TNG Season 5

Writing fanfiction was probably the earliest way I ever dynamically or critically interacted with media. I guess I always found it the most intuitive and instinctual to express ideas and concepts through the voices of particular characters. Perhaps it’s something like Lwaxana Troi said in “Cost of Living”: All those little people who live inside of us, each of them voicing a different facet of ourselves. I suppose part and parcel of being the sort of person who undertakes a project of this scope and magnitude is that these particular characters, or at least versions of them shaped by my own perspectives, readings, interpretations and projections, are always going to live inside of me.

In a sense, this is nothing more than an extension of the way we read. The overall impact a text is going to have on you is largely contingent on the positionality you bring to the text itself. When we’re talking about speculative fiction, we’re talking about a genre that, perhaps more than any other, is designed to stimulate and inspire imaginations. And a hallmark of storytelling has always been its mutability: That multiple storytellers can and do take familiar characters and stories and tell them in different ways, bringing something a little bit new and different along with a piece of themselves into the tapestry of myth.

“Time’s Arrow” is a good episode. More of a straightforward adventure story than maybe some other episodes, but well done. The two things that have always stuck with me are the Devidians themselves and the part at the beginning when the time travel stuff is first introduced, which dovetails into what’s actually a quite good allegory for mortality for what it is (Deanna rather aptly uses the term “terminal illness”, and her cute little imitation of Data is another sign of her current status as a character because that’s not at all Deanna Troi, but it’s pure Marina Sirtis). It’s a fitting way to close off a season that’s dealt so heavily with time travel (indeed, time becoming unbound, which will return with aplomb next season), death, the afterlife and counterfactual alternate realities exiting simultaneously and coming into contact.

So here’s a small alternate reality of my own. When I was watching the scene where Geordi and Data are talking in ten forward about Data’s imminent death, I still had “The Next Phase” fresh in my mind, so my thoughts drifted back to Laren and how she might take all of this. And then all of a sudden, this exchange popped into my mind. Laren isn’t in “Time’s Arrow”, but this is something I thought she might say given everything that’s been going on lately. I imagine this scene taking place just before the one between Geordi and Data. I swear this isn’t even the kind of fanfiction I normally like to write-I typically couldn’t care less about filling in blanks in aired stories or adhering to the televised canon of events too terribly much, and I actually surprised myself that I came up with this.…

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There’s really nothing much to say. It’s simply one of the single greatest moments in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and probably all of Star Trek. It deservedly won a Hugo Award back when the Hugo Awards actually meant something. If it’s not the single greatest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation it’s a contender; the connoisseur’s pick for those who don’t want to tow the fandom line and pick “The Best of Both Worlds”. It’s damn near close to perfect. You don’t need me to tell you that.

It’s almost funny though that “The Inner Light” gets all the accolades, because to me it runs so contrary to everything we’re told makes “good drama” and a good episode of this series in particular. There’s no “conflict” about Captain Picard’s suppressed darkness and nobody learns a lesson about the lengths they’ll go when pushed and there’s no angsty, broody mediations about how life is pain. Rather, this is a story about performativity and storytelling. In fact, it’s a story so willfully about performativity that it’s not even really about Captain Picard at all, even though it was envisioned as a story about “Picard’s unlived life” and features some of Patrick Stewart’s very best acting to date. The probe is described as a form of “ancestor simulation”, and that’s such a wonderfully loaded term-One I’m obviously quite drawn to. It’s Eline’s (or rather, a manifestation of her’s) final words that spell it out: “Now we live in you. Tell them of us”. Words to remember and return to.

If you were for some reason inclined to be negative about this episode, it is possible to read it as a particular kind of “down to Earth” story, showing how travelling the universe in starships is less preferable to settling down to raise a family and spend the rest of your life with your soulmate in a quiet, sleepy little village somewhere. In fact this is bolstered by the one line in the whole production that does grate on me a little bit, namely when Kamin says “I always believed that I didn’t need children to complete my life. Now, I couldn’t imagine life without them”. As someone who is childless by design this stings a bit, smacking as it does of heternormativity and reproductive futurism. But the thing to remember here is that this is technically Kamin speaking, not Captain Picard: One of the reasons why this is such an oustanding Picard episode, possibly the definitive, is how it plays on the narrative role he’s always had. Since the very early days of the show being hamstrung, one of Captain Picard’s strengths as a character has been his ability to fill whatever narrative role the diegetic philosophical fiction requires (you could, actually, probably redeem “I, Borg” a bit by thinking about it in that light), and this episode simply takes that and writes it back into the text.…

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Yes, it’s very, very good. Thank heavens. This is my favourite Geordi episode. It’s also my favourite Laren episode. It may well be my favourite Ron Moore episode. But I have to stop myself, because I’m perfectly liable to spend the entire essay just squealing about Geordi and Laren, and that’s going to entertain nobody but myself. So I’ll save that for the end and get all of the other things that are good about “The Next Phase” out of the way first.

