Star Trek: The Next Generation

Does a mask hide a person’s identity or bring it out? Perhaps it does a little of both; emphasizing certain states of being while keeping others hidden.

We all wear masks. We switch between them every day as we go about our lives, putting on different face and playing a different role for everybody we meet. Rarely, if ever, do we find someone with whom we can share the full multiplicity of people inside us. Instead, we wear the mask appropriate to the encounter. I’m wearing a mask right now for you all: This is the mask of Vaka Rangi, which has come to symbolize certain familiar behaviour traits and tropish signifiers that you have come to expect following this blog for a number of years. As personal as I try to get in my writings, Vaka Rangi is not, has never been and cannot ever be a complete encapsulation of my feelings and my identities for many different reasons. It’s a caricatured facsimile meant to stand for specific aspects of it I felt were appropriate and workable enough to weave into a multi-threaded series of narratives.

(This is not, it should be stressed, by definition a bad thing: We always want to evoke different parts of our personalities in different contexts because we all have different skills, talents and experiences that are relevant to different situations. This is ultimately just a more roundabout way of explaining how we call upon and mobilize our positionalities when it’s fitting to do so. In this world, not everybody needs to know everything about everybody else all of the time. Think about me however you need to in order to help you get through your day.)

Deanna Troi claims Data is suffering from “android multiple personality disorder”. But she’s a psychologist and is trained to view things in terms of diagnoses and disorders. But Deanna Troi is also an artist, as is Data, which is an important point worth returning to. Either way, what Data is experiencing is something far more profound than what the medical terminology would have us believe. In many cultures, masks play a ritual shamanic role: The mask is supposed to embody the essence of a god, spirit or ancestor, so when a shaman adopts the mask he or she is attempting to contact the deity it represents, either through channeling, invocation or direct communication. As in all such rituals, there is a strong performative element-For the duration of mask ceremonies of this type, the shaman “becomes” the deity through a combination of staged artifice (they’re literally playing a role) and through magickal, spiritual identification and association. And who better to give a role like this than to Data, our “imitation man” who is defined by the way in which he self-consciously takes on different roles, and is himself played by impressionist Brent Spiner? Indeed, this episode is likely the defining moment where Spiner and Data are finally allowed to meld their respective skills in a way that naturalistically furthers the story’s themes.…

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Sometimes I wonder why I do this.

This is another episode I have vivid, fond memories of that left me sorely disappointed. It’s not that I think “Thine Own Self” is particularly bad, and in fact I’d go so far as to say there’s a lot to recommend in it. But it couldn’t live up to the position it had in my memory, and there’s some writing decisions made in it I’m pretty vehemently opposed to. I mean, just look who wrote the teleplay: I should have known. A lot of this season has surprised me by how little enthusiasm I can muster for it, especially on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where we’re at the tail end of a stretch of episodes that are all peerlessly iconic to me, but which I wound up writing some fairly mixed things about after I sat down with them again this time. This should be my absolute favourite era, and while there’s a lot of it I do like, there’s just as much, if not more, that I’m finding myself at more of a distance from then I ever expected.

I suppose in some ways this episode is a perfect microcosm for my entire experience with Star Trek: The Next Generation over the course of my journey with Vaka Rangi. It’s not an episode I recall watching during the original run, but I do distinctly remember seeing screenshots from it in calendars, guide books, magazines and that sort of thing. I saw it for the first time (that I can place) as part of TNN’s reruns in the early 2000s and thought it was utterly beautiful. I remember the subplot about Deanna Troi taking the Bridge Officer Exam and getting promoted beat-by-beat, but it’s Data’s story on Barkon IV that was the most iconic. The makeup work on the Barkonians is some of the most striking in the series, and shots of them, alongside Data in rustic mountain clothes with part of his circuitry exposed, are among the defining moments of this whole year.

