TNG Season 4

I don’t get “First Contact”.

To be precise, I don’t get the reputation it has. On paper, the episode seems pretty straightforward and self-evident: Do a story about the standard procedure for how the Federation handles first contact situations, preferably one where something goes wrong because something something conflict drama conflict. Even though it comes out of a pathological compulsion to answer the sort of question only a vanishingly small subset of the audience was actually asking and is as such something I don’t have an especially deep fondness for just by definition, “First Contact” is at least pretty easy to explain. What I’m not understanding, and have never been fully able to, is why this is considered a timeless classic above and beyond that. Well, at least I certainly hope it’s for reasons above and beyond that.

Obviously, the conceit is to explore Federation first contact procedure by taking the perspective of the contactees such that “First Contact” is unique in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation by being the only episode not focused on the main characters. It is an interesting change of pace as a result and I can sort of see how this episode could be received as particularly memorable because of that, but to me both “Data’s Day” and “Clues” had already taken respectively unorthodox looks at the Enterprise crew, so this episode doesn’t strike me as being particularly groundbreaking in that regard (though it seems the production team thought otherwise, given the hoops they apparently had to jump through to convince Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman that this was a good idea). Maybe it just seems underwhelming in retrospect given how often the subsequent Star Trek shows broadened their scope beyond their main casts while this was the first story to try something like this, but I don’t remember feeling I was seeing something really special and groundbreaking at the time either.

Not to mention that, Holy Shit, how stagnant and insular must Star Trek fans be if this is seen as being truly refreshing and experimental?

Maybe this episode plays into an unspoken desire science fiction fans have. Maybe people identify with Mirasta Yale, a space engineer working tirelessly with prototypical Warp Drive in order to realise her dreams of travelling to the stars (by the way, great to see Carolyn Seymour again. I prefer her as a Romulan though). Perhaps they project onto her at the end when she asks the Enterprise crew to take her with them, and they agree. Certainly there’s always been, at least since the early days of the franchise’s syndication, this aspirational drive Star Trek fans have to actually insert themselves into their favourite fictional universe. These were some of the first modern fandom cosplayers, after all, and it’s no coincidence that it was Star Trek that became synonymous with the Mary Sue archetype.…

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This is an episode that has always been noteworthy to me for being one I keep feeling as though I should like a whole lot less than I do. On paper, it sounds like it’s setting up an irritating “Shocking Betrayal!” plot involving Data supposedly lying to the crew, which is the kind of story I hate (and compounding the obnoxiousness, we’ve already been made to watch Data do something similar earlier in the season in “Brothers”). But it’s an episode I’ve always found to be perfectly enjoyable, and all of my hypothetical doubts are always assuaged every time I watch it.

I think what saves “Clues” from the hackish melodrama quagmire that sinks so many other productions in the fourth season is that it goes out of its way to hedge against the stock dramatic conventions this kind of setup would otherwise use as a crutch: The story takes extreme care to ensure we never once think Data actually is attempting to maliciously mislead or betray the crew-In fact, he makes a point of never technically lying (at least not any more than he has to, depending on your reading of the probe scene and the “30 seconds” bit), just withholding specific bits of information, dancing around some topics by answering in hypotheticals and speaking the literal truth that he cannot answer certain questions. And even when the, erm, clues, start to stack up, the crew never once suspects Data is willfully turning against them, but rather that he might be physically compromised in some manner or is being coerced not to participate in the investigation. Which, of course, turns out to be exactly what’s going on. Because of this, “Clues” gets to dodge the flak canon of hackneyed drama tropes to instead become a story about how much the crew really does trust and respect each other.

This was an important point for the show to emphasize, given “Clues” is technically speaking the first “regular” episode of our new Star Trek: The Next Generation, following the two-part premier event of “Data’s Day” and “The Wounded” and the strange, if fun, aberration of “Devil’s Due” (which was if nothing else a polite, but firm, declaration to any new viewer that Star Trek: The Next Generation is not Star Trek, which does in a sense follow on from “The Wounded” in one respect). It’s a reinforcement of the themes those earlier episodes introduced and a reminder of the commitment the show has finally made to being about utopian conflict resolution. It also might be interesting to take note of how structurally “Clues” is an inverse of “Data’s Day”: In that episode, we shared Data’s perspective looking in at the rest of the Enterprise crew from the outside. Here, that situation is reversed, with us being in with the rest of the Enterprise crew looking at Data with uncertainty and concern. But most importantly of all, that tension is resolved at the end with the crew being symbolically reunited at last.…

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The 24th Century Begins. Again.

