Star Trek: The Next Generation

A volley of canon-fire and the future we had anticipated disappears in a cloud of cosmic dust.

A vision of my past life stands before me, its sparkling azure hue as vibrant and as clear as I always remember it to be. Memories wash over me as I’m reminded of the person I was and the way I saw things before. Hope for a future that never came, but perhaps should have.

My past, present and future exist at once together because time is not what we think it is. The grand cycle of the cosmos turns over once again and we find ourselves once more where it all began. We exist and we live. It’s not linear, but we live. We are defined by the power of the moment that can last both a brief instant and for all eternity at the same time. To remove or deny those moments is to deny identity, for it is through living in these moments that we learn who we are.

Symbols have meaning and power, but it won’t always be the same for every person in every context. I can try to explain the things I’ve seen to you, but language is merely a tool and there’s only so much of a discrete confluence that a tool can stand in for. But I try anyway. You may not have seen the same thing, as I, but I’ll wear a simulacrum of what I saw and put on a performance for you. And the fact remains you still saw something.

Memories of a time and place take on lives and identities of their own long after the moment of congress has faded away. Some call it a cheating distortion of reality, but reality is made every day through the act of people muddling by trying to read it. Seeing you again in this moment is like seeing you for the first time because our timelines diverged after you went away: The reality where we stayed together seems so very different from the one that I’ve forgotten.

A dream means something.

Is it bad that when I remember you, and even when I look at you now, I don’t see you for the way you were, but for the way I imagined you to be? That’s disingenuous I know-It’s certainly not relationship material, that sort of thinking. And yet neither are we: We never had the sort of relationship that would have required us to intimately know and trust one another, did we? It was always a matter of perspective; of me projecting things based on what I saw and what I felt. That’s the thing about heroes: We never see them for the people they really are, at least not all the time. We see them for the ideals and the qualities we figure they stand for and that we want to take into ourselves. And the act of meditation transforms spirit and shaman both.…

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Possibly the single most iconic shot of the season.

One common story structure going forward from here is what’s been described by numerous writing staff as, essentially “Let’s Do X”, where X is some non-Star Trek work of fiction that the show can bang out a more-or-less straightforward translation of with minimal edits needed to translate the story to a science fiction setting. Arguably the most prominent example we’ve seen so far could be called “Let’s Do Moby-Dick”, as the Original Series did that an astonishing three times over the course of its existence, the first two impressively even being in the same filming block, and the rest of the franchise promptly decided that wasn’t overkill enough and did it three more times.

But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here: Nicholas Meyer (and a fair few Original Series creative figures, if we’re being brutally honest) leaned on Moby-Dick (and Paradise Lost, King Lear, A Tale of Two Cities as well as about a billion other things plucked from the reading list of a high school English class) because he pretentiously thought it made him and his work look intellectual and cultured. When Michael Piller’s creative team and its descendents do an adaptation, it’s largely due to equal parts money and time saving concerns (it’s much easier to take a script from pitch to screen in a week if all you have to do is take a familiar archetype and plug in the names of your characters) and a desire to pay homage to an existing work that they’ve found inspirational, formative, or just that they thought would handily fit the narrative and ethical sensibilities of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in a pinch.

We’ve already seen the team do something like this already with “The Hunted”, which is quite obviously “Let’s Do First Blood”-Even though it was a freelance submission, it was something that went through a (somewhat infamous) rewrite process. What we see this week is basically that but more so: The genesis of “A Matter of Perspective” is quite easy to identify as “Let’s Do Rashōmon”, and because this is another story the entire creative team worked together doing rewrites on, it belies a particularly knowing cinephile’s touch about it that befits the source material. Rashōmon is a 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa based on a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa about a samurai and his wife who meet a bandit travelling on a road. A series of events transpires, and then the samurai winds up dead. The bandit, the samurai’s wife and even the dead samurai himself (via a psychic medium) each come forward in turn to explain how the murder happened and, baffilingly, each claim sole responsibility for it. The film follows a commoner, a woodcutter and a priest sitting beneath the titular Rashōmon city gate in Kyoto, today known as Rajōmon, attempting to piece together precisely what happened as each story flatly contradicts each of the other ones.…

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A lovely effects shot and an apt visual allegory.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation goes wrong, it’s almost never due to incompetence or sloppiness (“The Price” would seem to be an exception). It’s almost always due to creative decisions that, while they may have seemed like good ideas in the moment (or were the only option on the table), in hindsight turn out to have been particularly ill-advised and regrettable.

