All utopias are, at their most basic levels, ideas. Regardless of whether or not people have felt the need to take physical action to translate it into the material realm, the idea remains and is ultimately what’s important.

The blurb for “Where No One Has Gone Before” describes the plot as “A warp drive experiment transports the Enterprise to a region of space where thought becomes reality”. Except, that’s not true, is it? On multiple levels. Kosiniski’s experiments are nothing but, as he does nothing except unwittingly take credit for the work The Traveler surreptitiously does and there’s no actual theory to test here as it’s all common knowledge to him. But more relevantly, it’s The Traveler’s contention that there’s really no difference between time, space and thought. It’s merely the *acknowledgment* of such that allows the Enterprise to do the seemingly impossible things it does in this story. M33, that is, Messier 33, is a real place: It’s a spiral galaxy that’s the third largest in our local group, after the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. There’s no evidence that, if you were able to go there, it would appear any different than our own galaxy does, yet alone the indescribably beautiful psychedelic mindscape Rob Legato dreamed up for this episode. The reason it looks the way it does is because The Traveler helped the Enterprise attain a higher state of consciousness in order to comprehend reality. The world and the dream are one.

And it’s a captivating dream to be sure. There are a handful of images from the first season that are truly iconic, transcending the episodes they were apart of to become larger signifiers for the series on the whole. The M33 of “Where No One Has Gone Before” is one of them, the second of the year for me (the first being Q’s crackling energy net from “Encounter at Farpoint”). And yet while a few of them will take on lives of their own such that the stories they hail from seem middling and forgettable by comparison, these first two are equally as powerful as those episode they represent. Much of what I remember about Star Trek: The Next Generation is intensely surreal and abstract, especially in later seasons that deal quite explicitly with darkly psychological and speculative elements. In spite of Star Trek having a reputation for being “realistic” and the archetypical materialist Hard SF action series, The Next Generation‘s sojourns into the staunchly immaterial are just as real and important to me, despite this aspect of the show constantly being glossed over. Of course, they are real, because there’s no difference between the spiritual world and the physical one and nothing exists which is not divine.

And “Where No One Has Gone Before” is the first time in the series I start to get that same feeling. Apart from the shots of the galaxy itself, the show’s cinematography and visual effects perfectly capture how the Enterprise‘s own history plays out upon it.…

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And I knew you would be this brave.

Humans claim to always be in search of truths, yet all too often we blind ourselves and refuse to accept the ones we find. I am increasingly of the belief we overcomplicate our lives, not just in a material sense, but in a spiritual and philosophical sense. To go back, look back, to remember things we may have once known intuitively but have since forgotten…This is not sacrifice, but gaining an understanding of who we are and what’s truly important. And sometimes we need our routine disrupted to remind ourselves of that. If the universe seems to be trying to tell you something, perhaps you might listen: We all find our own paths in time.

The issue at stake for Deanna Troi and Wyatt Miller, and indeed of Star Trek: The Next Generation on the whole, is one of destiny. In Westernism, we tend to think that our entire lives, our past, present and future in the common parlance, are either entirely up to chance and individual will or, conversely, planned out for us in advance, spelled out to the letter. An arranged marriage can than be seen as a metaphor for this in microcosm: The young couple’s lives are planned out for them by forces entirely beyond their control and they have no say in the matter, seemingly bound by fate. And the show itself is caught up in this, threatened with the loss of a major character four episodes in. Given the washout of “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor”, it does seem worryingly as if Star Trek: The Next Geeration is in the process of rapid implosion. Even Captain Picard seems to sense this, opening the episode apparently preoccupied, musing as to whether the titular Haven will provide some much-needed, yet “all too brief”, reprieve for him and his crew.

This subtle awareness seems to permeate much of this episode, almost as if Star Trek: The Next Generation is in some way aware of its recent transgressions and its desperate need to move onward and upward as quickly and as dramatically as possible. And “Haven” is in many ways the exact story this show needed to do now: It’s the first episode since “Encouter at Farpoint” that unquestionably exists in its own world and doesn’t make sweeping, obvious callbacks to the Original Series. If “Haven” does resemble any Original Series high water mark it might arguably be “Journey to Babel”, both being character studies about one of the regulars who has a strained relationship with their parents set against the backdrop of a diplomatic incident. But unlike its immediate predecessors, if it does, it’s only on the level of basic storytelling structure, not a whole plot reference. And “Haven” goes above and beyond anything “Journey to Babel” ever did, by weaving all of its subplots together into an elegant demonstration of cosmic synchronicity.…

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It’s so bad.

Would you believe it actually gets worse?

