TNG Season 4

We always knew it was coming.

The point of convergence where it all leads back to. Perhaps not the greatest moment, but the defining one. In the end, it all comes back to redemption. We will redeem. We will be redeemed.

This is the cliffhanger season finale that looms the largest in my memory. Not my favourite…I think “Time’s Arrow” and “Descent” are probably better, and I have fonder and more vivid memories of them both. I was told, of course, that I was supposed to like “The Best of Both Worlds”, and “The Best of Both Worlds” is certainly very good at what it does. But this is the one that exerts the greatest gravity over the mental landscape of mine Star Trek: The Next Generation belongs to.

The first image that strikes me is, as is always the case with Star Trek: The Next Generation, that of a starship. It’s the image that defines “Redemption” for me: That of the Enterprise being escorted by the Bortas, the first, and archetypal, Klingon Attack Cruiser. To me, this is simply one of the most iconic designs of the series, occupies a primal, fundamental spot in my memories and is one of those images that defines what Star Trek means to me. The Attack Cruiser was designed by Rick Sternbach, and while it’s far from his first or last design for the series, it’s one of his signatures. It showcases a lineage from the old Klingon Battlecruisers of yore as well as taking some cues from Federation aesthetics (intentionally, according to Sternbach, to demonstrate the sharing and exchange of ideas brought about by the alliance).

But the Klingon Attack Cruiser also demonstrates a fastidiousness that’s uniquely Sternbach’s: While Andy Probert’s starship work tended to be defined by clean, organic elegance, Sternbach’s is absolutely loaded up with meticulously thought-out little details-There’s every manner of nook, cranny and panel all over the ship, each of which look like they’re there for a purpose and are doing something important. Indeed, there’s probably a technical manual somewhere that tells you precisely what they all do. It’s a dedication to go above and beyond and a pride in getting all of those details right that’s as much a hallmark of Star Trek creative and fan spaces as it is of anime communities, and it’s here that Rick Sternbach’s real heritage starts to shine through. The Klingon Attack Cruiser is actually far more reminiscent of 1980s sci-fi anime mecha designs than it is of the US Navy- and Golden Age Hard SF-inspired designs that characterized Star Trek’s earlier years, or even of Andy Probert’s unique flavour of artistry. One could very easily imagine it fitting in just as well in Macross or in Dirty Pair as it does here.…

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Oh no, not again.

I have to filet another Star Trek: The Next Generation sacred cow tonight. I hate doing this. But this one’s time is long, long overdue, ’cause “In Theory” is bad. Really bad. How bad? Well, in terms of gender, this is right down there in the same league as “Reunion”.

I’ll let writer Ronald D. Moore explain himself in his own words.

“I loved the notion of Data involved with a woman who fell in love with him because it was sort of a callback to when The Original Series was on. There were so many women who were in love with Spock. So much of Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail was from women, women who were falling in love with this remote, inaccessible character with the idea that ‘I could touch his heart-I could get to Spock like no one else.’ I was fascinated by that aspect of fandom. So I thought, well, what if we did that with Data and there was a woman who fell in love with a man who literally doesn’t have a heart, who could not give her something emotional. I wanted to see that relationship crash on the rocks. I wanted to see the moment when she realizes that he really can’t give back to her what she wants.”

The mean-spirited cynicism is self-evident. It always is with Moore. Like his compatriot Ira Steven Behr, that’s a signature of his. But the sheer, stupefying extent to which Moore is off the mark here is so galling I don’t even have the words to properly convey it, and what it reveals about how much Star Trek creators truly understand their fanbase and the history of their own damn show is absolutely frightening. Moore has essentially penned a 45-minute up-yours to the heart and soul of Star Trek and science fiction fandom and delivered one of the most inexcusably and hurtfully misogynistic sentiments this side of his precious Original Series. Jenna D’Sora is every single bro-ish stereotype of “clingy bitches” rolled into one: She’s vapid, shallow, air-headed and programatically dedicated to a man who doesn’t care about her in the face of all sense and reason. She’s even “on the rebound”. And she, and by extension this entire fucking episode, exists for no other reason than to bully and ostracize Star Trek’s original and most loyal fans.

