Forest of Illusions

Let’s address the obvious things first. Yes, “The Neutral Zone” rehashes key elements from both “Space Seed” and “Balance of Terror”. Yes, the Romulans as depicted in this episode bear no relation whatsoever to the way they were portrayed in the Original Series, in essence throwing all the interesting commentary and contrast they bring with them out an airlock. Yes, those bases were indeed meant to be destroyed as part of a story arc to introduce the Borg that gets promptly forgotten about as soon as this episode airs. And yes, the motivations of the main cast are seriously wonky and out of character such that characterization of people like Picard and Riker waffles back and forth bafflingly from scene to scene. This is all self-evident and indisputable. There, is, however, a pretty simple explanation for all of it that can’t just be laid at the creative team.

If you guessed it’s the Writer’s Guild strike, well, good for you! You’re getting good at this. I’m afraid you don’t win anything, though.

“The Neutral Zone” is basically a first draft spec script. The reason it is a first draft spec script is because it was the only thing the team had lying around to put into production to close out the year, and essentially nobody was allowed to actually revise it so it would, you know, make sense and be coherent. Every single fault the finished product has can straightforwardly be pinned on this, and to single out “The Neutral Zone” in particular for blame seems a bit unfair to me, not only given how sketchy things are going to get next year, but also due to the altogether reasonable defense that, through such gems as “The Naked Now”, “Code of Honor”, “Angel One” and “Skin of Evil”, this team has demonstrated itself to be perfectly capable of screwing up *without* an industry-wide Writer’s Guild strike to slow them down further. But also because, in spite of everything, “The Neutral Zone” really does work and contributes quite a lot to the unfolding text of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Romulans are, of course, a problem. After D.C. Fontana and others spent the better part (and I mean that quite emphatically in several senses) of the Original Series trying to make them a social parallel of the Federation, in some sense a people more cultured and sophisticated than us, “The Neutral Zone” basically undoes all of that in one fell swoop by making them an entire species of Dick Dastardlys. This does not, it should be noted, doom the Star Trek: The Next Generation Romulans for good: Future stories set in this continuity will make impressive strides with them and redeem this early tactical blunder by essentially depicting them as a fractured and splintered figurehead empire in decline…which actually *does* build off some themes from the Original Series, though they’re back to mustache-twirling by the Dominion War.…

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Rightly regarded as a high-water mark for the first season, “Conspiracy” is praised and fondly remembered by a certain kind of Star Trek fan for its unexpected gore-filled climax straight out of a splatterhouse horror flick or one of the Alien movies, and by less frightening Star Trek fans for its shocking perversion of the heretofore untouchable Starfleet Command. Of course it’s not really. It was, as is so often the case with this sort of thing, just aliens after all. And yet even so, “Conspiracy” does push the envelope noticeably for Star Trek: The Next Generation, even if its overall impact is arguably more muted than it perhaps could have been.

The idea of something rotten afoot in the hallowed halls of the supposedly incorruptible Starfleet Command should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this season with any degree of care or nuance. The seed was planted arguably as early as as “Too Short a Season”, where Admiral Mark Jameson’s flawless execution of Starfleet’s hero archetype plunged an entire planet into a four decade long world war. Then we had this episode’s direct antecedent, “Coming of Age”, where Admiral Quinn and Dexter Remmick interrogated the Enterprise crew under concerns something very big and very grave was about to happen that would “threaten the very core of Federation society”. Both of those episodes were, in one respect or another, about showing how the Enterprise was very likely the last bastion of progressive hope and idealism in an increasingly hostile and uncaring universe, and that’s not even touching on the direct diegetic and extradiegetic challenges to its ethics and values the show’s seen elsewhere from characters like Q, the Ferengi, the Tkon Empire, the Microbrain and even, debatably, Lwaxana Troi. If Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season has been about bringing Star Trek back for the Long 1980s, it’s also been about forcing it to prove it deserves to exist in the Long 1980s.

