Star Trek: The Next Generation

This is one of those marquee episodes that gets breathless amounts of critical acclaim, always tops fan lists for best episodes and is always held up as being a decisive sea change for the show. And all that praise is absolutely deserved. Oh yeah, this one is absolutely brilliant. More than that, it’s perfect. It’s about as perfect a blueprint for how Star Trek: The Next Generation should work and a self-demonstrating example of that structure in action as exists. But why precisely “The Bonding” works as well as it does and its true impact and legacy not just on this show, but on every Star Trek series to come, is actually surprisingly deceptive.

“The Bonding” is the end result of the early intersection of two forces new to Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s of course Michael Piller’s debut as head writer, and it’s also the inaugural offering from the first new bit of creative blood Piller brought onto the show: One Ronald D. Moore, future Dominion War architect and Battlestar Galactica brainchild who, suffice to say, is going to be something of a major figure from here on out. Although, as Moore quite aptly emphasizes, the success of both this story and his subsequent Hollywood career is due to quite a lot of luck: Moore was a die-hard Star Trek fan who practically worshiped the Original Series and, beyond excited about the prospects of Star Trek: The Next Generation, submitted an unsolicited spec script to the writer’s office while working as a gas station attendant between jobs after his law career didn’t pan out. Thing is, you kind of *don’t do* that in Hollywood-Writers need agents and publicity teams; jobbing in Hollywood is not the sort of thing the average guy can just walk in off the street and decide to do some day.

Unless, that is, you happened to want to write for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1989.

Part of Moore’s self-described good fortune comes from the second of two edicts Michael Piller made upon becoming head writer (the first being his staunch commitment to characterization and character development we talked a bit about in “Evolution”). Piller was at an absolute impasse with Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s complete, actual, literal lack of material and he knew no matter how talented the writing staff he could pull together, there was simply no physical way he could keep up with the punishingly unforgiving schedule of weekly television on his own. So, after running it by Rick Berman and getting his endorsement for the idea, Piller made a decision so elegantly simple no-one had thought to do it before: He decided to instate Hollywood’s first, and to date only, open submissions policy. Thanks to Micheal Piller, Star Trek: The Next Generation became the only show on the block that anyone who was interested could submit a story to *sight unseen* with *no official representation or Hollywood backing*, a tradition that eventually carried over to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.…

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Oh look. Vasquez Rocks.

There should be an entire genre of Star Trek story called “Star Trek Does Not Understand How Anthropology Works.”

So the obvious problem with “Who Watches The Watchers” firstoff is that it’s a Prime Directive story, which means it sucks. It also has a kidnapping subplot, which means it sucks even more and I also hate it for that. But what really arouses my ire is that for the first time Star Trek explicitly connects the Prime Directive with anthropological fieldwork which…no. No, no, no, no. You know that one person who’s so specialized in a certain field they get irrationally upset when bits of pop culture misrepresent that field through innocent ignorance? Yeah, I’m pretty much that person when it comes to anthropological methods. I’m sure everyone has their own justifications for getting incensed over stuff like this: Because we’ve dedicated a lot of our lives to working with and studying it, we think things like particle physics or paleontology or thermodynamics or ballistics or whatever is The Most Important Thing In The World and that when TV shows get it wrong it will surely send society onto a path of utter ruination.

But here’s the thing. Pop culture is a shared language and is the first exposure roughly 99% of everyone is going to have with certain concepts, fields and ideas, and getting them wrong can in specific cases be actually misleading to the point of being irresponsible. And Star Trek has been as guilty on this front as anything else, being at times egregiously sketchy on things like history, legal jurisprudence, developmental biology and yes, cultural anthropology. There’s a certain political and social responsibility associated with these things that you can’t just cast aside and ignore in favour of squeezing more melodrama out of your script, especially if it’s particularly shitty melodrama. And call me biased all you want, I am casting cultural anthropology in that group because cultural anthropology is fundamentally about how people communicate with and understand each other. If you don’t know how to do that, or teach people how to do it poorly, you are provably being a toxic and counterproductive force in the world.

