TNG Season 5

OK, OK, we’ll cut to the chase. No-one is pretending “Power Play” is anything other than a rollicking action show. There’s really not a whole lot more under the surface here than that. But damn is it ever a good one. Michael Piller seemed to think this was a hollow, empty and effectively mediocre outing, but even if it’s not as openly provocative as Star Trek: The Next Generation can get on its best days, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot to love in “Power Play”.

The first obvious thing to say about it is that it’s plainly an actor showcase episode, and it’s very probably the best damn actor showcase episode this show ever does. It takes three of the best talents out of an already preternaturally talented cast, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner and Colm Meaney (and with the utmost respect to the other actors, all of whom I deeply adore, they are) and just lets them run completely wild for 45 minutes: Because of them (as well as the episode’s ample direction that works seamlessly with them), this never for one moment stops being positively gripping. Marina Sirtis is obviously the biggest draw here, and this is the moment she’s finally, at long, long last, allowed to come into her own and show us what she’s truly capable of. Now she finally has the chance to play the imperious hardass she’s always wanted to, and she absolutely owns and relishes every ounce and every second of it. As much as Marina Sirtis will say she appreciated and respected Deanna Troi’s empathy as a virtue and as an acting challenge, there’s just no way she’s not having a total blast here. We’re frankly sorry when it’s all over.

Colm Meaney gets to show off his range a little differently. His character starts off more of the muscle of the team and he’s perfectly capable of playing a hardened hired thug archetype, but the scripts give him these little moments where Miles’ personality starts to reassert itself a bit, possibly because it’s his technical know-how that’s crucial to the convicts’ plot. This I suppose makes him probably the most interesting of the three from a character development standpoint, and Meaney’s good at working his material so the little flashes of Miles come across as warped, twisted distortions rather than moments of actual sympathy: Even though he may superficially appear to have more dimensions than his co-conspirators, he’s still very much a hardened heel and we’re meant to never lose site of that. Brent Spiner, meanwhile, is just absolutely fucking terrifying: He’s back in his element playing a psychopath, but this is still a true challenge for him, as he has to make sure his character here isn’t too reminiscent of Lore (something Spiner often admits and comments on when talking about this episode). Of course, he succeeds well beyond the point of comfort.

As much as this is unquestionably Sirtis, Spiner and Meaney’s hour, the rest of the cast do get some important bits.…

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Well it’s an interesting one indeed.

“Conundrum” is first off incredibly deceptive. On paper it sounds for all the world like one of the most stock things Star Trek: The Next Generation has ever done and a prime example of a show running on empty: I mean come on, really? An amnesia story? For real? But in truth this is yet another fifth season highlight and a prime example of how the show has never been stronger than it is now. The first clue is that this isn’t actually your typical amnesia story,which would have involved either a mysterious hero wandering into an unfamiliar setting where we have to learn about their past alongside them or a tragic accident where the supporting cast has to try and jog the memory of the amnesiac protagonist in a forced, strangled attempt to wring hollow drama out of the show’s premise.

Star Trek: The Next Generation can’t do either of those plots, not just for the eminently sensible reason that they’re both dumb and hackneyed ideas, but also because its narrative structure would preclude that. The amnesia is just a plot device to get at the heart of what “Conundrum” is actually trying to look at, which turns out to be several different interesting things. The original idea for the submission, according to Michael Piller, was the concept of mentally reprogramming people to be soldiers by manipulating their memories and sense of identity, and thus that it was a critique of militarism and the military-industrial complex. Piller feels “Conundrum” doesn’t do justice to the original pitch and he’s right to make that criticism as that’s not quite what this story is (though there’s a bit of that at the end), but that doesn’t mean the episode as aired is any weaker as a result. If anything, this just allows it to get even more clever and fascinating.

And anyway, the first key concept “Conundrum” is exploring does actually tie somewhat into the original pitch: What would happen, the story is asking, if you had all the conscious mental signposts of how you defined your identity stripped away from you? What parts of you would remain, and would those parts still be you? The easy answer is yes, as even though Kieron MacDuff puts on a convincing ruse, the Enterprise crew simply cannot accept his evidence that they’re cold-blooded killers. But there’s a further thread to examine here, several, in fact. Through this, “Conundrum” is also making a statement about what our identities actually are and where precisely they lay-As important as the context of our life experiences are (they’ve doubtlessly shaped the Enterprise crew even when they can’t consciously remember them, after all), our innate personhood goes beyond that.