If there was one story that perfectly encapsulated the virtues and strengths of Star Trek: The Next Generation and demonstrates the things it and only it can do, this would be it. “The Wounded” is an absolute masterpiece; as bold and defiant a statement of purpose for this show as exists, absolutely the story we needed after half a season of directionless navel-gazing and without question the definitive template for how it can stay fresh and relevant even four years into its run. This is it: This is where the new Star Trek: The Next Generation begins and the very first high water mark it must be constantly measured against. This is how good this show can be when people actually understand and care about it.

The reasons why “The Wounded” is a classic seem almost self-evident and obvious, and yet they seem remarkable precisely because of how much Star Trek: The Next Generation has been phoning it in and lowballing itself lately. It may be Star Trek’s definitive statement on conflict and racial tension, perhaps only to be undone in two years by an even more remarkable story, albeit one that would not exist without this one. This is noteworthy in its own right, because it means “The Wounded” is very possibly the first time in the history of the franchise these themes have been explicitly tackled: The Original Series got a reputation among its fans for being a post-racial utopia solely due to its (likely network encouraged) diverse casting and a few offhand remarks here and there, and Star Trek: The Next Generation began by declaring itself to be one, but we haven’t actually seen the material consequences of this before now.

And for the very first time we not only get to see how this plays out in practice, but the creative team itself finally seems to understand what all this utopian rhetoric really ought to mean. Every single character in this story is grappling with incredibly complex and difficult emotions, and the show never once uses them as a mouthpiece to preach at the guest cast from a self-appointed position of authority, nor gleefully and spitefully drags the mains through the mud in an attempt to show how they are “deceiving” themselves and others about their supposed entitlement. Instead, each and every character is allowed to behave in a way that is simultaneously human and idealistic. The creative team has at long last seemed to figure out what Star Trek: The Next Generation is really about-Utopian conflict resolution. Children’s television for adults, where very adult issues, concepts and dilemmas are explored with the clarity and patience of children’s television. Not a world where there are no problems and everything is perfect and idyllic, but one where we’re all mature enough to deal with conflict in a positive, constructive, and helpful manner.…

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Someone once said “the night is darkest just before the dawn”. And the dawn has broken.

“Data’s Day” is not the episode I would consider the true beginning of what we might call Star Trek: The Next Generation Mark II (Mark I having destroyed itself in the chaos of “The Best of Both Worlds” and the past ten weeks or so having been a largely directionless interregnum trying to come to terms with its loss). But it could be called the new show’s pilot, and it’s a thing of absolute beauty. This is without question one of my absolute favourite episodes in the entire series, if not the franchise, one I always made a point to watch whenever it would come on and a story that has defined a huge portion of how I imagine the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s not absolutely perfect and there are some nitpicks I’ve always had with it, but even so it’s nothing short of a masterpiece and a godsend after half a year of aimlessly puttering about throwing things at the wall and only occasionally tossing out an execrable disaster of a script.

It’s an understated stroke of genius to do a “day in the life” story chronicling an ordinary 24 hours aboard the starship Enterprise. Life, after all, is not lived in those grand and momentous events that become transcribed onto your memory forever, but in hours, months and years we spend in the humdrum, day-to-day routine in between. Which is why, of course, it’s so very important that we all make sure to live our lives as truthfully, sincerely and fully as we can each and every day. And Data serves as an excellent role model in this respect because, as he shows us over the course of this episode, Data chooses to spend his day trying to learn from others and improve himself. Over the course of what’s apparently an ordinary, uneventful and unremarkable day, Data learns to dance, strives to improve his social skills, looks after each and every one of his friends, ruminates on the meaning of love and commitment and, incidentally, uncovers a covert Romulan espionage ring. We’ll, uh, talk more about that a little later on.

As I’ve chosen to read “Data’s Day” as a pilot of sorts, it’s also lovely to see how Data uses his perspective to articulate his relationship with the rest of the Enterprise crew and how he sees them. In a sense, this serves as our reintroduction to them, and across the board the crew is as compelling and likable as they’ve ever been. There’s Commander Riker, who seems to know and get along with everybody, as charming and easygoing with Data as he is chatting up tactical officer Ensign Kellogg. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who stands firm for his people and his values even in the face of Starfleet Command’s accepted decorum. Geordi La Forge, Data’s best friend and closest confidant brought memorably to life by LeVar Burton.…

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Ugh, but first we have to sit through “The Loss”.