Cultural anthropology is first and foremost a framework for empathy. It’s an academic structure that facilitates talking to people and getting to know them and the way they think better. There’s a reason one of the field’s most sacred tenets is called “participant observation”: Anthropologists think the best way to learn about people is to live with them, talk to them and do what they do. There is a necessary sharing and exchange of of positionalities that happens when we do this, and both the insider and outsider perspectives are equally valued. This is how thinking and living anthropologically can help make the world a better place, because when positionalities meet people are exposed to truths and ideas they might not have been otherwise.…

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Our textbooks always generalize history and make it all seem much cleaner than it really is: A torrid cycle of life reduced down to big, monolithic, yet easy to digest bits and pieces. Here’s where this Age ends. Here’s where this Age begins.

Even though “Evolution” is the big watershed debut of Michael Piller, it’s nowhere remotely near the case that everything after it can be safely called part of the “Michael Piller Era” or that we’re now comfortably in the period of Star Trek where everything is Right and Good and Doesn’t Need To Be Talked About Anymore. For one thing, Piller isn’t even on staff yet: Michael Wagner is technically still head writer and co-executive producer, him having managed to get two other stories after “The Ensigns of Command” and “Evolution” into production before fleeing the scene-This one and the next one (as well as banging out an *extremely* early rough draft of “Booby Trap”). Essentially, even though we’re now in the period that’s frequently cited as the Big Star Trek Golden Age…None of Piller’s trademark innovations are actually visible yet, at least not as standard operating procedure, and won’t be for another month at a conservative estimate (there’s another episode coming up in a couple of weeks that’s similarly held up as a transformative milestone, but, as we’ll see, there was no reason at the time to see it as anything other than a complete fluke).

So what we get with “The Survivors”, and for the next two weeks or so more generally, is a curious dead end: This is as close to a glimpse at the abortive “Michael Wagner Era”, or as much as such a thing can be said to exist, that we can get. If we’re going to try to tease out any sort of influence, if any, Wagner might have had on the unfolding text of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this is the most opportune moment to talk about it with him not only still technically on the payroll, but writing the script for “The Survivors” as well. This episode is also interesting for me personally, as it’s one I actually have no recollection of: “The Survivors” is among a handful of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes that I at once never saw when it originally aired, but also somehow managed to miss whenever it was rerun during any of my numerous revisits of the show. So finally seeing this on Blu-ray was an education for me in a number of respects, as it both filled a gap in my personal history of Star Trek and also gives me insight into how Michael Wagner and his team might have conceptualized Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Unfortunately, that seems to be “A very TOS-like sci-fi mystery superficially updated for modern sensibilities”. It’s a bit uncanny how well this ticks the necessary boxes: The Enterprise shows up somewhere where something weird is happening, the away team beams down to discover a baffling mystery with locals who are being suspiciously obtuse and evasive, more stuff happens including, but not limited to, at least *one* major space battle and ship-shaking scene, some telepathic chicanery, the captain bluffing his way to victory on an assumption while leaving his co-workers in the dark, something deeply shocking and unpleasant happening to one of the female crewmembers, and it all ends with a trademark Hyper Evolved Being of Pure Consciousness engaging the captain in a philosophical debate about a weighty moral dilemma that’s entirely removed from anything that there was the slightest chance of being construed as applicable to actual terrestrial morals and ethics.…

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Natural selection is not teleological. A species does not evolve from an inferior state to a superior one, it changes in response to new environmental circumstances. There are no “higher” forms of life, and to claim otherwise is tantamount to race (and species) essentialism. Species adapt to harmonize better with nature, not to surpass and dominate it.