Some of the writing here is nothing short of poetic (the title, for one): Talur’s speculation that the amnesiac Data is an “Ice-Man” from the “Vellorian Mountains” whose superhuman strength is an inherited trait amongst his people to help them “fight off the wild beasts that roam the mountains” is an absolutely spellbinding bit of worldbuilding. It’s evocative and haunting in a way Star Trek hardly ever is, and it captures the imagination in a way typically reserved for, let’s face it, superior genre fiction franchises. “Thine Own Self” also boasts one of the single greatest lines in the entire series, if not the franchise, bar none: When Gia comments that her mother passed away, she tells Data “Father said she went to a beautiful place, where everything is peaceful and everyone loves each other and no one ever gets sick.…

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This is the one episode that seems to unite all sides of the fanbase. In a rare moment of nonpartisan respect and consensus, hardcore Star Trek fans and the more heretical voices who have been raising their tone in the discourse for the past few years both unanimously agree that “Lower Decks” was A Good Idea. So naturally, I’m going to be the contrarian dissenter who casts doubt on that assumption.

It’s odd, if you think about it, that this would be the one episode from this season that would be universally beloved because it’s so drastically different from everything the party line says is good about Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has next to nothing to do with any of the regulars, and hangs the entire dramatic crux of the story on a bunch of one-shot guest characters (excepting Alyssa Ogawa), including one character who only showed up once in a episode three years ago. Indeed that Michael Piller greenlit this story in the first place earned him more than a few double-takes from the writing staff because it flagrantly violates the first hardline rule he established at the beginning of his tenure: That every episode had to be about one or more of the main characters and that guest stars should not be allowed to carry a story, because that would be “overshadowing” the regulars. The reasoning employed by both Piller and this episode’s fans for letting “Lower Decks” through is that the story shines a light on an important and all-to-often overlooked perspective: The nameless and faceless workaday junior officer who walk in the shadows of giants.

Perhaps it does. Indeed, when I first saw this episode as part of TNN’s reruns in the early 2000s, I loved it for those very reasons: I thought it was terrific how we got to see what the Enterprise looked like from a different vantage point, and I found myself really invested in the day-to-day concerns of the crew’s junior officer contingent. You’d think, if anything, “Lower Decks” would be absolutely right up my alley, what with my constant contention that Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reject anything it might have inherited from the action sci-fi genre. However, as I came to revisit it for this rewatch, my opinion of it cooled significantly. In particular, I think it’s worth considering exactly whose viewpoint is truly being examined here, and what that says about how people are reading the overall climate of this series’ environment.

To those looking for a glimpse at the Star Trek universe’s underclasses, those left behind by master narratives of history and grandiose tales of war, conquest, glory and political heroism, you’ll certainly not find it in “Lower Decks”. These are all Starfleet officers (or all but one), just not bridge officers. Our hero is even Sito Jaxa, disgraced one-time Academy cadet whose presence here (and story arc) is an explicit callback to “The First Duty”, an episode which, regardless of your feelings on it, you must at least grant is controversial.…

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“Sub Rosa” is a fucking triumph, and I’m not at all ashamed to say so.

One of the most reviled entries in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a frequent sight on various “Worst Star Trek Episodes Of All Time” lists, like most stories in its class the reaction to “Sub Rosa” says more about the fandom at large than it does about its own textual quality. As is usually the case with these types of episodes, I enjoy “Sub Rosa” considerably more than the kinds of people who typically critique and review Star Trek episodes, but this time I have a bit more of a chip on my shoulder than I normally do for this sort of thing because the split in fandom is *so* blatant and explicitly defined the contrast couldn’t be drawn any clearer. If you’re looking for a microcosm of the schism in genre fiction circles that led to the rise of master narratives, you actually can’t find a better example than “Sub Rosa”.

Men hate it. Women love it. That’s what it comes down to, plain and simple, and that’s what it has always come down to. That has always been the line drawn in the sand. It’s as true for “Sub Rosa” itself as it is for every other controversy or debate we’ve talked about in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the entire history of genre fiction writ large. Where you stand on issues like this has always been and will always be determined by where you stand on the patriarchy/feminism binary.