And “Conspiracy” is the moment where this all comes to a head…or at least, it should have been. Because while it does build on these themes and neatly, satisfyingly wrap up the story arc introduced in “Coming of Age”, it doesn’t exactly do so in the way writer Tracy Tormé had hoped it would. The original plan was to reveal the Conspiracy to be just that: An actual conspiracy orchestrated by Starfleet Command’s higher-ups to instate martial law across known space and rule the Federation as a military junta. It would have been the deliciously perfect logical end result of Starfleet’s thinly veiled militarism: It doesn’t take much for someone surrounded by that kind of rhetoric and ideology to suddenly decide the world would be better off with them in charge. Couple that with the troublesome Philosopher King overtones Starfleet and the Federation have always had, and you get a recipe for a truly terrifying mixture of imperialism and grandiose self-entitlement.…

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Most people tend to remember “We’ll Always Have Paris” as the episode where Michelle Phillips guest starred in an odd bit of celebrity casting (this being the second documented connection to the Phillips family and The Mamas and the Papas in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season). I remember it as the first episode where Tasha Yar wasn’t on the Enterprise.

There is, of course, a bit more to it than either of those interpretations might lead you to believe. Not much, I’ll grant, but some. “We’ll Always Have Paris” is essentially Star Trek: The Next Generation doing Casablanca, with Captain Picard as Humphrey Bogart, Michelle Phillips as Ingrid Bergman and a great big fuck-off mad science experiment with time distortion in place of World War II and Nazis. This is all, of course, fairly standard operating procedure for the show at this point: The Manheim Effect, which causes one specific point in time to repeat itself, is rather transparently supposed to be a metaphor for Jenice meeting Captain Picard again and the latter’s subsequent re-examination of his past life choices. In this regard, it doesn’t bring much new to the table in terms of maturation themes then the likes of, say “The Battle”, “Too Short a Season”, “Coming of Age” or “Heart of Glory”. It does, however, handle romantic relationships a hell of a lot better than “The Naked Now” did.

What I love about this episode is how emotionally honest everyone is, especially Captain Picard. There was room here for the character to be played very gruff and uncomfortable, as if he’s unwilling to own his past mistakes (“Enough of this self-indulgence!” springs immediately to mind for me here), but Patrick Stewart, as usual, plays against this, and infuses his lines with a delicate balance of remorse, nostalgia, affection and acceptance. But due to the script’s stronger moments and the actors’ considerable skill (Michelle Phillips is, perhaps surprisingly, quite good as well), “We’ll Always Have Paris” comes across as a very emotionally mature story about two adults coming to terms with their past lives and past selves. In that sense, while it doesn’t particularly *add* anything to the themes Star Trek: The Next Generation has been working with over the course of the past year, it does very clearly build upon them. It’s a story the Original Series not only wouldn’t do, but was flatly incapable of doing, and its another sign that in spite of its occasional missteps, Star Trek: The Next Generation genuinely has transformed Star Trek into something newer, fresher and better in its inaugural season.

There’s a lot of subtler moments outside of Patrick Stewart’s and Michelle Phillips’ turns that make this clear as well. The fact that we *can* so casually and dismissively say the sci-fi plot and the human story are meant to be allegories for one another means we’ve reached the point where we can take that for granted, and that’s extremely telling.…

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“The Arsenal of Freedom” is without question near the top of my list of highlights for Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season and I’ll never understand why nobody seems to talk about it. This isn’t just good with qualifiers, which is how you can describe a decent segment of this year if you were inclined to be uncharitable, it’s genuinely *great*. It’s a flagrantly experimental story that’s one of the first clear departures from the Original Series template Star Trek: The Next Generation is saddled with and is, in retrospect, probably the definitive example of the kind of risks the series only took in its inaugural year. Everything about this episode is demonstrative of a show that’s creatively energized, bold, confident and self-assured.