And boy does it ever go wrong here.

There are bad creative calls, and then there are crushingly poor ones that manage to cripple the show’s entire ethos, dynamic and sensibilities. That’s what we’re looking at today. “Deja Q” is an episode that finally takes the metatextual voice of the universe who challenges us to justify our utopias, reminding us to constantly better ourselves and never settle for complacency in the process, and turns him into a complete mockery. Yes “Hide and Q” had already done serious damage to Q’s efficacy, but “Q Who” had managed to make significant inroads for the better in restoring a lot of that while also going some way towards restoring his original edge. “Deja Q” undoes all of that in one fell swoop by stripping Q of his powers to tell a hackneyed, hackish story about sacrifices and “inner humanity”. “Deja Q” is unquestionably near the top of the list of episodes I most dreaded having to cover, and it remains one of my least favourite episodes in the entire franchise. This is Star Trek: The Next Generation at its absolute most cloyingly unwatchable, from its sappy milquetoast humanism to its unbearably forced, tuneless, shockingly out-of-touch cornball “zaniness” and its dangerously slipshod grasp of utopianism.

The fact that this is the exact same story that we saw in DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation miniseries three years ago is concerning enough without the fact the licensed comic book tie-in, while histrionic and fluffy, actually handles the brief with far more nuance, tact and maturity than the offering from the professional group of television veterans. At least I can point to a definitive reason for why this episode turned out the way it did, as opposed to the inexplicable clusterfuck of “The Price”: Simply put, Gene Roddenberry was wrong. The original draft for this episode, according to Michael Piller, would have had Q pulling an elabourate feint on the Enterprise crew, *pretending* to have lost his powers to get himself onto the ship and acclimated with the crew so he could prove his worth to them during an imaginary standoff with the Klingons. The point of the story was going to be that Q was trying to show the crew why they needed him and the kinds of talents and skills he could contribute to their betterment, with or without his powers. It was a really cool sounding pitch, and would have built nicely off of the themes of “Q Who”, where Q was, at least on some level, trying to get the Enterprise crew to trust him.…

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A sizable portion of Star Trek fans would, if you polled them, likely state that the franchise’s biggest strength is in its ability to do so-called “social commentary” on the issues of today in a futuristic science fiction setting. When they say this, what they’re referring to is the interpretation of Star Trek that I’ve somewhat flippantly chosen to call “Roddenberry’s Fables”. This is the kind of story where our crew beams down someplace, encounters an alien civilization that either operates under a structure or is facing a situation that very closely mirrors a social debate in the real world. Back in the Original Series, this usually took the form of quite literally punching the moral of the week (typically Gene Roddenberry’s Opinion on something) into the guest cast, but with the advent of Star Trek: The Next Generation. we’ve by and large been more interested in helping our one-off characters work through their problems in a constructive way.

How interesting it is than that the one time the creative team did explicitly decide to Say Something Important about a major social issue of their time is largely considered to be a disaster.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann compare “The High Ground” to “The Hunted”, by saying both involve a dangerous, violent man whom the Enterprise crew nevertheless find some manner of sympathy for, but point out that “The High Ground” was far more controversial, being banned in several countries for varying lengths of time. What they’re too polite to say is that of fucking course “The High Ground” was more controversial, because it deals with terrorists and openly, diegetically draws comparisons to several real-world terrorist campaigns. It’s a brazen move to be sure, and the show comes dangerously close to endorsing violent uprising as a valid form of material social change, even while it justifiably tries to stay ambivalent about the ethical underpinnings of it. Where things go wrong, naturally, is that the script ends up a little *too* ambivalent and, apart from making the dramatic crux of the plot hinge on yet another kidnapping of a female main character, basically just ends up reciting a bunch of vague platitudes about terrorism and violence that don’t actually *say* anything. As Michael Piller says:

“Another show that I wasn’t particularly happy with. We set out to do a show about terrorists. What was the statement we made about terrorism in the show? Was it the point where the boy puts down the gun and says, ‘Maybe the end of terrorism is when the first child puts down his gun?’ It was effective in the context of that show, but is certainly not a statement that provides any great revelation. You must be prepared to say something new about social issues.”