Displaying a seasoned wisdom and savvy that only comes after making a career of spending years of their life immersed in the genre fiction mire, this is something that, for the very first time, the creative team has actually come out and admitted. They saw it back when this episode was made and commented on it then. And it even manifested in the actual production: The majority of the male creative figures were at best cautious about doing this story and at worst outright opposed to doing it sight unseen, while the entire female staff was very enthusiastic about it and showered Brannon Braga with constant praise and affection for his work on the teleplay. It is literally physically impossible for the network gap (which exists everywhere in society and has existed as long as agriculture and the division of labour have existed, but which is significantly magnified and exaggerated in genre fiction circles) to be defined any clearer.

Braga himself puts it succinctly when he says “I’ve come to notice that whenever you infuse a show with sexual themes, some of these fans seem to short-circuit”. I think that sort of speaks volumes.

Of course, just because some women of a certain social class, occupation and predilection liked “Sub Rosa” does not mean “Sub Rosa” was enjoyed by all women across all circles of society did, or that it’s by definition good for feminism (although I would posit the fact the show was inundated with letters from grateful women who saw the episode, loved and, and thanked the creative team for finally writing to their interests likely says something).…

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I cannot remember “Homeward”.

I don’t just mean that I didn’t watch it during the original run, or missed it on reruns, or that it never left a meaningful impression on me. I literally cannot remember this episode exists: Every time I rewatch this show, I forget that “Homeward” is part of the filming block. I can’t remember what “Homeward” is about, or even that there is in fact an episode called “Homeward” at all. Every time it’s brought up to me I have to look it up, because the title draws nothing but an empty, blank vacuous absence of meaning. I have friends who were watching Star Trek: The Next Generation along with this blog and, given the schedule I write under, eventually they got ahead of me. They liked to chat with me about my rough thoughts on upcoming episodes, and just a couple of months ago as of this writing they got up to the seventh season. When they asked me about my feelings on “Homeward”, I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about and had to turn to Memory Alpha. When I was planning this week’s essays a few days ago and saw that “Homeward” was coming up, I had to look it up again because any and all traces of it had vanished from the recess of my memory even though I’d just looked it up again a few months back.

*That* is how forgettable “Homeward” is to me. It belongs to a very select club of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes I simply cannot, for the life of me, ever remember as a material artefact of media, a club which also includes the likes of “The Survivors” and “The Masterpiece Society”. And, well, I can’t say it’s in terrible company, to be honest with you.

Longtime readers of the blog who are familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation…You know what I’m going to say about this. For those of you who are newcomers to Star Trek: The Next Generation but not to the blog: It’s a Worf story. It’s a Prime Directive story where they wheel in a guest star (Worf’s adoptive brother Nikolai Rozhenko, just to drive the point home by using a recognisable character) to lecture the main cast about why they’re once again on the wrong side of history. Naren Shankar even goes so far as to *literally* compare Star Trek: The Next Generation unfavourably to the Original Series by saying Captain Kirk violated the Prime Directive all the time while Captain Picard “hides behind it” (as usual, Shankar is right but for the wrong reasons. He also seems to have an alarmingly poor memory of his own show). The structure of “Homeward’ is built out of the most objectionable (well, to me at any rate) parts of stories like “The Defector”, “Captive Pursuit” and “Force of Nature”, and it’s not worth wasting the time and energy to me to critique it on those grounds.…

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And this is it. We’ve arrived: The greatest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation ever. Not necessarily in terms of abject quality, though “Parallels” is definitely one of the best outings of the year, and of the series in general, on that front as well. The reason this episode is the show’s finest hour is because of the repercussions the events of this story have on all of Star Trek.

“For any event, there is an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our choices determine which outcome will follow. But there is a theory in quantum physics that all possibilities that could happen do happen in alternate quantum realities.”

What “Parallels” does is establish the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whatever else you want to attach to it by association, as a quantum multiverse of literally infinite possibility. This is the actual plot of the episode, with Worf shifting between one reality to the next, each different from the other in ways both negligible and profound. It’s textual on such a level that it’s impossible to deny. Just look at all those Enterprises out there, and than try to think about how many more there could possibly be. Or even Galaxy-class starships that aren’t called Enterprise and don’t serve an imperialistic Federation. If anything that can happen does happen somewhere, there are absolutely no constraints on plots or themes or characters or anything anymore: If you can imagine it, it exists. Captain Picard is a pirate. Ro Laren made commander. Beverly Crusher a respected scientist. Kestra Troi grew up to be her sister Deanna’s role model and best friend. Will Riker finally got together with Lyrinda Halk. Worf isn’t an asshole. Tasha Yar and Sela really were the same person, or Tasha Yar stayed aboard the Enterprise to be Geordi La Forge’s lover and closest ally.