Last time we talked a bit about how speculative fiction can sometimes get so caught up in its own ideas it neglects certain other aspects of good storytelling convention. And we also mentioned how Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s various creative teams have pretty much always had a problem with their characters, for some reason never quite managing to find a way to make them understandably human while also maintaining the idealism they’re supposed to represent (a problem that is, I should point out, exclusively limited to the TV series side of things at this point in time. Michael Jan Friedman has never once been tripped up by this). “The Loss” is the most cringe-worthy and egregious example of this worrisome trend we’ve seen to date, because nobody on the Enterprise seems to furrow quite as many brows in the writer’s room as Deanna Troi.

Wesley may have been sent of in an excessively tropish way, but at least it seems like “Final Mission” was something the creative team was onboard with and knew how to approach, even if the way they approached it was glaringly lacking in ambition. Yes there’s still a glut of Picard, Riker and Data stories such that even if you don’t like specific individual episodes about them, there’s almost certainly another one you will, and no, don’t get me going on Tasha Yar again, but the fact remains that we’re at a point in the show’s history where even Worf and Doctor Crusher have had extensive (and more or less effective) stories dedicated to them. And even so poor Deanna Troi gets shunned like she somehow offended every single crewmember on the series. The only other character who elicits anywhere near the same amount of confused emotions from Star Trek creator types seems to be Geordi La Forge, and we’ll deal with the issues he gets saddled with at the end of the season.

With “The Loss” though, the show tries to do for Deanna much the same thing it had done to Captain Picard last season in “The Best of Both Worlds”: Strip away something vital and fundamental to her character and see what’s left behind. But it plays out very differently for Deanna than it did for Captain Picard-“Family” notwithstanding, the whole ordeal with the Borg and Locutus was supposed to be about demonstrating how human Picard really was by showing what he looked like as the hollow shell of a human: Something is defined by its absence wherein we notice what we’ve taken for granted when we notice it’s no longer there. “The Loss” is sort of the inverse of that-The episode plays out almost as a critique of Troi, trying to show that how, absent the one thing that defines her as a character, she’s rendered a seething, barely-constructed bundle of negative emotion.…

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A requiem for the would-be boy wonder?

Wesley Crusher, of course, had to go. That’s been obvious to everyone since at least “Encounter at Farpoint”. Perhaps not to the writing staff, however, as the final impetus for the Whiz Kid’s resignation from Star Trek: The Next Generation came not out of basic good sense on the part of the creative team, but from the person who played him. Wil Wheaton was an established, in-demand Hollywood film actor before and into his tenure on the starship Enterprise, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that while the show was doing nothing but increasing the stature of his castmates, it was holding him back and forcing him to turn down lucrative job offers. Of course, it’s also somewhat bleakly funny for me to point out that LeVar Burton was *also* an established Holywood personality, and he had no problems not only committing to Star Trek: The Next Generation but also holding down a whole second television career over at Reading Rainbow, so it’s not exactly like Wheaton was some special case or anything.

But either way, it came to pass that Wheaton would follow in Denise Crosby’s footsteps and leave the show, and that Wesley Crusher would finally be shipped off to Starfleet Academy.

The writing staff were apparently very proud of “Final Mission”. Everyone involved says they wanted to make sure they were able to send Wesley off with the most fitting tribute showcase they could think of. Jeri Taylor says this is the script she put the most work into all year, and Micheal Piller said everyone was very cautious on this production because there were a lot of bad feelings surrounding the way Tasha Yar had been written out…

Oh yeah. Tasha Yar.

Yes, I’m going to bring up Tasha Yar again, and no, I’m not sorry in the slightest. Let me put it to you all as bluntly as I can. How precisely do you think it makes me feel to read this? To hear people like Piller, Taylor and Rick Berman say it was incredibly important to everyone to make sure Wesley Crusher went out on a good note and then mention Tasha Yar in the same breath? I could maybe accept that this was them trying to make good on their past mistakes and make up for how poorly Tasha was handled (even if that does weirdly seem to throw “Yesterday’s Enterprise” under the bus) had this show not just come off the one-two punch of “Legacy” and “Reunion”. Bringing up Tasha three weeks after you still sort of failed to do a story about her with the appropriate dignity that was kinda sexist on top of things and two weeks after tossing out one of the most jaw-dropping, misogynistic affronts to utopian progress and basic fucking human decency imaginable does not come across as good in the slightest, particularly when you’re doing so in the context of an episode about how wonderful Wesley Crusher is.…

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This is the archetypal example of the problem I’m having with the fourth season. “Future Imperfect” is a perfectly straightforward and even enjoyable hour of television, but it doesn’t leave me with a whole lot of room to craft a creative and entertaining critical analysis of it. I mean, pretty much everything that can be said about it is pretty obvious to anyone watching it.