While Ron Moore puts it more bluntly when he calls it

“an abomination.

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“Welcome aboard. Now rewrite act three for me and have it on my desk by this evening.”

That’s how Ira Steven Behr was welcomed to Star Trek: The Next Generation by Michael Piller on his first day as producer and staff writer. That gives you an idea of what this show’s behind-the-scenes climate was like during the third season: Behr recalls how even though he was a veteran writer and producer, this was like no other show he’d ever worked on before. Everyone was frantically writing and rewriting stories, absolutely nothing was ready to go, and it stayed like that for the entire year. The insane workload eventually burned Behr out so badly that he walked away from Star Trek after only one season, and only came back to the franchise at Michael Piller’s personal request four years later when he and Rick Berman were drafting up what would become Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s sister show. We’ll talk more about Behr and his influence once we get to the fist story he actually wrote himself (as opposed to ones he did an uncredited rewrite of at the eleventh hour to get them into a marginally filmable state), but that script that Behr rewrote the third act of on his first day happens to be this one: “The Hunted”.

“The Hunted” is perishingly easy to explain. It is straightforwardly First Blood on the Starship Enterprise and, in spite of its positively ridiculous production history, it works and is a solidly watchable hour of television. There are moments in which it reveals its functionality as a work, and, frustratingly, when it does it’s at its most Original Series-esque: Even that third act Ira Behr worked on is one big chase through a bunch of pre-existing sets with a lot of flying fisticuffs and choreographed doofy fight scenes (Which isn’t altogether surprising as Behr, for a number of reasons, was never entirely comfortable with Star Trek: The Next Generation, being much more familiar with the Original Series). That’s not to say it’s entirely without merit, as the gambit our John Rambo analog, Roga Danar, pulls off is truly laudable in its cleverness and sophistication, even if he does kinda end up making the Enterprise crew (save Worf) look like a bunch of idiots in the process. Also memorable to me are the scenes where Danar is clomping around the Jeffries Tubes trying to misdirect the crew: The sets are some of the best interior designs of the year, exuding a palpable sense of being a sprawling, labyrinthine maze of corridors. Furthermore, Marvin Rush’s use of subtle red mood lighting really sets the tone for these scenes and also happens to look really cool. Actor Jeff McCarthy’s presence and swagger compliment this splendidly; he really sells the tension and walks around like he owns the place.

Which leaves examining the wisdom of doing First Blood on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the first place, which there is, even if it’s not entirely intuitive.…

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The worst parts of “The Defector” are what it inherits from “The Enemy”.

I mean that very sincerely in a number of different ways. This is another story dealing explicitly with Romulan culture and politics in an era of heightened tension with the Federation, and while it’s a more than decent one of those, it is hamstrung by its attempts to wed its continuity to “The Enemy”. What this does is reveal both how much of “The Enemy” actually really was a misfire, but also the dangers of relying too much on continuity in the first place as, you know, simply ignoring “The Enemy” wasn’t an option here (both in terms of common sense, as we’ve just done another Romulan runaround two weeks ago that I suspect most people are fonder of than I am and also because that’s never something this team, who much prefer to link new episodes back to old ones if the opportunity to do so presents itself than not, ever would have done).