Oh right, Tasha Yar. I’ll come back to her later.

The point is, “Parallels” tells us Star Trek can be anything we want it to be. Anything. It canonizes the franchise’s status as a living modern oral tradition by abolishing the idea of canon: The Lovely Angels came back to destroy the God Canon once and for all. Your interpretation is every bit as true as mine, because we all have a universe inside of us and we all share a universe together. “Parallels” takes the way we generate truths through reading and the operational process of the imaginal realm and writes it back into itself through a science fiction metaphor. It’s astronomically brilliant, sublimely elegant and unfathomably oversignified genre fiction; the medium at its thematic and intellectual best. The kingmaking moment for Brannon Braga and, without exaggeration or hyperbole, the single most important and cosmically meaningful story this franchise has ever produced, or will ever produce. I can’t think of a single other large-scale, ostensibly corporate controlled populist mass media franchise that has ever, or indeed would ever, come out and explicitly say this about itself.…

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Last week on Star Trek: The Next Generation we talked about the counterintuitive reality that Star Trek is at its creative peak, yet has also run out of ways to tell Star Trek stories. And last week on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine we talked about how I’ve reached a critical impasse with accepted discourse surrounding the show. What I want out of Star Trek and what other people seem to want out of Star Trek are two completely different things, and it’s this episode that finally clarified it all for me.

Basically, I seem to like Star Trek best when it’s being anything other than Star Trek. “Inheritance” is not a Star Trek story, not really, but it’s exactly the kind of story this show should be doing.

Near as I can tell, “Inheritance” has a reputation ’round about that of “Dark Page”. That is, everyone hates it except me, and I naturally love it. “Inheritance” seems to get a lot of the same criticisms levelled at “Dark Page” too, namely that the story is predicated on a heretofore unknown bit of backstory for one of the main characters that strains credulity beyond the breaking point. And my response to that line of argument this time is about the same as it was then: I don’t understand how you can claim any sort of backstory development for a character in an episodic television series in unbelievable (certain Cousin Oliver-type panderings possibly excepted), because in polyauthored episodic television backstory is by definition created cumulatively. It’s not that far-fetched to posit Doctor Soong had an assistant who he fell in love with and who, consequently, served as Data and Lore’s “mother”. At least, it’s not any more far-fetched than some of the other stuff this franchise expects us to swallow from time to time (like, say, I dunno, an arbitrary Warp 5 speed limit). And it should be noted “Inheritance” seems to be aware of the reception “Dark Page” got and hedges against it, with Data being highly suspicious of Doctor Tainer’s story until the climax: It’s almost as if Data himself is standing in for a fickle, easily bored implied science fiction audience.

(There’s some potentially worthwhile ground to be covered in exploring that metaphor further, especially in lieu of what this story reveals about Data’s character, but I don’t much care to pursue it.)

Aside from being a genuinely sweet, touching and astonishingly well-acted character piece (shout-out to the incredible Fionnula Flanagan, who plays Juliana Tainer, fresh off her equally outstanding stint on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Enina Tandro in last year’s “Dax”), I really love the idea “Inheritance” raises that all of Data’s positive qualities, his creativity, inquisitiveness and affably polite demeanor, come from a female role model: His “mother” instead of his “father”. Not that Star Trek: The Next Generation has necessarily valorized Doctor Soong-There’s always been some darkness lurking around his paratext. But equally, there have been moments where that story has taken on a whiff of The Great Man and His Works about it, and “Inheritance” is a much needed counterbalance to that.…

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Now this one is interesting to me because it’s an episode that’s always been very memorable to me, but also one that’s sort of bad, however, it’s not memorable to me because it’s bad.