And there are quite a lot. Dealing with themes of coming to terms with death and loss is nothing new for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and certainly not for Ron Moore. No surprises from him there. What *is* new, at least to this show, is the idea of looking it it from beyond the veil, so to speak: It doesn’t go too far down this path, of course, but even so “The Next Phase” does leave open a few tantalizing possibilities for those inclined to read what happens here critically and laterally. It reminds me in this regard a bit of “Power Play” (coincidentally another story where Geordi and Laren featured relatively prominently together, but again I’m getting ahead of myself) where a seemingly supernatural phenomenon (again, ghosts) is explained away by some form of technobabble…But the show never actually goes so far as to debunk the supernatural explanation or claim that the two forms of situated knowledge are not in truth describing the same thing.

And again just like in “Power Play” the story is very good about choosing which specific kind of technobabble to invoke. In the previous episode, the entity possessing Deanna’s body claims that consciousness can live on in the ionic storms of a planet’s atmosphere which, even though it’s technically a lie to mislead Captain Picard and accrue his sympathy so she can take advantage of him and the Enterprise crew, still opens up some particularly interesting avenues of thought. To me, it was a very appealingly animistic way of conceptualizing things fittingly translated into Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s blend of sci-fi fantasy. This time it’s a kind of “interphase cloaking device” developed by the Romulans that renders the user not just invisible but immaterial, existing on a different “phase” of being and therefore able to pass through solid objects, including people and particle beams.

Now, I believe there’s a special kind of significance in the fact that it’s the Romulans in particular who developed this kind of technology (as Geordi says, the Klingons were working on the same idea but abandoned it after deciding it was untenable-The Romulans didn’t) and it isn’t because the Romulans are sneaky backstabbing bastards, but this isn’t the time or place to properly go into my theory as to why. Instead I’ll talk about the ramifications being phased like this has for Laren as a character. One of the things that strikes me as interesting about her when compared to her kinsfolk, whom we’ll be meeting a great many of very shortly, is that she’s basically an atheist Bajoran, or at least starts out as one.…

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The Borg are somewhat unique in the pantheon of Star Trek species. While not the first to be portrayed as villainous or antagonistic, they are the first to be designed explicitly to fill that role from the beginning, and nothing else (or at least the first successful attempt at this, given the Ferengi are in some ways a rough draft of the Borg). In spite of the kind of stereotypical “planet of hats” jokes, every other alien culture in Star Trek, even the Original Series Klingons, was created to have more than one facet about them. Not the Borg though: They were very clearly designed to be an enemy the crew couldn’t debate or reason with intellectually, only fight with old-fashioned weapons and pray they could run away from relatively unscathed.

You can read this as beneficial or harmful depending on your perspective. One way you might defend this is to argue that, as such fitting metaphors for the engines of capitalism, it’s good that the Borg are a faceless evil who exist just to get blown apart by phaser blasts. After all, you’d want no quarter for the oppressing hegemony: It’s irresponsible to borderline collaborator levels to portray the kind of captailism the Borg represent as anything other than utterly irredeemable. However there’s also the small fact that these are sentient beings, not monsters you can take pot-shots at in low-rent action sci-fi, and it’s no less reactionary when Star Trek turns the Borg into their version of cannon fodder to satiate the bloodlust of a certain subset of its fanbase who really just wants brainless military science fiction where they can run through corridors shooting things. This is, for example, pretty much the default mode of depicting the Borg from about 1996 onwards, and it’s a hard sell to claim that did Star Trek any real favours.

So in that sense “I, Borg” is an important and necessary story to do. By putting a face to the faceless enemy it humanizes them (literally, in Hugh’s case) and points out the insularity and shortsightedness bound up in all forms of hate. Michael Piller is quit right to extol the virtues of this episode on that count, and to say this is a very Star Trek message to deliver. But as much as this episode might get praised for those reasons, it’s not quite as simple as some might want it to be and we can’t, in my opinion, go patting ourselves on the back for a job well done just yet. “I, Borg” for me is something of an inverse of “Cost of Living” and “Imaginary Friend”, and kind of an outlier in my history with Star Trek: The Next Generation on the whole. While those were episodes I always remembered strongly that turned out to be nowhere near as good as I though they were, this is a story that’s always been pretty iconic for me and that I can fully understand why it gets the praise it does…But I just can’t bring myself to like it and have never been able to.…

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The episodes I look at for this project pretty unfailingly come in one of three forms. Bad episodes I know are bad but which I may or may not be fuzzy on the details of precisely why, good episodes I know are good because of longstanding vivid memories I have of them and episodes I have next to no recollection of whatsoever. “Cost of Living” and “Imaginary Friend” mark something an interesting milestone in this respect because they’re none of those things: Sadly, this is probably the first time (or at least one of the rare instances in which) a story that brought me a lot of joy in the past turned out to be nowhere remotely near as good as I remembered.