I actually remember “Future Imperfect” quite well. I did tend to mix it up with “Parallels” a lot, which I like better than this episode, but “Future Imperfect” still sticks with me. The caves on the planet where Commander Riker spends the episode in particular, as well as Barash’s design, reminiscent as it is of the stereotypical Grey aliens from abduction reports while also being endearingly cute and childlike at the same time. I guess if you’re going to do an abduction, missing time and false memories story in a Star Trek: The Next Generation setting, that’s the kind of character you’d naturally want to create for it. The illusory Enterprise stuff is obviously pretty fun in a sort of “lets play around with our stock programmatic conventions a bit” kind of way. I just don’t have a whole lot to actually say about the episode itself, so this is going to be another one of those entries where I tell you how much I’m trying to fill space in this post as a way of filling space in this post.

“Future Imperfect” holds the distinction of being the one episode Michael Piller apparently thought was so good he told the team to buy it sight unseen without even hearing a formal pitch. At least, that’s the story Brannon Braga tells: Piller himself says he thought the story was “a little flat” after the action got going and he, along with the script’s writers J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carron, came up with the Romulan illusion misdirection subplot during a brainstorming session. With that kind of setup, “Future Imperfect” is obviously an extraordinarily good showcase for Jonathan Frakes, who gets to sink his teeth into a stylistic range as Riker he hasn’t always gotten the chance to. To broadly generalize, in more mediocre outings Will has tended to be written as either a pallet swap of Captain Kirk from the Original Series, an affable everyman or a grumpy Starfleet lackey. This is one of the first episodes to really play up and play on where he really shines on the show, which is in his strong relationships with the other crewmembers.

Here, Will is confronted with the possibility that a huge chunk of his life is missing, so he defaults on what he knows best. And, Minuet notwithstanding, it turns out he knows his friends so well that this becomes the key to figuring out the illusion-One of my favourite exchanges from this whole year happens when Will confronts the illusory Geordi: “[You’ve been running a Level 1 diagnostic] For thirty hours?…

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No. Unforgivable. Fuck this and everything about it.

Yes, you’re all in luck today. Been awhile since I’ve done a proper polemic on this blog, but here we are: “Reunion” is simply godawful. This one deserves to stand with “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor” among the series’ absolute lowest lows. This episode is pretty much everything I hate about scripted drama in general and Star Trek in particular all neatly wrapped up in a gift bundle.

Unless this is literally the first thing of mine you’ve ever read (in which case, hi! And sorry you had to come in on such a crap episode! Please go read something I enjoyed writing about instead!) you know why I hate “Reunion” as much as I do. What happens to K’Ehleyr is a textbook example of fridging: Randomly and unceremoniously killing off a female character solely to give her male significant other something to lament about. With no agency of her own, she’s treated as a disposable satellite of a male character’s dour, angst-ridden narrative existence. It’s a flagrantly sexist (and in this case, borderline misogynistic given a few concerning habits the show’s developed over the past couple of years and with an eye on one or two specific episodes coming up this season) approach to storytelling that Star Trek: The Next Generation not only has no business engaging with, shouldn’t even be something conceivable to someone working in it.

It tells you something about how rotten and vile the concept of fridging is given that I’m not even a *fan* of K’Ehleyr and I *still* think she deserved better. Every woman does. Yeah, I still think K’Ehleyr was a not-entirely-functional attempt to “spice up” a show and cast the second season creative team didn’t really know what to do with: Her big contribution, setting Worf on a path to put the Klingon and human sides of his personality in better harmony, could have been done a lot of other ways. I mean, isn’t it *also* sort of sexist to have that all wrapped up in a single, female package? That’s just the infamously-dubbed Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, which is just another form of objectification. It’s always a warning sign when men expect you to breeze into their lives, straighten them out and help them figure themselves out. Those are men who don’t know how to grow up.

But you know what? None of that actually matters, because you don’t fridge characters period, not even Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Once again, what does it say that this creative team is so sadistic and creatively bankrupt their first instinct is to wheel in a former one-shot guest character and put a bullet through their head to give one of the mains some more precious “conflict” to deal with? Fuck off. Fuck off and think about what you’ve done.