That Moore’s conception of Star Trek fandom (I refuse to use the phrase “female fandom” because in the 1960s and 1970s women were the only fans of any consequence Star Trek fucking had) is blindingly ahistorical goes without saying. Those women who Moore would be so quick to belittle and infantilize were the young people of the 1960s that Star Trek inspired and who worked hard to make sure it had enough episodes to become syndicated, thus guaranteeing it a legacy and a life beyond its pathetic initial network run on NBC.…

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Poor Geordi La Forge.

I have no idea what it is about the Starship Enterprise‘s chief engineer, but absolutely nobody seems comfortable with writing for him or even has any real idea who he is. Michael Piller’s big contribution to fleshing out Geordi’s character was turning him into an insecure mechanophile who didn’t know how to act around women, Ira Steven Behr thinks he should be eaten by Klingons and even René Echevarria mentioned he had no idea what Geordi and Beverly Crusher would have to talk about to each other as an example of how hard he found it to write for the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters. Only Deanna Troi elicits a comparable level of writer’s block and despair amongst Star Trek creator types, and even she’s had “Night Terrors” and bits of “Half a Life” by this point.

So it really is fitting one member of this trio is entitled “Identity Crisis”, because that’s what it feels like Geordi is going through. And not just him, but Star Trek: The Next Generation too-Recall that while we’ve seen some strong stuff in the past few weeks, we’re still very early on in the show’s Mark II phase and it’s still finding its footing to some extent. That process won’t be complete until we enter the summer hiatus. But as for poor Geordi, it really does feel like the creative team has absolutely no idea what to do with him here: Instead of looking at the role he plays on the Enterprise and his relationships with the other members of the crew, the episode invents backstory for him, is primarily interested in creating the person he used to be instead of who he is now and tries to tell a story in the past tense (unlike what the show did with Captain Picard in “The Battle” where the Stargazer backstory was firmly in the past, here the Victory stuff has real material bearing on the plot). Also, it turns Geordi into a 1980s version of the aliens from Raumpatrouille Orion.

The other episodes in this set aren’t especially better. “The Mind’s Eye” is the most obviously offensive, being a rote, boring “Shocking Betrayal!” Manchurian Candidate ripoff. It’s an unimaginative and stock “Let’s Do” plot well beyond the point at which we should have learned that these don’t work, and the treatment of Geordi is absolutely horrific: Let’s take his visor, which was designed to facilitate an empowering portrayal of blind people, and turn it into a security risk by treating it like a computer in a thriller movie you can hack and make it do whatever you want. On top of that, it renders Geordi subservient to the by this point entirely and unnecessarily overblown Worf/Mogh/Duras discommendation story arc. The one bit of partial credit I suppose I could give this episode is that Commander Sela is in it, but she really doesn’t need to be in this episode.…

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For some reason I’ve always taken “Half a Life” and “The Host” together: The two well-remembered big dramatic doomed love stories from the back of the fourth season brought to you by the letter H. They’re also the two episodes I was the most apathetic about revisiting from this filming block, as I didn’t have especially fond memories of the pair. I was completely mistaken in the case of “Half a Life”, which I now consider to be a definite highlight of the fourth season.

It turns out that if I had any reservations about this diptych at all, it was entirely thanks to “The Host”. This is another one that I’m afraid I can’t redeem in the slightest.

In the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there are three infamous scripts whose clumsy handling of gender and sexuality, along with their general ineptitude, are directly responsible for saddling the series with a reputation of heteronormativity and homophobia. The first was the titanic piece of shit that was “Blood and Fire”: Although the show was able to dodge that particular bullet, so cavernous was the yawning expanse of its suckitude that it somehow managed to bend reality such that it makes Star Trek: The Next Generation look homophobic in every potential universe regardless of whether or not it physically exists in them. The third is a deeply unfortunate car crash of an episode we’ll look at next season that at least has a strangled redemptive reading you can tease out of it. The second is “The Host”, and this time the show has no goddamn excuse.