It’s with its third season, fans always claim, that Star Trek: The Next Generation finally got good and started to become the show we know and love. Older accounts would breathlessly emphasize how the show was apparently on the verge of cancellation because of how terrible the first two years were, and it was only “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1” that saved it and guaranteed it would go on to have a prosperous future. Nowadays, especially with mainline fandom’s re-evaluation of the Dominion War arc and the success of Battlestar Galactica, it’s become trendy to say that not only was Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s third season the beginning of “the good part”, it was unambiguously the best year of the entire series *by far* because it was the only time both Ronald D. Moore and Ira Steven Behr (the former being responsible for the reimagined BSG while both helmed the Dominion War) were on staff together. The true story of this fan-favourite run of stories is a bit more complicated then either of those accounts would lead you to believe, however, and there’s one very important person whose positionality always seems to get swept up in the torrent of the Master Narrative and overlooked.

Star Trek does not have the patriarchal neo-auteur construction of the “showrunner” that’s so common in modern parlance about TV shows: Cult of Gene Roddenberry notwithstanding, there’s no one person who it can be even pretended holds ultimate sway over any individual era’s look, feel or quality. Although Roddenberry is always keeping watch, always hovering around making sure his specific (though small) set of requirements are being met, his job is and always has been basically that of a sort of quality control analyst-He’s not, strictly speaking, an auteur or a creator. But it can be said Star Trek has had, over the years, people whom we might call primary creative figures-A creator or group of creators whose voice was strong and compelling enough that it shaped or facilitated a great deal of the tone of any given period.

To overgeneralize for the sake of argument, during the first two seasons of the Original Series, this was obviously Gene Coon, along with D.C. Fontana and Bob Justman, with John Meredyth Lucas taking over Coon’s role for the tail end of the second season. For the final year of OG Trek we had the somewhat infamous duo of Fred Freiberger and Arthur Singer butting heads with Justman, with Fontana coming back to hold the majority of the Animated Series together by herself.…

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It’s become accepted fandom opinion that Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s third season was when the show first “got good”; the beginning of the series’ golden age, if not the show’s single best year by far, *period*. This is, obviously, far more complicated than testimony this glib would imply it is. For one thing, I maintain that Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s early years were not entirely without merit, especially the first season. And while things most assuredly change this year and there are a number of reasons for this we’ll discuss in turn as we go along, the third season’s import and legacy comes mostly when taken together in restrospect. In the moment, the show’s production was no more or less chaotic and turbulent than it had always been.

Nowhere is the gap between the fan-esposued master narrative for what the supposedly near-”legendary Season 3 was and what it actually felt like for those who were in the trenches working on it more apparent than in the season opener “The Ensigns of Command”. Though aired after the story that actually went out as the year’s first episode, “Evolution”, “The Ensigns of Command” was actually put into production first, and it feels for all the world like an uncertain time of transition. Onscreen we get a number of fairly noticeable changes: There’s a new intro sequence, new costume designer Bob Blackwell, (hired at the recommendation of the departing Durinda Rice Wood, who herself replaced William Ware Theiss) was finally able to redesign the Starfleet uniforms by ditching the unfortunate spandex jumpsuits for cloth two-piece ensembles with pipped collars that are both far more fetching and far less destructive to the actors’ spinal columns and new director of photography Marvin Rush begins to reconceptualize the show’s lighting to great effect…Though he was actually only on hand for part of this episode, with key bits of it needing to be helmed by Thomas F. Denove.

But behind the scenes, it starts to feel depressingly a bit more like business as usual. Head writer and executive producer Maurice Hurley has long sense departed, him basically having checked out during the final third of the second season, and with Hurley goes the last tangible link to the creative team that was around when Star Trek: The Next Generation was originally conceived. Hurley left absolutely nothing behind that was in the remotest sense usable, and the only remaining actual writers on staff were Richard Manning, Hans Beimler and Melinda Snodgrass, the latter of whom had only been with the show (and writing for TV in general) for about half a season. With Gene Roddenberry starting to walk away from the show for health reason, the only person in a position of leadership left was Rick Berman, who was faced with the unenviable task of stringing together a functioning television production with roughly the same amount of resources and sense of preparedness as me.…