Funny thing then that “The Arsenal of Freedom” was also the subject of one of the biggest, ugliest creative disputes of its early years. The debate in question apparently stemmed from the scene where Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher fall into the underground control room. In the original script, Picard was to have been injured and Beverly would have to tend to him, confessing her feelings for him in the process. Writer Robert Lewin wanted it to be an extension of the romantic subplot that supposedly underwrites their characters, but Gene Roddenberry wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea so the roles were switched and the dramatic moments were toned down by Maurice Hurley, who handled the final script. As a general rule, Hurley was always fiercely loyal to Roddenberry as a producer and always kept in lock-step with whatever he thought he wanted. This spat resulted in Lewin leaving the show, and is sometimes cited as evidence of Roddenberry’s (and Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s) frustrating lack of interest in conflict and character development.

And it’s a bullshit argument.

While it’s true Roddenberry was not terribly interested in character drama (he was far more intrigued by ideas and concepts as both a writer and producer, sometimes to his benefit, other times to his disadvantage), there are several reasons why Roddenberry might not have approved of Lewin’s first draft. First of all, Beverly’s action would have been flagrantly a Hippocratic Oath violation, which is my first issue with it, but also the scene as originally written was simply put cornball and not Star Trek: The Next Generation. People always mistake this show’s pioneering work in utopian conflict resolution for a *lack* of conflict because they lack the media literacy necessary to understand there’s a difference (not even getting into the fact you can perfectly well have plot without any sort of conflict at all), this is what makes Star Trek: The Next Generation so incredibly difficult to write for and I think that’s what happened here.

 Because the subplot as Hurley rewrote it is lovely: There isn’t a passionate, bombastic, angst-ridden declaration of love between Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher, no, but instead we get several wonderful scenes of two characters forced together through an emergency who keep themselves going by talking and getting to know each other a little better.…

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Like most of the first season, “Heart of Glory” is a moment notably effaced in the standard historical record. It is, quite obviously, designed to be the first big Worf and Klingons episode. According to fans, the first big Worf and Klingons episode is “A Matter of Honor” from next year, which is curious, considering that episode is far more about Commander Riker. It’s especially frustrating for me in this regard, because not only is “Heart of Glory” itself very good, it’s also the episode I always saw as ushering in the part of the first season that (with one notable exception) starts to get really consistently confident and adventurous.

This is not a story about Klingons, at least not entirely and not to the extent any of the Ron Moore penned stuff will be. Nor is it some angst-ridden character story about Worf where he’s forced to decide where his loyalties lie. There is never any doubt Worf will remain loyal to the Enterprise: In fact, the entire episode hinges on setting up a double feint where Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Tasha Yar (and, metatextually, us) all begin to doubt and mistrust Worf’s intentions with Klingon reactionaries aboard only to feel really ashamed at the end when Worf delivers a stirring speech about how true honour and glory lies with doing battle with your inner demons and trying to become a better person. It’s a bang-on perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation brief, which is all the more astonishing considering it was bounced around between four different writers like a hot potato. “Heart of Glory” is in truth a deeply touching commentary on empathy, personal journeys and where you make your home, and as good as some of the future Worf episodes are going to be, there’s an undeniable and irreducible idealistic maturity to this episode that gets lost under every single successive creative team to handle him and his people.

In some respects then “Heart of Glory” is another Original Series/Phase II revist, in this case John Meredyth Lucas’ “Kitumba”. That episode concerned a top-secret mission to the Klingon home world where the Enterprise crew had to stop a civil war that would have put all of local space at risk, all the while learning that while Klingon culture is very different to ours, it’s still manifestly a culture of its own that we must respect. D.C. Fontana worked on this script briefly, and she at least was surely aware of “Kitumba”, having been on Phase II‘s staff as well. When viewed this way, “Heart of Glory” does seem to be a bit after its time, considering the Klingons are manifestly supposed to be our allies now and thus “Kitumba”’s central punch no longer quite seeming to deliver or by necessary. However, “Heart of Glory” does hedge against this by going out of its way to paint Korris and his crew as reactionary fundamentalists obsessed with returning to an imagined past Golden Age of glory and honour.…

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