This isn’t to say the initial concept isn’t worthwhile or influential. The Trill of course go on to be a major, major species in the Star Trek universe (though for a number of reasons they eventually end up having nothing to do with the way Ambassador Odan is depicted here) and they open up a genuinely compelling set of storytelling possibilities. However, that’s all due to what Terry Farrell and Jadzia Dax establish on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine-The rhetorical logic behind Ambassador Odan’s role in this episode is surprisingly prosaic and unambitious. The point of the Trill in “The Host” is to set up a very stock and boring moral about how “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”. The person Doctor Crusher is in love with is the symbiote, not the hunky guy it lives in. The idea being, as director Marvin Rush explained it, “if your beloved turned into a cockroach, could you love a cockroach?”

Which makes it all the more inexplicable that, in what is quite possibly the single most ethically bankrupt and ill-fitting conclusion in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Host” ends by having Beverly break off the relationship with Odan’s next host, a woman, because it’s “too complicated”. There is, of course, the obvious homophobia. Rush and the writing staff vehemently deny that they were intending to pass judgment on homosexuality and that this wasn’t even a place they were meaning to go and that the episode isn’t about that.…

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Lwaxana Troi is a very deceptive character. But she always has been: From the moment when she first walks off of the transporter pad onto the Enterprise, she’s defined as someone who superficially appears to be a stock programmatic, broad-strokes comedy character but who in truth hides many hidden depths. “Haven” sees her mercurially flitting about the newborn Star Trek: The Next Generation with obfuscating performativity, her true goal to teach the new show something fundamental it will need to succeed in life.

In the years since, Lwaxana has been reduced down to more of a basic comic relief character, much to her detriment (though there were some strides made towards dialing this back last year). But now with “Half a Life”, when Star Trek: The Next Generation is new again, Mrs. Troi is finally allowed to return to the roots of her character’s role once more. But the universe is different now, and things aren’t quite the same anymore.

“Half a Life” is often seen as being a statement about forced euthanasia. This is because Star Trek fan discourse is ruled unquestionably and unfalteringly by Original Series fans, and Original Series fans think Star Trek must always be “social commentary” about “issues”. By this, they of course mean they want the show to take some vaguely relevant hot-button, yet safe, current topic and opine boisterously about it with the main characters serving as the creator’s mouthpiece loudly proclaiming the Right and Just course of action. It should be as read that “Half a Life” is not, in fact, about forced euthanasia. That people seem to think it is at least lets us know they did actually watch the episode as it is in fact a plot point, even if it does worryingly call into question Trekkies’ grasp of metaphor and rhetorical devices.

Of course it’s terrifying to set an arbitrary date at which a person has outlived their usefulness and should be disposed of, but that’s not what the debate here is really about: What this story offers instead are two contrasting positions on aging and parents’ relationships to their children. Doctor Timicin, and by extension his people, believe that it’s tragic to watch people deteriorate and lose their faculties and feel its the duty of society to not allow this to happen and to prevent children from having to set aside their own lives to take care of their elders. Lwaxana Troi, meanwhile, believes that life goes on well into seniority, that a person should live their lives to the fullest for themselves and that it is the duty of children to pay their parents back for raising them by looking after them in old age.

It’s a powerful and deeply complex philosophical debate to be having and, ironically considering “Half a Life” tends to get read as a Roddenberry’s Fables style Original Series plot, is the kind of thing only Star Trek: The Next Generation can really do.…

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It’s these marquee episodes that always cause me the most trouble. I know very well what I’m expected to say, and that casts a shadow that looms very large over the whole writing process. I always end up driving myself half mad trying to say something that’s not completely dumbly obvious.

So here were are again with another universally acclaimed masterpiece; acclaimed for reasons that are plainly on record in every single reference book on the show you can find. And I think it’s utterly overrated tat.

First of all, “The Drumhead” is a courtroom drama, which I hate on principle. So every single argument against this genre I made in my essay on “The Measure of a Man” in the second season is just as valid here. But there’s an additional wrinkle this time. When reviewing Babylon 5 for TARDIS Eruditorum, Phil Sandifer pointed out that as the limit case for the Golden Age Hard SF style of writing, the fatal flaw of J. Michael Straczynski’s magnum opus is that it remains a space opera about Great White Men being historic. It is, to crib a phrase of his, “the most preposterously middle class thing ever filmed” (Phil actually doesn’t use that phrase to describe Babylon 5, but, and this is speaking as someone who watched and enjoyed the show, it fits). We’ll return to to Babylon 5 at the other end of the book, but the reason I bring it up now, or rather Phil’s take on it, is specifically because of this passage, which I shall quote in its entirety:

“Babylon 5’s heart is in the right place, but it simply can’t get past its creator’s privilege. It’s telling that Babylon 5’s idea of the most horrifying thing imaginable consists of witch hunts, brutal interrogations, and propaganda. Put another way, it’s clear that Straczynski thinks the absolute worst thing to happen in America in the twentieth century was the McCarthy era. Which, yes, that sucked royally, but it’s also the most privileged answer imaginable. And yet it makes total sense within Straczynski’s larger worldview. Straczynski is following almost directly from Heinlein, and is thus absolutely in love with individual liberty and self-identity as the greatest principles imaginable. So his nightmare scenario are things that make a man deny who he is, and his idea of virtue is that ‘never start a fight but always finish one’ sort of steadfastness.”

This right here? This is the problem with “The Drumhead” in a nutshell.

This is an episode explicitly about “witch hunts” and McCarthyism and says absolutely nothing more beyond “it could happen here”. This is super problematic for two big reasons. The first is the same one that dooms Babylon 5: To have a nightmare about the McCarthy-era United States is to have the most detached and privileged sort of nightmare imaginable. It takes a particularly severe case of blinders to hold that up as the worst thing ever perpetuated by a country built on the back of neo-imperialism, genocide and the enslavement of entire ethnic groups.…

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It’s absolutely inane. Let’s just dispense with that straight away.

Much like last year’s Q episode, “Qpid” (ugh) completely casts aside Q’s original symbolism as an extradiegetic challenge to the ethical underpinnings of Star Trek: The Next Generation in lieu using him as a vehicle to set up a pointlessly safe comedic runaround. It’s depressingly cynical, a Robin Hood romp done only to capitalize on Robin Hood’s popularity at the time, and yet another teeth-gnashingly sexist outing to boot: Q’s assessment of Vash aside, one of the bitterest ironies in the history of the series is that Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis were the only members of the crew trained in fencing and stage combat (in fact, they’re instructors themselves), and not only were they the only people *not* to partake in stage combat in the one episode where those talents would have come in handy, nobody, not even for just a moment, ever once thought to consult them when teaching the rest of the cast. To add insult to injury, it’s Ira Steven Behr’s only post-Season 3 contribution to Star Trek: The Next Generation and is a sequel to his own “Captain’s Holiday”, an episode the man practically disowns.

(And indeed even here, Behr’s grimdark sensibilities and deep-rooted bitterness show through: The much-vaunted mandolin scene, which I detest, by the way, was meant as another jab at Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s utopianism. Behr sympathized with Worf, whom he imagined being a bloodthirsty warrior stuck in a world he found insufferable “lying awake at night thinking ‘Can’t they just let me kill Geordi?’”. Geordi being a character whom Behr found “sweet” but “kind of underused” and unacceptably lacking in a “dark side”. Behr figures Geordi is the kind of person the Klingons “devour”.)

Lest you think I’m an entirely humourless curmudegon, I hasten to add I’ve nothing against genre romps, even though I tend to like my romps handled with a bit more nuance and sophistication than, well, this. The Star Trek: The Next Generation cast is famously fond of romps: It’s another manifestation of their inherent performativity. They get a huge kick out of spicing up old stock tropes and scenarios by bringing in their own unique sense of bravado, and in the hands of a production team who knew better how to respond to and play off of this there’s a lot of potential for some really clever metacommentary on fiction and narrative styles.

But this is what I think the holodeck is for: It’s a crossroads of storytelling where the Enterprise crew can dynamically interact with fictional worlds, transforming them and each other for the better. The holodeck also serves as a diegetic reinforcement of the show’s themes of performativity and role-playing, a knowing artifice in-universe acting as a microcosm of how they work on the whole. Having Q come in, wave his hands around and turn everything into a Robin Hood story seems a bit of a waste of his character, and a less-than-satisfying bit of metafiction than what the holodeck was already capable of.…

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Here’s another episode I never caught during Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s original run. In fact, I kind of went out of my way to avoid “The Nth Degree” because I always thought it sounded completely ridiculous, a suspicion not helped by the fact it’s always represented in magazines and reference books by stills of the final effects shot; that of the Cytherian ambassador. An effects shot which calls to mind descriptors such as “amazing” and “incredible”, except not in their original unironic contexts. So the other night, I actually sat down to watch this episode critically for the first time.

