It’s these marquee episodes that always cause me the most trouble. I know very well what I’m expected to say, and that casts a shadow that looms very large over the whole writing process. I always end up driving myself half mad trying to say something that’s not completely dumbly obvious.

So here were are again with another universally acclaimed masterpiece; acclaimed for reasons that are plainly on record in every single reference book on the show you can find. And I think it’s utterly overrated tat.

First of all, “The Drumhead” is a courtroom drama, which I hate on principle. So every single argument against this genre I made in my essay on “The Measure of a Man” in the second season is just as valid here. But there’s an additional wrinkle this time. When reviewing Babylon 5 for TARDIS Eruditorum, Phil Sandifer pointed out that as the limit case for the Golden Age Hard SF style of writing, the fatal flaw of J. Michael Straczynski’s magnum opus is that it remains a space opera about Great White Men being historic. It is, to crib a phrase of his, “the most preposterously middle class thing ever filmed” (Phil actually doesn’t use that phrase to describe Babylon 5, but, and this is speaking as someone who watched and enjoyed the show, it fits). We’ll return to to Babylon 5 at the other end of the book, but the reason I bring it up now, or rather Phil’s take on it, is specifically because of this passage, which I shall quote in its entirety:

“Babylon 5’s heart is in the right place, but it simply can’t get past its creator’s privilege. It’s telling that Babylon 5’s idea of the most horrifying thing imaginable consists of witch hunts, brutal interrogations, and propaganda. Put another way, it’s clear that Straczynski thinks the absolute worst thing to happen in America in the twentieth century was the McCarthy era. Which, yes, that sucked royally, but it’s also the most privileged answer imaginable. And yet it makes total sense within Straczynski’s larger worldview. Straczynski is following almost directly from Heinlein, and is thus absolutely in love with individual liberty and self-identity as the greatest principles imaginable. So his nightmare scenario are things that make a man deny who he is, and his idea of virtue is that ‘never start a fight but always finish one’ sort of steadfastness.”

This right here? This is the problem with “The Drumhead” in a nutshell.

This is an episode explicitly about “witch hunts” and McCarthyism and says absolutely nothing more beyond “it could happen here”. This is super problematic for two big reasons. The first is the same one that dooms Babylon 5: To have a nightmare about the McCarthy-era United States is to have the most detached and privileged sort of nightmare imaginable. It takes a particularly severe case of blinders to hold that up as the worst thing ever perpetuated by a country built on the back of neo-imperialism, genocide and the enslavement of entire ethnic groups.…

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It’s absolutely inane. Let’s just dispense with that straight away.

Much like last year’s Q episode, “Qpid” (ugh) completely casts aside Q’s original symbolism as an extradiegetic challenge to the ethical underpinnings of Star Trek: The Next Generation in lieu using him as a vehicle to set up a pointlessly safe comedic runaround. It’s depressingly cynical, a Robin Hood romp done only to capitalize on Robin Hood’s popularity at the time, and yet another teeth-gnashingly sexist outing to boot: Q’s assessment of Vash aside, one of the bitterest ironies in the history of the series is that Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis were the only members of the crew trained in fencing and stage combat (in fact, they’re instructors themselves), and not only were they the only people *not* to partake in stage combat in the one episode where those talents would have come in handy, nobody, not even for just a moment, ever once thought to consult them when teaching the rest of the cast. To add insult to injury, it’s Ira Steven Behr’s only post-Season 3 contribution to Star Trek: The Next Generation and is a sequel to his own “Captain’s Holiday”, an episode the man practically disowns.

(And indeed even here, Behr’s grimdark sensibilities and deep-rooted bitterness show through: The much-vaunted mandolin scene, which I detest, by the way, was meant as another jab at Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s utopianism. Behr sympathized with Worf, whom he imagined being a bloodthirsty warrior stuck in a world he found insufferable “lying awake at night thinking ‘Can’t they just let me kill Geordi?’”. Geordi being a character whom Behr found “sweet” but “kind of underused” and unacceptably lacking in a “dark side”. Behr figures Geordi is the kind of person the Klingons “devour”.)

Lest you think I’m an entirely humourless curmudegon, I hasten to add I’ve nothing against genre romps, even though I tend to like my romps handled with a bit more nuance and sophistication than, well, this. The Star Trek: The Next Generation cast is famously fond of romps: It’s another manifestation of their inherent performativity. They get a huge kick out of spicing up old stock tropes and scenarios by bringing in their own unique sense of bravado, and in the hands of a production team who knew better how to respond to and play off of this there’s a lot of potential for some really clever metacommentary on fiction and narrative styles.