Let’s square away the obvious right away. “Code of Honor” is catastrophically, disgustingly and inexcusably racist. I don’t think anyone disputes that. Jonathan Frakes describes it bluntly as a “racist piece of shit”, and his castmates emphatically agree: Michael Dorn calls it “the worst episode of Star Trek ever filmed” while Brent Spiner muses that “It was the third episode so it was fortuitous that we did our worst that early on and it never got quite that bad again”. Somewhere along the way, somebody, most likely an assistant casting director or wardrobe designer, made the absolutely unthinkable decision to make the Ligonians an entire culture of space Africans, when they had never once been specified as such in the original script, and on top of that has them kidnap a white woman. Story editor Tracy Tormé points out the obvious, saying “Code of Honor” features a “1940s tribal Africa” depiction of Africans. Even Gene Roddenberry, a man not always known for his enlightened and progressive view of nonwestern, nonwhite societies, fired the director halfway through filming for being racist to the cast, although he was apparently fine with the rest of the episode.

The bottom line is nobody important wanted this episode to happen, and indeed *everyone* important was trying desperately to ensure that it didn’t happen. So let’s take it as read that “Code of Honor” is utterly abominable at a conceptual level, try to forgive the people we’ll be spending the next seven years with (because it really wasn’t their fault) and take a look at everything else that sucks about this repulsive train wreck. The first thing we notice after stripping away the most obvious hideousness is that the plot is basically an apathetic retread of “Amok Time”, with a member of the Enterprise forced to fight in ritual combat, with the clandestine administration of a neurosuppressor agent to one of the combatants a key part of the battle. Not only does it eschew absolutely all of the complex sexual and world-building themes of “Amok Time” in lieu of fantastically shitty and racist ones, as Wil Wheaton points out, “Code of Honor” aired the week after “The Naked Now”…Which was another twelfth-rate rehash of an Original Series episode. Not exactly the message the all-new Star Trek striving to stand apart from its iconic forebearer wants to be sending three weeks into its run.

But for me the worst part of all of this is that this is an episode I once actively sought out and looked forward to seeing. Let me, uh, try to explain: I was badly, badly mislead by Starlog magazine in this case, and I don’t think I’ve quite gotten over that even now. “Code of Honor” was not an episode I saw when I was first introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn’t watch it when originally aired, or even during the syndicated reruns various networks would often run in later years.…

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In space, no-one can hear you scream.

Bob Justman once said he felt the original “Naked Time” should have been the premier episode of Star Trek. Given Justman was on staff as a producer, perhaps that’s why “The Naked Now” went out as the second, but first regular, episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This does not make that decision any less catastrophic.

It is not, I stress, simply that “The Naked Now” is a shitty remake. It unquestionably is a shitty remake, the shittiest, in fact, but there were underlying problems with the structure it inherits that the original still had in droves and this one merely doubles down on them. The absolute best you reading you could pull out of “The Naked Time” is that it was probably a bad idea to drive a starship while space drunk (although it’s hilarious when it happens) and the worst is that confronting your emotions is distracting to the point of self-destructive and everyone should man up and bottle those emotions away somewhere because they interfere with duty. Let me address this as bluntly and succinctly as possible: I have witnessed firsthand what happens when people try to deny their feelings and hide their emotions from others because they’re ashamed of them. That can be utterly devastating to a person’s mind and mental health. Furthermore, this is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The entire point of the show is to demonstrate how humans can deal with their emotions in an idealistically healthy and fulfilling way. There is essentially no brief more contrary to the series’ foundational thesis statement than this.

There’s also the matter of leading off the series with an episode that is unabashedly a remake of an original Star Trek episode, complete with Picard and Data looking up Kirk’s logs from the first episode to come up with a solution to their own problem. Gene Roddenberry wanted no overlap between the two Star Trek shows *whatsoever*, feeling, rightly, I might add, that Star Trek: The Next Generation needed to prove itself and stand on its own. Obviously, he was voted down in this case by his Star Trek fan producers who wanted to throw in continuity references to the Original Series whenever possible in lieu of actually telling a story. Perhaps the idea was that skeptical OG Trekkers would appreciate the nods to the old show, in much the same way the main viewscreen has running lights deliberately reminiscent of the ones on the set from the Original Series. But that’s the fundamental mistake: The existence of “The Naked Now” is proof positive Paramount is misjudging and misunderstanding who its target demographic is, which isn’t obsessive Star Trek nerds, but mainstream audiences for whom The Next Generation is their very first Star Trek who are being introduced to the franchise’s concepts and ideals for the first time. And anyway, serious Trekkers would just look at something like this and use it as further evidence the new show is a pale imitation of the “real” Star Trek.…

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