A requiem for the would-be boy wonder?

Wesley Crusher, of course, had to go. That’s been obvious to everyone since at least “Encounter at Farpoint”. Perhaps not to the writing staff, however, as the final impetus for the Whiz Kid’s resignation from Star Trek: The Next Generation came not out of basic good sense on the part of the creative team, but from the person who played him. Wil Wheaton was an established, in-demand Hollywood film actor before and into his tenure on the starship Enterprise, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that while the show was doing nothing but increasing the stature of his castmates, it was holding him back and forcing him to turn down lucrative job offers. Of course, it’s also somewhat bleakly funny for me to point out that LeVar Burton was *also* an established Holywood personality, and he had no problems not only committing to Star Trek: The Next Generation but also holding down a whole second television career over at Reading Rainbow, so it’s not exactly like Wheaton was some special case or anything.

But either way, it came to pass that Wheaton would follow in Denise Crosby’s footsteps and leave the show, and that Wesley Crusher would finally be shipped off to Starfleet Academy.

The writing staff were apparently very proud of “Final Mission”. Everyone involved says they wanted to make sure they were able to send Wesley off with the most fitting tribute showcase they could think of. Jeri Taylor says this is the script she put the most work into all year, and Micheal Piller said everyone was very cautious on this production because there were a lot of bad feelings surrounding the way Tasha Yar had been written out…

Oh yeah. Tasha Yar.

Yes, I’m going to bring up Tasha Yar again, and no, I’m not sorry in the slightest. Let me put it to you all as bluntly as I can. How precisely do you think it makes me feel to read this? To hear people like Piller, Taylor and Rick Berman say it was incredibly important to everyone to make sure Wesley Crusher went out on a good note and then mention Tasha Yar in the same breath? I could maybe accept that this was them trying to make good on their past mistakes and make up for how poorly Tasha was handled (even if that does weirdly seem to throw “Yesterday’s Enterprise” under the bus) had this show not just come off the one-two punch of “Legacy” and “Reunion”. Bringing up Tasha three weeks after you still sort of failed to do a story about her with the appropriate dignity that was kinda sexist on top of things and two weeks after tossing out one of the most jaw-dropping, misogynistic affronts to utopian progress and basic fucking human decency imaginable does not come across as good in the slightest, particularly when you’re doing so in the context of an episode about how wonderful Wesley Crusher is.…

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This is the archetypal example of the problem I’m having with the fourth season. “Future Imperfect” is a perfectly straightforward and even enjoyable hour of television, but it doesn’t leave me with a whole lot of room to craft a creative and entertaining critical analysis of it. I mean, pretty much everything that can be said about it is pretty obvious to anyone watching it.

I actually remember “Future Imperfect” quite well. I did tend to mix it up with “Parallels” a lot, which I like better than this episode, but “Future Imperfect” still sticks with me. The caves on the planet where Commander Riker spends the episode in particular, as well as Barash’s design, reminiscent as it is of the stereotypical Grey aliens from abduction reports while also being endearingly cute and childlike at the same time. I guess if you’re going to do an abduction, missing time and false memories story in a Star Trek: The Next Generation setting, that’s the kind of character you’d naturally want to create for it. The illusory Enterprise stuff is obviously pretty fun in a sort of “lets play around with our stock programmatic conventions a bit” kind of way. I just don’t have a whole lot to actually say about the episode itself, so this is going to be another one of those entries where I tell you how much I’m trying to fill space in this post as a way of filling space in this post.

“Future Imperfect” holds the distinction of being the one episode Michael Piller apparently thought was so good he told the team to buy it sight unseen without even hearing a formal pitch. At least, that’s the story Brannon Braga tells: Piller himself says he thought the story was “a little flat” after the action got going and he, along with the script’s writers J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carron, came up with the Romulan illusion misdirection subplot during a brainstorming session. With that kind of setup, “Future Imperfect” is obviously an extraordinarily good showcase for Jonathan Frakes, who gets to sink his teeth into a stylistic range as Riker he hasn’t always gotten the chance to. To broadly generalize, in more mediocre outings Will has tended to be written as either a pallet swap of Captain Kirk from the Original Series, an affable everyman or a grumpy Starfleet lackey. This is one of the first episodes to really play up and play on where he really shines on the show, which is in his strong relationships with the other crewmembers.

Here, Will is confronted with the possibility that a huge chunk of his life is missing, so he defaults on what he knows best. And, Minuet notwithstanding, it turns out he knows his friends so well that this becomes the key to figuring out the illusion-One of my favourite exchanges from this whole year happens when Will confronts the illusory Geordi: “[You’ve been running a Level 1 diagnostic] For thirty hours?…

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No. Unforgivable. Fuck this and everything about it.