But this is what I think the holodeck is for: It’s a crossroads of storytelling where the Enterprise crew can dynamically interact with fictional worlds, transforming them and each other for the better. The holodeck also serves as a diegetic reinforcement of the show’s themes of performativity and role-playing, a knowing artifice in-universe acting as a microcosm of how they work on the whole. Having Q come in, wave his hands around and turn everything into a Robin Hood story seems a bit of a waste of his character, and a less-than-satisfying bit of metafiction than what the holodeck was already capable of.…

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Here’s another episode I never caught during Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s original run. In fact, I kind of went out of my way to avoid “The Nth Degree” because I always thought it sounded completely ridiculous, a suspicion not helped by the fact it’s always represented in magazines and reference books by stills of the final effects shot; that of the Cytherian ambassador. An effects shot which calls to mind descriptors such as “amazing” and “incredible”, except not in their original unironic contexts. So the other night, I actually sat down to watch this episode critically for the first time.

It’s actually not bad. But I was right about the effects shot.

“The Nth Degree” is in a lot of ways a response to the third season. There’s Barclay back, of course, but it’s also another “Let’s Do” episode, much like “A Matter of Perspective”. In both cases, the tack the show takes this time around is a little bit more nuanced and appreciable than it was last year. We’ll talk about Reg later, but the story we’re “paying tribute” to this time is the award-winning science fiction short story Flowers for Algernon, about a janitor who undergoes a special treatment to rapidly raise his IQ, but it doesn’t take. We’ve actually already looked at Flowers for Algernon once before, in the context of the Dirty Pair TV episode “The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie”, which was likewise an “homage” to the original story. The thing about the Dirty Pair episode though is that it was, charitably speaking, a gigantic shitshow, with excruciating forced wackiness, horrible characterization of Kei and Yuri, casual racism and a plot so overblown and dense it forgot to actually be about anything.

“The Nth Degree”, thankfully, isn’t, and from a plot perspective this is largely due to how it approaches its source material. “The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie” tried to show how anyone who undergoes the same kind of procedure Charlie does in the original story would naturally try to take over the world, believing themselves to be superior to others (as Yuri memorably puts it, “Listen. All intelligent beings eventually grow tired of taking orders from idiots.”), but it ultimately gets lost in its own central conceit of having a fascist regime ruled by a clan of hyper-intelligent mice before it can actually take the ethical stand it needs to, which should have been a commentary on the privilege of education and the elitism that so frequently accompanies it. The show almost gets there, but I had to bring in Avital Ronell’s reconceptualization of stupidity eighteen years ahead of time to redeem it enough to make its own point.

“The Nth Degree”, by contrast, drops all of the troubling connotations that would go along with a fixation on intelligence quotients to hone in on a different angle. It uses the Flowers for Algernon plot to explore what happens when a person undergoes a life-changing, transcendent experience…and then what happens to them afterward.…

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“Night Terrors” is another episode derided by pretty much everyone: From the people who worked on it to the people who watched it, almost nobody has anything kind to say about this story and it’s frequently held up as being among Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s absolute worst of the worst.

You should know where this is going by now. I always thought it was pretty good!

What we’ve got this week is another step in the show’s transition into its next form. Like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is a story about the Enterprise crew in the thick of a mind-bending cosmic mystery that warps their conception of reality. It’s also a competently mind-bending psychological thriller for the audience as well, with some unsettlingly well-done hallucinatory scenes and a plot that goes out of its way to showcase the power of dream logic and dream imagery. A great many future Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will be comprised of one or both of these storytelling archetypes in roughly equal measure, and while “Night Terrors” isn’t the best or most ambitious iteration of either one of them, it is a very noticeable first draft.

It’s also not really safe to say that “Night Terrors” is the point where this becomes the show’s default mode, and of course the very best Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will find ways to blend this with its pre-exisiting commitment to utopian conflict resolution, but, perhaps fittingly, this episode is a sort of vision of things to come-A decent first look at what’s going to be more or less a baseline average for the show going forward. Which is really not a terrible thing as far as I’m concerned.

Also like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is another strong ensemble outing where each and every character gets to show off their talents and particular skillsets. Deanna Troi obviously plays the biggest role and we’ll talk about her a little later on, but this is a great showing for everyone in the main cast. I think what I enjoy the most about the act of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from an entertainment standpoint is seeing the crew work together comfortably and effortlessly to figure something out and the trust they have in one another in the process: It’s that “competency porn” idea again, and this episode is a good example of that. The twist this time is that the dream deprivation is testing the limits of their capabilities and sanity both, and the hook is in watching how the crew responds to this.

And in this regard the actors really drive home some stellar performances: I know they always do and I always say they do, but it’s especially noticeable when their acting is bolstered by writing they can really play off of, as is the case here. Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden are particular standouts for me, as they play Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher slowly and subtly growing more and more frazzled and unhinged, yet never once wavering from their heroic dedication to saving their friends and their ship.…

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