It’s actually not bad. But I was right about the effects shot.

“The Nth Degree” is in a lot of ways a response to the third season. There’s Barclay back, of course, but it’s also another “Let’s Do” episode, much like “A Matter of Perspective”. In both cases, the tack the show takes this time around is a little bit more nuanced and appreciable than it was last year. We’ll talk about Reg later, but the story we’re “paying tribute” to this time is the award-winning science fiction short story Flowers for Algernon, about a janitor who undergoes a special treatment to rapidly raise his IQ, but it doesn’t take. We’ve actually already looked at Flowers for Algernon once before, in the context of the Dirty Pair TV episode “The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie”, which was likewise an “homage” to the original story. The thing about the Dirty Pair episode though is that it was, charitably speaking, a gigantic shitshow, with excruciating forced wackiness, horrible characterization of Kei and Yuri, casual racism and a plot so overblown and dense it forgot to actually be about anything.

“The Nth Degree”, thankfully, isn’t, and from a plot perspective this is largely due to how it approaches its source material. “The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie” tried to show how anyone who undergoes the same kind of procedure Charlie does in the original story would naturally try to take over the world, believing themselves to be superior to others (as Yuri memorably puts it, “Listen. All intelligent beings eventually grow tired of taking orders from idiots.”), but it ultimately gets lost in its own central conceit of having a fascist regime ruled by a clan of hyper-intelligent mice before it can actually take the ethical stand it needs to, which should have been a commentary on the privilege of education and the elitism that so frequently accompanies it. The show almost gets there, but I had to bring in Avital Ronell’s reconceptualization of stupidity eighteen years ahead of time to redeem it enough to make its own point.

“The Nth Degree”, by contrast, drops all of the troubling connotations that would go along with a fixation on intelligence quotients to hone in on a different angle. It uses the Flowers for Algernon plot to explore what happens when a person undergoes a life-changing, transcendent experience…and then what happens to them afterward.…

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“Night Terrors” is another episode derided by pretty much everyone: From the people who worked on it to the people who watched it, almost nobody has anything kind to say about this story and it’s frequently held up as being among Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s absolute worst of the worst.

You should know where this is going by now. I always thought it was pretty good!

What we’ve got this week is another step in the show’s transition into its next form. Like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is a story about the Enterprise crew in the thick of a mind-bending cosmic mystery that warps their conception of reality. It’s also a competently mind-bending psychological thriller for the audience as well, with some unsettlingly well-done hallucinatory scenes and a plot that goes out of its way to showcase the power of dream logic and dream imagery. A great many future Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will be comprised of one or both of these storytelling archetypes in roughly equal measure, and while “Night Terrors” isn’t the best or most ambitious iteration of either one of them, it is a very noticeable first draft.

It’s also not really safe to say that “Night Terrors” is the point where this becomes the show’s default mode, and of course the very best Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will find ways to blend this with its pre-exisiting commitment to utopian conflict resolution, but, perhaps fittingly, this episode is a sort of vision of things to come-A decent first look at what’s going to be more or less a baseline average for the show going forward. Which is really not a terrible thing as far as I’m concerned.

Also like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is another strong ensemble outing where each and every character gets to show off their talents and particular skillsets. Deanna Troi obviously plays the biggest role and we’ll talk about her a little later on, but this is a great showing for everyone in the main cast. I think what I enjoy the most about the act of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from an entertainment standpoint is seeing the crew work together comfortably and effortlessly to figure something out and the trust they have in one another in the process: It’s that “competency porn” idea again, and this episode is a good example of that. The twist this time is that the dream deprivation is testing the limits of their capabilities and sanity both, and the hook is in watching how the crew responds to this.

And in this regard the actors really drive home some stellar performances: I know they always do and I always say they do, but it’s especially noticeable when their acting is bolstered by writing they can really play off of, as is the case here. Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden are particular standouts for me, as they play Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher slowly and subtly growing more and more frazzled and unhinged, yet never once wavering from their heroic dedication to saving their friends and their ship.…

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