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The scene where Letek and his away team react with horror at the fact that Tasha is allowed to work alongside her male crewmates as an equal, and even *wears clothes*, is actually brilliant: Letek’s objection ticks all of the misogynistic pseudo-feminist boxes-He bemoans how Earth women are “forced” to work and wear clothes, arguing that the Ferengi prohibition of such things is a more noble and respectful treatment of women. Just think about how many male chauvanists have tried to keep women from holding the same positions of men while phrasing it as if they’re concerned about their well-being or consider women in some sense too special to do that sort of thing, or how many “Strong Female Characters” (in the Kate Beaton sense) refer to bras as “unnatural restraints”. It’s a dead-on satire of patriarchal gender norms and assumptions in contemporary Western culture. 

Lieutenant Commander Data, played by Brent Spiner, is an android built by “unknown aliens” who left him with the combined memories of their people before they vanished. Data was found by a Federation research team who reactivated him, and promptly asked for a position in Starfleet, seeing humanity as an ideal form to strive for. He got one once it was determined he was both alive and sentient, which was a moment of great pride for Data. Although he is superior to humans in every respect (memory capacity, physical strength and endurance, etc.) he steadfastly holds onto an “impossible dream” of becoming human. Primarily a comic actor and performer (one of his most notable pre-Star Trek roles was a reoccurring role on Night Court), Brent Spiner was under the impression Data was Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s comic relief, and made a point to play him that way every chance he got.

Though it may not be as catastrophically and disgustingly racist, as “Elaan of Troyius”, “The Dauphin” keeps every ounce of its insufferable sexism, as its entire plot can be succinctly summed up as “bitches be cray-cray”: In no short order, we have Commander Riker flippantly pointing out how someone like Salia won’t “have time” for Wesley (career women-such ice queens, amiright?), Salia giving stereotypical tsundere “hot and cold” “mixed signals”, Wesley actually bemoaning how confusing girls are and this gem of dialog between him and Worf:

Notice how O’Brien, who is an many ways the lynchpin character here if for no other reason than he spans both plots, gives a succinct, yet stirring, speech about being able to choose your friends and co-workers, but not your family. And notice how, in both cases, the story is resolved by an acknowledgment that the Enterprise is home: Worf discovers who his true family is when they re-create the Klingon rite of ascension on the holodeck and Riker decides to turn down the promotion to stay with his fellow travellers.

This episode, from beginning to end, is an aesthetic car fire.…

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The title has a double meaning.

A war game is meant to be a test of someone’s prospective performance in a real combat scenario. But it itself is also a performance; an exaggerated caricature meant to stand in for a supposedly real thing. Symbols and objects are one and the same and the idea of a war is a real war, but paradoxically it’s the very unreality of war games that makes them in the remotest sense ethically defensible. Captain Picard is only half right when he says that “Starfleet is not a military organisation” and that “its purpose is exploration”, of course: He and his crew may think of themselves as explorers and scientists rather than soldiers, but Starfleet is very much a “military organisation”-That is, in fact, its single greatest flaw.

Which is why it’s so interesting that the Enterprise should play a war game explicitly in lieu of the recent revelation of the Borg’s existence. Kolrami thinks this is a needed precaution to prepare for open warfare against the Borg but, even though he’s the only one so far who has witnessed firsthand what the Borg can do, Picard, very tellingly, doesn’t take any of this especially seriously: He remains opposed to the whole concept of the thing from the beginning, and makes it clear that if he and his crew must go through with it, they’ll do so on their own terms. Indeed, its this very “joviality” that Kolrami resents in Commander Riker, seeing it as a sign of capriciousness when really its how he builds trust, community and and camaraderie, as Captain Picard also points out.