K’Ehleyr’s death is also stands in for a unanimous vote of no confidence in Suzie Plakson as a potential new member of the Enterprise extended family, which hurts for its own reasons.…

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You would think the moment where Star Trek: The Next Generation finally outlasts Star Trek would be a special occasion and cause for celebration. And yet “Legacy”, a morose, funereal affair that follows on thematically from “Remember Me” in taking a long, hard look at feelings of loss and the contemplation of that which we’ve left behind, is anything but. Surprisingly for a show that was supposedly more popular than it had ever been before, Star Trek: The Next Generation, for the first time, seems to feel apathetic, directionless and depressive.

Whose legacy are we looking at here? Is it Star Trek‘s? Apart from a requisite and hyper-obscure in-joke in the teaser about Camus II and archaeology, there’s nothing really about the Original Series here. Is it Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s? Isn’t that a little premature?

There is someone on everyone’s mind tonight. Of course, that person is Tasha Yar. Her absence weighs heavily both diegetically and extradiegetically: Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s long, dark season of discontent and introspection has finally forced it to come to terms with its biggest and greatest failure. The universe has long changed since the trauma of “Skin of Evil” and it’s going to change again, dramatically, in the not-too-distant future. But this doesn’t mean the ghosts from our past have entirely dissipated, and in order for that new universe to come to pass the show will have to somehow square away its remaining baggage and try to divinate some good from it. If we’re all about “facing our inner demons” now, it’s only fair that we should tackle the biggest one of all head on.

I’m not entirely convinced “Legacy” does that, though. It’s a definite theme to be sure, it’s certainly about this need on some level, and it’s telling Star Trek: The Next Generation is aware of this. But Michael Piller says that if you were to strip away all the backstory about Tasha, you’d be left with a perfectly serviceable, though middling, story about extracting Federation personnel from a crisis situation, akin to something like “The High Ground”. And he’s right: Far from engaging with the spectre of Tasha Yar one-on-one, “Legacy” uses her as window dressing to doll up a filler episode. Which, as much of a kick to the gut as that is, is probably actually more fitting. Piller does say that it’s a very good drama, because it hinges on the betrayal of an innocent (Data), which is always a gripping trope. Once again, Tasha’s story and positionality is rendered a subservient subset of Data’s. Just as it always has been.

Even “Turnabout Intruder” had the courtesy to at least be a fascinatingly hot mess of confused gender roles.

But Michael Piller speaks the literal truth. The man knew his drama, possibly better than anybody else. And “Legacy” is in fact a good drama. But being a good drama does not make it good Star Trek: The Next Generation: That is not, and has never been, sufficient.…

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As is is befitting a show contemplating loss and nostalgic regret, “Remember Me” plays quite knowingly and powerfully over our own memories of that which we have left behind. In our case, memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season: A year that, while comparatively speaking not all that distant from us all things considered, given recent events feels like a whole lifetime away.

Most obviously, of course, this manifests in The Traveller returning to play a pivotal role in the episode’s resolution, bringing with him all the provocative concepts of thought-form magick, reminding us there was once a time when Star Trek: The Next Generation would not be so quick to run away from such things. But it’s not just “Where No One Has Gone Before” that is invoked, but also “11001001”, though the re-use of most of that episode’s iconic effects shots, most notably the Enterprise approaching and mooring inside Spacedock. It’s bittersweet that these, two of the most vividly iconic, haunting and defining visual landscapes of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s inaugural year, would be the ones to be revisited now. I already feel a pang of nostalgic sadness and yearning for the feelings I associate with those images, even though the part of me that recently wrote a whole book on the historical era they’re from remembers how even then the show had its slew of bungled opportunities and bad decisions. And even though I know what’s just around the corner.

“Remember Me”’s central themes about people and memories tending to fade with age if we’re not careful and letting people know you appreciate them while you have the chance are fairly obvious. Textually overt, even, what with the fact the whole warp dimension was conjured up out of Beverly’s thoughts as she was going through those particular emotions, as multiple characters take care to point out for us. And yet there’s real synchromystic power and resonance in doing this story now, at ground zero in the aftermath of the Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s traumatic exorcism of its past self. You may think it odd that a show currently in the process of trying to essentially reboot itself would suddenly become so backwards-thinking, what with how much “Remember Me” seems to be desperately trying to grasp at the spectre of the dearly-departed first season. But I actually think it’s entirely to be expected, and welcomed, for that matter: The strength of memory is what it can remind us about our own past lives, both positive and negative. Ideally, we should want to learn not to repeat the mistakes of our past while trying to reconnect with things we might have known back then, but have since forgotten.

Put that way, “Remember Me” is also a re-evaluation of “The Battle”, and maybe even “The Neutral Zone”: The past cannot truly remain the past, because it is always with us guiding our actions in the ever-unfolding present.…

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