So the Romulans are once again generically and programmatically shifty, manipulative backstabbers scheming to stir the pot just because they can. Even Commander Tomalak is back to puff out his chest and rattle his sabre at us, though don’t get too used to him-Dude barely shows up again after this. And yet apart from that there’s a lot of good stuff here, most notably in the character of Admiral Jarok himself, who immediately engenders our sympathy: His rank and the things we can extrapolate he did with it aside, here’s someone who’s been “on the ground”, so to speak, and understands firsthand the full consequences and repercussions of the Romulan Star Empire’s retrograde and destructive neo-imperialism. He’s the first real clue we get that Romulus isn’t a monoculture and that the cartoonishly bloodthirsty jingoism of Andreas Katsulas’ Tomalak does not speak for every Romulan. In fact, the folly of reducing an entire people down to crass generalizations is something of a theme, with Jarok needing to learn to trust the Enterprise crew and set-aside the in-built prejudices he’s internalized from living in such a xenophobic climate. And how great is it that this all comes together in one of the single most beautiful bits of lore-building in the show to date, when Jarok poetically reminisces to Data about the Valley of Chula, which is later brought to life on the holodeck through a breathtaking bit of set design from the art department?

The only concern I might raise is that Jarok becomes so sympathetic through all of this (I dare you not to get choked up when he starts talking about his daughter to Captain Picard) he actually runs the risk of upstaging the Enterprise crew at various points, which is something Michael Piller of all people should have caught. This episode does not portray the crew in the most flattering of lights, lining them up to get punched down by Jarok though having their first instinct to be to strip the scout ship (although do note how the episode pulls the genius sleight-of-hand of having Tomalak force Jarok to eat his words during the climax when he promises to do the same thing to the Enterprise: What was that about Jarok was saying about humans being inherently shortsighted, and what were we saying about the Romulan Star Empire and the Federation being the same thing?)…

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Another episode that tends to go curiously underappreciated during the otherwise fan-favourite third season, “The Vengeance Factor” has always been one of the most memorable episodes of the year for me, and this time for good reasons. It’s partially because this is another episode I saw quite a lot of and have very fond memories of, but also because I happen to think it’s fantastic.

It starts out with what is, for my money, one of the most unforgettable opening sequences in the series: Commander Riker, Doctor Crusher, Worf and Data make up an away team beaming down to an imposingly alien looking planetary settlement. There’s a palpable sense of mystery and foreboding perfectly accentuated by the terrifically eery green stage lighting as the team picks through the rubble of the bombed-out research centre. There’s no Captain’s Log to provide blase exposition, just a cold open with the team already on a head-start to a situation they know more about than we do. “The Vengeance Factor”’s opening moments really are a design triumph: That matte painting actually has a famous pedigree, as it’s the same one used in the science fiction classic The Forbidden Planet. Mike Okuda had wanted to use it in Star Trek: The Next Generation for a long time, and when he finally got the opportunity, he rented the physical piece for this episode. And the research centre really feels like it’s been built around that painting: The set design matches it so perfectly and so seamlessly it’s a shock to learn they don’t come from the same place.

From this point “The Vengeance Factor” doesn’t let up on the visual front, but like all good Star Trek: The Next Generation episode it’s got a solid story to tell as well. One perhaps gets a little worried early on upon learning we’re going to be dealing with a group of displaced people who’ve become nomads forced to plunder remote settlements to get vital supplies: This is an area of politics Star Trek is historically shaky on, and while this episode maybe doesn’t go quite as far as we’d really like, it does manage to take a stand that’s admirably not a reactionary default. The Enterprise crew, especially Captain Picard, are the most overtly sympathetic to the Gatherers’ plight and are in the position of constantly reminding the Sovereign to keep her decades of bitterness over the conflict between the two factions in check by reminding her that were she in their place she’d be demanding the same things (there’s even a terrific bit of 1980s design on display when we first meet the Gatherers, who apparently reside in world of fantastic postmodern cyberpunk urban decay and who resemble a cross between 1980s chain gang street punks and Mad Max-esque road warriors-I absolutely love it).

Then there’s Commander Riker’s plot, which is lovely. The episode plays an interesting sort of skip when it comes to diegtic information: At first, the characters know far more about the situation than we do, but, as soon as we move the action to Gamma Hromi II, they suddenly start to know far less as it’s revealed to us in one shot how Yuta is an assassin whose actions will work against peace talks and that she kills using some kind of biotech interface.…

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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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