This essay is, I should mention, something of a strange one for me. Normally when I do these multiple episode recap-type posts I know in advance which episodes I’m going to be lumping together and what central shared theme I’m going to hang them on. This gives me time to schedule my watching and writing so I’m not down to the wire trying to fit everything in at the last minute. That, uh, didn’t happen the week I was writing this: I had initially planned to give each of these episodes their own posts as I had fond memories of both I wanted to reflect on. As it turned out…They both suck. And they both suck for dully pedestrian and identikit reasons. So I’ll freely admit this is a rough sort of cut-and-paste job, but I guess this means you now have the opportunity to see how my writing style adapts to contingencies.

I’ll run down the gamut of both episodes and the things I was expecting to talk about each of them. What I always remembered about “Cost of Living” is Lwaxana Troi’s interactions with Alexander. I remember her coming in, finding him out of sorts and immediately bonding with him and showing him the multitude of life’s little joys and wonders through the medium of mud baths. A great many mud baths. This was traditionally my favourite Lwaxana Troi story, after “Haven” and “Dark Page”: I always thought this episode was a terrific showcase for the more whimsical, breezy and inspirational sides to her character and I thought she made a delightful comparison to Alexander, someone who’s trying to find out what it means to be a kid in a family dynamic that doesn’t have any idea either. And all of those things are indeed there-The episode simply sings whenever Lwaxana and Alexander are onscreen together, and the first mud bath scene in particular, where Lwaxana tells Alexander about the “hundreds of little people” who live inside all of us “waiting for just the right moment to come out and save us from ourselves” is flat-out one of the greatest single lines of dialog in the show to date, at least from her.…

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It’s fuck-awful. It’s “Elaan of Troyius” again. Famke Janssen, who would appear alongside Patrick Stewart again in the X-Men movies, was also Rick Berman and Michael Piller’s first choice to play Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but she turned them down fearing she’d grow complacent as an actor despite the opportunity. Even so, Janssen is herself responsible for redefining the Trill as we will soon know them, as it’s the spots on Kamala’s neck that will go on to be Jadzia’s signature look once the production team realised giving Terry Farrell Odan’s headpiece from “The Host” would be a crime against humanity (much like the rest of “The Host”) and Rick Berman told Michael Westmore “just give her spots like we gave Famke”. Speaking of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Max Grodénchik plays a Ferengi in this episode, and he too will get cast on that show next year as Rom.

I have now exhausted literally all of the erudition it is possible to glean from “The Perfect Mate”.

Because I have an essay’s worth of space to fill, however, I need to think of something to talk about. One solution might be to talk about Jadzia Dax, given how many links to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and her character in particular there are this week. There is an earnest danger in doing that, however: At the very least ever since I spent the bulk of “Ensign Ro” talking about the world-building that episode puts in place instead of the episode itself, which I now consider to be a catastrophic mistake on my part, I’ve sensed a overwhelming, and perhaps inevitable, desire to move on to the fourth Star Trek as quickly as possible. This is a bit heartbreaking for me though, because as much as I adore the show we’re about to see in less than a year’s time, it’s Star Trek: The Next Generation that’s my first and debatably still my greatest love, and I don’t want its legacy on Vaka Rangi to be entirely one of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential.

I grant there’s a great deal of that, however. A whole bunch more than I remember, in fact. This season in particular is unbelievably more rocky than my memory affords it (though not as much as the fourth season). Ironically, it’s the much-maligned first season that’s still standing out as the strongest and most consistently solid and on-target, even though this one has had a higher percentage of my favourite episodes and season six is looking pretty damn excellent from where I sit now. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be the soundest and most put-together show with the strongest sense of identity, ethics and storytelling technique this blog has looked at, but I’d definitely say it’s the third (since you’re going to ask, or at least wonder, the first two for my money are Original Dirty Pair and Miami Vice, respectively).…

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Shout-out to Ray Walston, My Favorite Non-Terran Humanoid Solid.