I’m not trying to tread into Cartesianism here, but you can imagine a situation where you might hold similar beliefs and make similar decisions even if your life turned out differently. You would be a different person of course, but not necessarily an unrecognisable one.…

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This is probably the episode I’ve changed my opinion on more times than any other. The first time I saw “The Masterpiece Society” I thought it was middling, though acceptable in a vague sort of way: It didn’t really hold my interest long enough to leave much of an impression, though I liked that Geordi had a meaty plot with a lady guest star. Later, I came to understand that this episode has, or at least had, a very significant and vocal hatedom, with many fans describing it as the flat-out worst episode in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which struck me as odd, considering “Code of Honor” and “Reunion” both exist. Then I remembered I had read somewhere that some fan forum or critical aggregate site (I can’t remember which one) bestowed upon “The Masterpiece Society” the unusual title of “most average Star Trek: The Next Generation episode”. As in, if you were looking for one episode that best encapsulated what the show looked like and how it operated on an average week, this would be it.

So going into it this time I really had no idea what to expect. These are the kinds of episodes I actually secretly like revisiting the most: I always know the classics and my old favourites are going to be just as good as I remember, but it’s the episodes I haven’t seen in many years or don’t remember as well (or in extremely rare instances have *never* seen) that often prove the most rewarding from an analytical perspective as it gives me a chance to approach a show I typically have a very hard time maintaining any sort of real emotional distance from with the full arsenal of critical tools and ideological maturity I’ve accumulated over the years. So my takeaway from “The Masterpiece Society” in a nutshell is that it is actually kind of bad, but not at all for the reasons people tend to say it’s bad and is actually way less egregious in some respects than other times the show has slipped up. And even then the only truly irredeemable bollocks is in the last act, and there’s quite a strong kernel of a good idea here that’s obfuscated by the unpleasantness at the end.

The first thing about this episode is that, like a lot of middling Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, it’s basically an Original Series episode. The Enterprise discovers a “Planet of Hats” where everyone behaves in a programmatically idiosyncratic manner where said idiosyncrasies put them at philosophical odds with our heroes and the crisis of the week. There is a conflict of interests and culture clash between the two parties as they work to resolve the crisis, exacerbated at least in part by one of our heroes falling in love or becoming otherwise involved with a prominent figure among the natives.…

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So. There are a handful of episodes that, irrespective of their quality one way or another, I simply cannot watch. This would be one of those.

The first strike against “Violations” is that it’s one of those infamous “Issues” stories. Even though this is the kind of story Star Trek is arguably most famous for doing, the fact of the matter is they’re also the kind of story Star Trek is also the most terrible at telling. There’s no way it can do a story like this and not come across as equal parts blinkered and self-absorbed. The best way for Star Trek to do “social commentary”, as it were, is through its utopianism: Demonstrate a utopian approach to solving a problem or portray a world where a specific problem is conspicuously absent. Conversely, if you must tell a story about a specific social topic that would no longer be strictly speaking relevant in a utopian future setting, you have to speak about it in allegorical generalization. The problem “Violations” has is that it doesn’t quite commit one way or the other, which is deeply unfortunate as it also happens to be “The Rape Episode”.

I’m not even sure how to tactfully go about this. I mean, I think the story has its heart in the right place, but it’s deeply, deeply uncomfortable to watch, and not in a good way. And just being right-on politically and ethically does not mean can adequately translate that into a narrative setting. Alien this isn’t, that’s for sure. Actually, Alien might be a good place to start: Like “Violations”, that’s a story that is at its roots a condemnation of rape and rape culture told mostly through allegory. But while the Alien eventually did end up going around indiscriminately slaughtering people, the key thing there was that the first victim was male, part of an attempt to force male audience members to come face-to-face with the rape culture they have been brought up a part of. “Violations” already comes up short by comparison, because two of its three victims are women and the first is…Deanna Troi. Someone who has an unsettling predisposition to mind rape. And this one doesn’t even have the excuse most of Deanna’s possession plots do (that being allowing Marina Sirtis to actually do shit) as she’s comatose for most of this episode.

Another crucial aspect of Alien‘s success is the fact that so much of it is conveyed through its own awareness of its cinematic nature. It’s a film so loaded with symbolic imagery that it basically runs on it (thanks in no small part to H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott), demonstrating a peerless mastery of Long 1980s cinematography. “Violations”, meanwhile…doesn’t. It’s a further continuation of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s frustratingly conservative and dated filmmaking techniques, and this is a major problem for a story like this because of the subject matter.…

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And this would be the perfect counterpoint to that argument. It’s one of my absolute favourite episodes in a season mostly made up of favourite episodes.