The way the Enterprise crew justify their taking part in a war game here is the same one I use to justify my enjoyment of strategy games in real life: By emphasizing the underlying mental exercise while downplaying the unpleasant connotations that tend to accompany tactics and strategy in real life. Commander Riker plays Strategema with Kolrami not to challenge or prove himself against a more experienced opponent (remember the attempt the show made to draw a line between him and his father in “The Icarus Factor”), but for the honour of playing with such a master of the game and because it’s fun. Similarly, he and Captain Picard, and their respective crews, approach the actual training exercise is as essentially an overblown game of Chess or Go. The appeal of the game for them is to guess the thought process of their friends, which, if you look at it a certain way, is another way of showcasing the close, familial bond they share with each other that Kolrami and his Starfleet peers find so upsetting (think back to Dexter Remmick here too). I’ll bet if they had access to Nintendo Wars, the Enterprise crew would likely hang up their phaser rifles for good.

An embrace of the unreality of mental strategy games is a good example of the crew’s knowingly recursive performativity, and an even better example of Star Trek: The Next Generation remaining true to its heritage and themes.…

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Yo.

Yeah, I could have made a really cheeky joke about Benjamin Sisko and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine here, but I didn’t feel like it.

Although she only makes four actual appearances across the franchise, Suzie Plakson is one of Star Trek’s most beloved and memorable guest stars. She’s an incredibly talented performer who can work wonders with parts of any size and wields the broad-strokes brush incredibly deftly. We’ve already seen her once this season as Doctor Selar in “The Schizoid Man”, the specialist who studies Ira Graves and who Captain Picard calls in to help discern what’s happened to Data. Her most memorable Star Trek role, however, is unquestionably K’Ehleyr, who is introduced in “The Emissary”.

K’Ehleyr’s existence is something of a messy subject in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There’s a massively problematic aspect of her character arc (really, the entire arc itself), but that doesn’t come into play until the fourth season, so I’ll save complaining about it until then. At this point, K’Ehleyr is just a one-off guest character: Merely one more example of the second season production team tossing things at the wall in a desperate attempt to make something stick. She’s something like the sixth new character introduced and teased as a potential regular or reoccurring character *this season alone*, which is so embarrassing it frankly speaks for itself. However, K’Ehleyr stands among her wannabe peers as interesting, not only for the fact she actually does come back (albeit only once), but because she overtly replaced one of them. The team were looking to explore romance themes with Worf, and K’Ehleyr was straightforwardly brought in to facilitate that. But she wasn’t the first choice: Indeed, it was Suzie Plakson’s previous character, Doctor Selar, who was meant to be Worf’s paramour.

This is actually fascinating, because Worf stands apart even among his Star Trek: The Next Generation shipmates for having a royally screwed up love life. He’s a character whose canon romances and fan-preferred ships tend to be dreadfully boring and uninspired, but with whom the potential always existed to say something really clever and imaginative about culture clashes and cultural diffusion through them. In this regard Selar is an incredible choice, especially had she become a reoccurring fixture of the Enterprise sickbay. Klingons aren’t supposed to like healers because of their obvious privileging of honourable death in glorious battle, and Selar isn’t just a healer, she’s a Vulcan: If there was one person on the ship who reads on paper like the complete polar opposite of Worf, it’s her. But Worf, at least Worf as we’ve seen him so far, isn’t exactly a full-blooded Klingon traditionalist. He grew up completely disconnected from his people, and while he has an academic understanding of their culture and certainly is no less Klingon than the next proud warrior guy, this does mean his heritage and experience is tempered by his life outside of them.…

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I’ve no particular lead in to these two episodes. They’re both bad, and they’re both bad in ways that are easily explainable and honestly don’t bear much repeating at this point. One would imagine that as the production year finally drew to a close and the slush pile of scripts finally dried up, things would start to get more formulaic and more desperate…which they do.