In the mid-1980s there was a cartoon show called The Get-Along Gang. It was about a group of happy preteen anthropomorphic animals living in a storybook world called Green Meadows and, as you could probably tell from the title, was about the various and sundry ways teamwork and friendship will solve all of life’s problems. Each character had some egregious and crippling flaw that would be unflappably counteracted by working together with their friends.

If you were willing to be unkind to The Get-Along Gang, you might say it typified the concept that “The Complainer Is Always Wrong” in children’s media. That did certainly seem to be the worrying underlying implication of a lot of the show’s morals, and you could probably trace an entire counter-revolutionary movement in children’s television after the fact solely dedicated to moving as far away from The Get-Along Gang as was possible to get. It also probably didn’t help matters that the show was the product of a greeting card company. Not that anyone had anything much to worry about anyway, as Disney kicked off the Renaissance Age not two years later. But my point is that The Get-Along Gang was a very specific kind of children’s television: First and foremost it was prescriptive: That is, it existed more or less just to talk down to kids and tell them how to act, how to behave and how to think.

In the past, you might have noticed I have a specific opinion of how I think teaching should work. My conception of how the teacher-student relationship should operate is derived from Paulo Freire’s famous (some would say infamous) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he argues that students and teachers are both equal participants in the creation of knowledge, and that teachers should be willing to learn as much from their students as their students learn from them. The kind of teaching that The Get-Along Gang tried to do is the kind that Freire calls “the banking model”, because it treats students as “empty receptacles into which knowledge is deposited”, much as one might do with a piggybank. This “banking model” is the exact model of education Freire is positing his pedagogy in opposition to, because the banking model’s attitude to students is the exact same one that colonizers take to the colonized.

So the thing about “The First Duty” is that, like The Get-Along Gang before it, it’s adopting a hierarchical banking model approach to moralizing. It’s clearly a story about the importance of always telling the truth and is obviously aimed at the sorts of young people who were expected to project onto and identify with Wesley Crusher (whether or not they actually did is beside the point and a question I think we’ve more than settled by this point).…

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It’s almost the hardest to write about the stories that are my very favourites. Doubly so when they’re so consummately made. How many ways can I say “Cause and Effect” is a work of genius without sounding like I’m just pointlessly gushing? How much can I go into my personal connection with stories like this without regressing to the point of being an utterly, hopelessly, self-indulgent bore? And yet this is a turning point: Whenever Star Trek: The Next Generation is mentioned in passing or I’m casually reminded of it in my day-to-day existence, this is one of the stories I think about. This, and the kinds of stories “Cause and Effect” sets the stage for.

Is it “iconic”, either in the fandom or television history more generally? Not exactly, or at least not the the extent of something like “The Best of Both Worlds”, “Unification” or “Unification II” (although many fans do consider “Cause and Effect” to be a classic too). Is it sweepingly moving, emotional and dramatic? No, not really. It’s not “Transfigurations”, “Darmok” or “The Inner Light”. Indeed, like “Power Play” before it, you might, at first glace, even get the impression “Cause and Effect” is a little too “clever” for its own good: A little too fixated on its science fiction concept to do much of anything else. This is certainly the criticism that’s often laid at the feet of Brannon Braga, a writer known for increasingly clever and complex science fiction inspired stories. But also like “Power Play”, this is not your typical masturbatory Hard SF story that doesn’t care about narrative technique, and there’s way more going on here then this reading would afford.

Although it was certainly a concern in the writers’ room. Even though Braga himself is rightly keen on this episode, he talks about how much of a gamble an episode this experimental and unorthodox was at the time (and would gently like to remind us that “Cause and Effect” was made *before* Groundhog Day, which famously also dealt with a causal time loop). Producer Herb Wright pointed out how a viewer’s first “temptation” upon witnessing something like this might be to “jam the button on the remote”. Rick Berman was even afraid audiences might think there was something wrong with their TV set or the broadcast feed, or worse, think this episode was a clip show. So he instructed the director to make sure every iteration of the loop looked and played out ever-so-slightly differently to assure them it wasn’t and to keep them guessing. That director happened to be Jonathan Frakes, who, upon first getting Braga’s script, initially thought the writers were trying to pull one over on him.

Naturally they weren’t, and Frakes immediately rose to the challenge and then some. I’d actually go so far as to cite “Cause and Effect” as Frakes’ defining moment as a director, because what he pulls off here is nothing short of a technical masterpiece.…

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Oh dear.

So remember back in the “The Host” essay when we were talking about clumsy, confused, poorly handled episodes that kind of make a big mess of gender and sexuality? I said there were three big ones that, due to their relentless terribleness or just general incompetence, singlehandedly saddle Star Trek: The Next Generation with a reputation for heteronormativity and homophobia, no matter how many admirable strides it manages to make elsewhere. The first was “Blood and Fire” (and by extension “The Naked Now”) and the second was “The Host”. “The Outcast” is the third.