I used to get “Hero Worship” mixed up with “The Bonding” a lot because they both deal with helping children cope with a traumatic loss and move forward with their lives. They’re also both fucking brilliant and textbook example of what Star Trek: The Next Generation is all about. It would be understandable to make the assumption “Hero Worship” is a ripoff or rehash of “The Bonding” in this respect, and I even thought that myself for awhile. But it’s actually not: Both episodes approach loss from different angles, and Jeremy from that episode and Timothy in this one deal with their confusion and sadness in two very different ways: Jeremy tries to cling to a past he can’t go back to, while Timothy shuts down and doesn’t want to acknowledge his feelings. Also, and this is just me I’m sure, but I almost think “Hero Worship” is maybe a little more nuanced and sophisticated than “The Bonding” in some areas.

Firstly though, the title is very apt. Timothy doesn’t pretend to be an android just because they don’t have emotions and he doesn’t want to feel pain and guilt anymore: As Deanna Troi points out, Timothy also sees a strength in Data that he wants to emulate. It’s pretty much the first diegetic acknowledgment in the entire history of the series of how Star Trek: The Next Generation is actually supposed to work, and if there’s a better place to put an episode like this than in the 25th Anniversary year as part of a season of growing strength and confidence, I don’t know where that is. There’s also the very nice touch early on of Data turning to Geordi for help in understanding childhood trauma so he can better help Timothy, to which Geordi naturally responds with a story.

He’s not the one directly interacting with Timothy, but Geordi helps Data who then helps him. Reading Data, as we do, as filling the kind of role that might otherwise go to a child character, this results in a very sweet and elegant chain of empathy showcasing how role models work: One person is inspired by another, they then take those lessons into their own being and, through living their lives in accordance with them, can then go on to inspire a third person. Role models are important not only because we see in them the sort of person we’d like to be ourselves, but because they can sometimes provide example of solutions to confusing and painful situations. We trust their judgment not necessarily because they think like us, but because they think the way we would like to think, and that can be profoundly helpful on many different levels.

(In fact Deanna gets a very telling quote early in the story: “His world is gone, Data.…

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“New Ground” is a bit like “Ensign Ro” in the sense it’s a rather middling, though functional, effort that exists primarily to introduce a new reoccurring character, or in this case reintroduce one. “New Ground” comes across a bit better than “Ensign Ro”, or at least more forgettable (in a good way) because it doesn’t have the retroactive weight of Bajor, the Cardassian occupation and Ro Laren hanging over it and because Alexander is quite frankly nobody’s favourite character (with the exception of Michael Piller’s mother, which is apparently the reason he sticks around as long as he does).

Any problems this story has can be purely chalked up as conceptual ones it inherits by virtue of digging up Alexander rather then issues with its localized narrative structure. Simply put, Alexander was never a good idea, or at least the way they introduced him wasn’t a good idea. The stink of “Reunion” is going to hang over the poor kid forever no matter what he does (and he does do some good stuff). Actually, the most annoying thing about “New Ground” is that like 80% of it works as a perfectly standalone introduction to Alexander before Deanna Troi has to come in and talk about how K’Ehleyr hurt both of them by not telling Worf about her pregnancy and not telling Alexander anything about his father or his Klingon heritage and how they both have to heal each other together. Of course, it’s all K’Ehleyr’s fault-The girlfriend and mother conveniently cut out of the picture who also conveniently can’t come back to defend herself.

The plot, such as it is, fairly clearly is designed with a form-follows-function approach in mind. Kid shows up to live with his single parent, has trouble adjusting, gets into problems, situation arises where they’re forced to work together and reconcile. The acting is good on everyone’s part, but it always is, isn’t it? That’s barely worth mentioning now. There’s a subplot involving something science fictiony and technobabley going on that crosses over with the A-plot, which is another device Star Trek: The Next Generation can use as a comfortable fallback. It’s not as well put-together as it sometimes is (the idea that the sci-fi plot and the human plot could be the same and metaphors for each other was ossified way back in “We’ll Always Have Paris”), but it works and it’s cool, which always helps. I do remember the major setpieces here fairly well: That oscillating electric blue wave surging towards the main viewer, the explosive backdraft in the science lab with Worf and Commander Riker on either side.

