the departing Durinda Rice Wood, who herself replaced William Ware Theiss) was finally able to redesign the Starfleet uniforms by ditching the unfortunate spandex jumpsuits for cloth two-piece ensembles with pipped collars that are both far more fetching and far less destructive to the actors’ spinal columns and new director of photography Marvin Rush begins to reconceptualize the show’s lighting to great effect…Though he was actually only on hand for part of this episode, with key bits of it needing to be helmed by Thomas F. Denove.

But behind the scenes, it starts to feel depressingly a bit more like business as usual. Head writer and executive producer Maurice Hurley has long sense departed, him basically having checked out during the final third of the second season, and with Hurley goes the last tangible link to the creative team that was around when Star Trek: The Next Generation was originally conceived. Hurley left absolutely nothing behind that was in the remotest sense usable, and the only remaining actual writers on staff were Richard Manning, Hans Beimler and Melinda Snodgrass, the latter of whom had only been with the show (and writing for TV in general) for about half a season. With Gene Roddenberry starting to walk away from the show for health reason, the only person in a position of leadership left was Rick Berman, who was faced with the unenviable task of stringing together a functioning television production with roughly the same amount of resources and sense of preparedness as me.…

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