Buckle in tightly, kids.

“The Outcast” is a story about a planet (of hats, natch) where there is no concept of gender. They view “dividing people into two genders” to be a retrograde and “primitive” notion and consider themselves more “enlightened” as a result (and Holy Goddamn Shit that’s a can of worms I’m not even going to go anywhere remotely near the ballpark of). Commander Riker gets involved (in more than one way) with one of their scientists, an individual named Soren. During their time with the Enterprise crew, Soren learns more about the human notion of gender and it influences culture, society and behaviour, especially when it comes to romance. Soren takes to Doctor Crusher in particular, viewing her as a model female because of her more traditionally femme aesthetic, and ultimately confesses to harbouring long-held strong feelings of being female too. Because identifying as either male or female is punishable by death in their society, Soren has explored her feminine side by engaging in romantic relationships with men in secret. Eventually, Riker and Captain Picard violate the Prime Directive again by criticising the gender laws and negotiating for Soren’s clemency.

It would be eminently understandable if, given the rough plot synopsis above, you would be considerably taken aback to learn what the creative team actually meant for this episode to be about. You see, the real doozy is when you find out that Rick Berman and writer Jeri Taylor considered “The Outcast” to be a strong “Issues” story about homosexuality and homophobic prejudice. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, Rick Berman said

“We thought we had made a very positive statement about sexual prejudice in a distinctively Star Trek way, but we still got letters from those who thought it was just our way of ‘washing our hands’ of the homosexual situation.”

While in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, Jeri Taylor said

“’The Outcast’ allowed us to explore the issue of sexual intolerance in a unique, offbeat way. I identify with the disenfranchised and the powerless of our world. So I really wanted to make a statement for tolerance, broad-mindedness and acceptance for those who are disenfranchised.”

And it’s at this point the wincing and cringing commences, because I don’t think there’s a single episode where the creative team is more ignorant, ill-informed, off-target and off-the-mark about anything than they are in this one.…

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There was an urban legend going around awhile back about an entire intro class failing due to rampant, universal plagiarism, the kicker being the reveal that it was an ethics class. I’ve also heard a variant where criminals were getting caught illegally profiting off of resold ethics textbooks. That’s sort of what I was thinking about as I was working through this episode.

“Ethics” is, to my knowledge, considered a highlight of the fifth season. In Starlog‘s episode guide from the mid-1990s (which for the longest time was my primary insight into what conventional wisdom on any of these stories was) there was a little Starfleet emblem next to the title of this episode, an indication that this was one of the editors’ personal recommendations. Longtime readers of my guides will have doubtlessly picked up on my thoughts about this already: Typically when I go into this sort of background before I actually start analysing things it’s a sign that I disagree with it just about entirely. Well, I’m certainly not about to go against type now. I’ve tried to like this episode, many times, in fact. But I just can’t get passed the fact that the fundamental, well, ethical stand the story seems to be taking just seems so fundamentally wrongheaded. Not to mention how there’s some cratering characterization problems on display.

So I mean first of all, Worf gets paralyzed in the most humiliating way imaginable. He’s “distracted” because he was too busy thinking about losing to Deanna in poker? Seriously? That’s not a tragedy, that’s a black comedy farce, which would be one thing if that set the tone for the rest of the episode, but it doesn’t. And Worf is embarrassed about losing to Deanna in a game of skill and bluffing where she clearly played more strongly? That doesn’t strike me as the way an honour-bound warrior would react to losing to a worthy or superior opponent and sounds uncomfortably like Worf is just sexist (and given how he’s the favourite of the writing staff, particularly Ron Moore, that’s an avenue I’d rather not go down).

This naturally leads into the episode’s big “ethical” dilemma, and its big “ethical” screw-up. At least the subplot between Worf, Deanna, Alexander and Will (we’ll…come back to Will) basically amounts to an examination of paraplegia and the right to die. And Star Trek: The Next Generation handles both with all the trademark nuance it displayed in such classics as “Blood and Fire”, “Angel One” and “Violations”. I can’t actually think of a way this could have landed more spectacularly wrong had it been deliberately trying to: First of all equating disability with something like, say, total brain death is basically appalling from any angle you care to mention and completely goes against the moral of “The Masterpiece Society” from just a few weeks back. Even if you grant the analogy and buy this is a right to die situation, which I very much do not advise you do, the central philosophical standpoint here still doesn’t work, what with every other character yelling and screaming about how cowardly and shameful assisted suicide is, especially when it’s apparently a sacred tenet of Klingon society.…

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