I’ll say this for “Up The Long Ladder”, though: It’s impressive that Melinda Snodgrass is credited with penning both one of the absolute best episodes in the series (“The Measure of a Man”) and one of the absolute worst (well, this). Knowing who the author is, it is worth attempting to come up with at least some defense of “Up The Long Ladder”, because science fiction fans are all too eager to poke holes in stories written by women. And there are very noble roots in its conception: Snodgrass meant for it to be an overt attack on anti-immigrant sentiments in general and the United States immigration policy in particular. Snodgrass wanted to convey how immigration policies are deliberately designed to make the process as difficult as possible for no other reasons than straightforward xenophobia. There’s also a laudably overt slam against the pro-life movement (how deliberate it was seems to be a matter of contention, though Snodgrass is explicitly on the record as being pro-choice) where Commander Riker immediately destroys the clones of himself and Doctor Pulaski, declaring that the cloning was done without his permission and that he has the right to control his own body. The major issue being, of course, neither theme is particularly prevalent in the episode as aired.

There are three major criticisms of “Up The Long Ladder”. the first is for the aforementioned pro-choice statement, which we can safely disregard as not worth paying any sort of attention to, and the second is the accusation that Captain Picard was wrong because he violated the Prime Directive, which I’m likewise going to ignore. The third is the only one that’s really worth engaging with, and that’s the fairly inarguable contention that the Bringloidi are racist and stereotypical depictions of Irish people. The backstory does seem to be a bit more complex than in “Code of Honor”, however: Instead of being the result of employing actual racists, the missteps here seem to be more the result of sloppy and rushed rewrites. Maurice Hurley is Irish himself, and it was actually he who suggested to Snodgrass making the displaced colonists the descendents of Irish immigrants and was largely responsible for their characterization in the final script. I also haven’t heard about Colm Meaney raising any objections here, and it’s a matter of historical fact that Meaney did at least once step in and request script alterations when he felt the depiction of Irish people was not up to Star Trek standards. This doesn’t necessarily defend the aired product, naturally, but, like pretty much everything about the second season, there might be something to be said for the fact the production team didn’t want things to turn out as badly as they did.…

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There’s a joke I read in Cracked magazine once that stuck with me and that I enjoy paraphrasing. It was in an article about no-budget knockoff animated films and is along the lines of “the most good these movies could ever do is inspiring a baby to pursue a life of filmmaking through helping them realise they could actually have done better themselves”. Though it’s describing an undeniably more negative form of inspiration arguably tied to a certain egoism, the joke definitely touches on a real phenomenon. Sometimes art sparks our creativity not because we resonate with its message and sentiment so much as we are incensed at its structural incompetence.

It’s become a common story in fan circles that “Samaritan Snare” is a textbook example of this, as it upset writers Dennis Russell Bailey, David Bischoff and Lisa Putnam White so much in its opening moments that it drove them to write “Tin Man” a year later in a deliberate attempt to show a production team they considered to be wholly and completely incompetent how “proper” Star Trek should be written. In a now somewhat infamous interview, Bailey absolutely rails against this episode, calling it an “idiot plot” relying on the assumption both the crew and the audience are completely stupid and nitpicking pretty much every major action the characters take throughout the entire story, basically using it as an excuse to trash Star Trek: The Next Generation by comparing it unfavourably to the Original Series. Here’s the thing though. Aside from being a textbook example itself of the reality that whiny, obsessive, nostalgia-driven fan discourse that gets irrationally angry at every single plot hole has existed since the birth of genre fiction and conceding that “Tin Man” is in fact bloody brilliant (and momentarily setting aside the fact the show’s production team in its third season was *completely different* from the one in its second and that Bailey et al are blaming Michael Piller’s crew for the alleged sins of their predecessors), Bailey’s argument blatantly ignores several crucial details about what “Samaritan Snare” was trying to say.

No, this is not the show’s finest hour. I absolutely grant that. But its problems are generally distinct from the so-called Idiot Plot: As Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann point out in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, there really is only one idiot here, and that’s Commander Riker. And there is something of a redemptive reading to be had here, as Riker dropping the ball in regards to the Pakled situation was not written into the story out of ignorance or incompetence (in life, it’s generally a good idea to assume your interlocutor is in possession of the same mental faculties as yourself, and isn’t Star Trek supposed to be teaching us empathy?), but rather in an attempt to show that, in spite of rapidly rising in fame and accolades, as first officer, Riker is still young and perhaps not quite ready for prime time yet.…

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