For some reason, the Warp 5 speed limit is a concept that really stuck with me. I have no idea why, it’s no less outlandish then some of the other artificially out-there concepts this franchise plays with on occasion, but for some reason this one connected with me. When rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s earlier years back in the day I would *always* self-correct whenever Captain Picard had the Enterprise go somewhere at over Warp 5: “Well, they didn’t know any better at the time”, I kept telling myself. For some reason. Because, famously, this is a plot thread that is pretty swiftly abandoned and the speed limit is a rule that has more exceptions and gets broken more frequently than the Prime Directive. I would always let this one through in my personal headcanon, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy watching it, because to me it introduced a critical piece of worldbuilding: A “Datalore” for the latter years.

Except it’s not critical. At all. The warp speed limit is only mentioned I think like three other times, so I have absolutely no idea why this struck me as such an important piece of Star Trek universe worldbuilding. I can tell you why I think it’s important to talk about today though: “Force of Nature” is attempting, albeit clunkily and embarrassingly, to address environmentalist issues, which don’t get considered anywhere remotely near as much as they should. Environmentalism is a fundamental part of my political philosophy because I believe in a holistic utopianism that would reunite all forms of life energy in the universe. Connection to our land is an extension of empathy, of course, and perhaps the highest form of it because at that stage you’ve finally shed all the artificial boundaries you have erected between the self and the perceived other. A great deal of my most formative intellectual background is actually in the fields of zoology, ethology and natural history (my interest in genre fiction media studies is honestly a kind of aberration, albeit a big one) and I’m a big supporter of Donna Haraway’s conception of ecofeminism and multispecies ethnography, although that’s best saved for a look in a specific essay down the road a bit.

(Apart from the weird warp speed limit thing, as I looked at “Force of Nature” this time some of the effects shots with the space rift and scenes with Data and Geordi in the Jeffries tubes felt familiar to me: This may have been an episode I saw way back when, or it’s at least a part of the same landscape of visual memory.)

It’s important that Star Trek: The Next Generation adopt ecology and environmentalism as part of itself, but sadly, the way “Force of Nature” goes about doing it is fairly terrible.…

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Could it ever have worked?

That’s a question failed romances and failed engineering projects seem to get asked all the time. There’s an allure to the counterfactual, the idea that had just a few things happened a bit differently, than all our lives would have ended up immeasurably better as a result. When confronted with a failure, or a perceived failure, it’s perhaps only natural that we would pick through the rubble and self-reflect after the fact. Sometimes we say things like “it was doomed from the start”. Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20.

In reality, no endeavour is ever “doomed from the start”. At the outset, each project has just as much potential for success, or for failure, as any other. Technology must always start as a fiction, and every fiction is equally real. What governs the success or failure of a technology is whether its constituent human and nonhuman actors can work together to keep it alive throughout the process of reification. It requires a sustained loyalty and commitment from all given players, and this is what we mean when we talk of love. Because that kind of unyielding resolve only comes about through a kind of love, because we can only ever be that committed to things we love very deeply. Actors need to adapt and evolve as time goes on, and they have to care enough about their project to have the willingness to adapt alongside it. From an engineering perspective, the moment where something is post-facto declared a success or failure only comes about when the actors resonate together in such a way that the project becomes what can be considered a material, tangible reality.

But this is not necessarily a healthy approach to take when examining romantic relationships between human (or perhaps humanoid) actors. There’s no bigger or better sign of an aimless, self-absorbed and self-indulgent man who’s completely lost his way in life (and let’s be honest, this is almost always a man) then the guy who randomly calls up his ex to ask if things could ever have worked out between them and if they ever had a chance at “really going the distance”. In real life, romantic relationships typically end for a good reason, usually that the people involved have either grown apart from each other (which happens way more than people are willing to admit) or they’ve slowly realised that they probably weren’t a great match for each other to begin with.

So the question has to be asked. Could it ever have worked out for Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher? And the answer, quite simply, as far as I’m concerned, is no. Firstly, I still maintain there’s too much of an age difference between Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden, and thus their characters-Ten years is simply far too large a gap. That puts them, quite literally, in two different generations. And as much as Captain Picard may symbolically be linked to his younger crew instead of other people his age or older, there’s still an unpleasant cultural precedent involved in pairings like this I feel Star Trek: The Next Generation should not be perpetuating.…

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