Yes, you’re all in luck today. Been awhile since I’ve done a proper polemic on this blog, but here we are: “Reunion” is simply godawful. This one deserves to stand with “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor” among the series’ absolute lowest lows. This episode is pretty much everything I hate about scripted drama in general and Star Trek in particular all neatly wrapped up in a gift bundle.

Unless this is literally the first thing of mine you’ve ever read (in which case, hi! And sorry you had to come in on such a crap episode! Please go read something I enjoyed writing about instead!) you know why I hate “Reunion” as much as I do. What happens to K’Ehleyr is a textbook example of fridging: Randomly and unceremoniously killing off a female character solely to give her male significant other something to lament about. With no agency of her own, she’s treated as a disposable satellite of a male character’s dour, angst-ridden narrative existence. It’s a flagrantly sexist (and in this case, borderline misogynistic given a few concerning habits the show’s developed over the past couple of years and with an eye on one or two specific episodes coming up this season) approach to storytelling that Star Trek: The Next Generation not only has no business engaging with, shouldn’t even be something conceivable to someone working in it.

It tells you something about how rotten and vile the concept of fridging is given that I’m not even a *fan* of K’Ehleyr and I *still* think she deserved better. Every woman does. Yeah, I still think K’Ehleyr was a not-entirely-functional attempt to “spice up” a show and cast the second season creative team didn’t really know what to do with: Her big contribution, setting Worf on a path to put the Klingon and human sides of his personality in better harmony, could have been done a lot of other ways. I mean, isn’t it *also* sort of sexist to have that all wrapped up in a single, female package? That’s just the infamously-dubbed Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, which is just another form of objectification. It’s always a warning sign when men expect you to breeze into their lives, straighten them out and help them figure themselves out. Those are men who don’t know how to grow up.

But you know what? None of that actually matters, because you don’t fridge characters period, not even Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Once again, what does it say that this creative team is so sadistic and creatively bankrupt their first instinct is to wheel in a former one-shot guest character and put a bullet through their head to give one of the mains some more precious “conflict” to deal with? Fuck off. Fuck off and think about what you’ve done.

K’Ehleyr’s death is also stands in for a unanimous vote of no confidence in Suzie Plakson as a potential new member of the Enterprise extended family, which hurts for its own reasons.…

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You would think the moment where Star Trek: The Next Generation finally outlasts Star Trek would be a special occasion and cause for celebration. And yet “Legacy”, a morose, funereal affair that follows on thematically from “Remember Me” in taking a long, hard look at feelings of loss and the contemplation of that which we’ve left behind, is anything but. Surprisingly for a show that was supposedly more popular than it had ever been before, Star Trek: The Next Generation, for the first time, seems to feel apathetic, directionless and depressive.

Whose legacy are we looking at here? Is it Star Trek‘s? Apart from a requisite and hyper-obscure in-joke in the teaser about Camus II and archaeology, there’s nothing really about the Original Series here. Is it Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s? Isn’t that a little premature?

There is someone on everyone’s mind tonight. Of course, that person is Tasha Yar. Her absence weighs heavily both diegetically and extradiegetically: Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s long, dark season of discontent and introspection has finally forced it to come to terms with its biggest and greatest failure. The universe has long changed since the trauma of “Skin of Evil” and it’s going to change again, dramatically, in the not-too-distant future. But this doesn’t mean the ghosts from our past have entirely dissipated, and in order for that new universe to come to pass the show will have to somehow square away its remaining baggage and try to divinate some good from it. If we’re all about “facing our inner demons” now, it’s only fair that we should tackle the biggest one of all head on.

I’m not entirely convinced “Legacy” does that, though. It’s a definite theme to be sure, it’s certainly about this need on some level, and it’s telling Star Trek: The Next Generation is aware of this. But Michael Piller says that if you were to strip away all the backstory about Tasha, you’d be left with a perfectly serviceable, though middling, story about extracting Federation personnel from a crisis situation, akin to something like “The High Ground”. And he’s right: Far from engaging with the spectre of Tasha Yar one-on-one, “Legacy” uses her as window dressing to doll up a filler episode. Which, as much of a kick to the gut as that is, is probably actually more fitting. Piller does say that it’s a very good drama, because it hinges on the betrayal of an innocent (Data), which is always a gripping trope. Once again, Tasha’s story and positionality is rendered a subservient subset of Data’s. Just as it always has been.

Even “Turnabout Intruder” had the courtesy to at least be a fascinatingly hot mess of confused gender roles.

But Michael Piller speaks the literal truth. The man knew his drama, possibly better than anybody else. And “Legacy” is in fact a good drama. But being a good drama does not make it good Star Trek: The Next Generation: That is not, and has never been, sufficient.…

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