But while “New Ground” may be constructed out of pre-built narrative devices that have become tropes, much as one might with Duplo blocks, it’s telling that this time I’m not meaning it as a criticism. There’s nothing blatantly ill-advised or backwards-thinking here, though trying to graft this kind of stock bad children’s television plot onto Star Trek: The Next Generation isn’t the most elegant thing the show has ever done.…

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There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that has always been imprinted on me. In my mind, I see an image of Data and somebody else slowly moving about inside what appears to be some kind of alien spacecraft. The walls are all odd, geometric shapes coloured silver blue. There’s a cool, yet dark, lighting to the scene. I think the episode is “A Matter of Time”, but I can’t know for sure.

So now you’ve heard their story. It’s time to tell the other side.

“A Matter of Time” is another of Rick Berman’s rare solo contributions, and marks his first stab at a topic that seems to fascinate him and inspire a lot of his future creative work on Start Trek: The ramifications of time travel. In particular, what kinds of social norms and mores would crop up in a universe where time travel technology is commonplace. As it pertains to this story, Berman cites the “Mark Twain” feeling” of “what Leonardo da Vinci could have done with a calculator or Alexander the Great with a shotgun”. But while Professor Berlinghoff Rasmussen may not technically be a historian, this doesn’t mean he’s just a simple con-man with a time machine either.

Yeah, Rasmussen was one of ours. Bad seed; went rogue. More or less harmless in the scheme of things, mostly because he was also terrible at his job. We found the time pod adrift in space, probably crippled during one of their skirmishes. We brought it to him for analysis and to keep it safe, hopefully so we could finally get some answers about this damn war. The agents found out, of course. They came to us and told us we had to return it because it would endanger the future-Their future, naturally. Our thinking was that they’d spent so much time meddling in our present, it’d only be fair if we poked around in theirs for a bit to see for ourselves what all this was about. Of course, Rasmussen thought it would be an easy way to make some extra coin.

The thing that struck me the most about “A Matter of Time” is how aware of its own structure it is. For 97% of its running time, it’s very straightforwardly one kind of story: Rasmussen’s presence prompts the Enterprise crew to realise that Penthara IV is not going to be a run-of-the-mill mission; that something genuinely historic is going to happen. And the knowledge that it will, and they aren’t allowed to know anything more about it than that, forces the crew (most notably Captain Picard, but Commander Riker, Geordi, Doctor Crusher and Deanna as well) to consciously think about their own decision making processes and ethical standpoints. It’s not shoehorning conflict into Star Trek: The Next Generation for the sake of conflict, it’s another manifestation of what travelling on the Enterprise means: That you get to know yourself better and grow as a person because of that.…

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“It’s almost facile, trivial, in fact, to read “Unification”. The fandom narrative is both obvious and trite: The unification of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or to be more precise, their fans. Collectively the first and second parts of a three-part 25th Anniversary gala celebration that will heal once and for all the acrimonious rift in Star Trek fandom that has existed since 1986, or so the story goes. In truth, this is all merely comforting platitudes designed to hide a reality deeply uncomfortable to Trekkers; that there is no such thing as a Star Trek fan. There are only fans of specific incarnations and philosophies of the meta-work, something that the looming premier of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is only going to highlight all the more starkly.” 

“And sure, Sarek has an incredibly memorable scene with Captain Picard, but all that does is reinforce the Captain’s position in the narrative: It sets up that Jean-Luc is someone Sarek has a history with and is close enough with that he’ll have him near while his mental faculties are slipping away from him. Indeed, we even learn that Sarek and Jean-Luc had mind-melded at one point, a fact that is left, like the rest of their relationship (and so much about the new show’s backstory) to our imaginations in the negative space of the narrative ether. 

(The scene itself, I might add, really is a triumph. It’s a lot more brightly lit than I remember, though: My memories of this exchange always cast it in very stark shadow, something very much akin to “Lonely Among Us”, or even “The Empath” from the Original Series. I guess it’s the combined effect of the detail revealed by the Blu-ray restoration and the fact I no longer watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on a hulking 1980s CRT TV. I think I’ll still remember it that way though.)  

With all that said, perhaps you’ll forgive me that in a two-part story that explicitly invokes the Original Series with guest appearances from two prominent characters from that show that the most memorable part of this episode for me personally is actually the B-plot involving staking out a space junkyard.”

And now, the conclusion…

Of the two “Unification” halves, this is the one my memory tends to shortchange the most. Pretty much all of the moments from this story that are personally iconic and resonant for me hail from part 1, while this one I always seem to remember as being an extended runaround to make Spock look awesome. That turns out to not be the case at all, however: “Unification II” is one of the most sophisticated and nuanced stories Star Trek: The Next Generation has done in a very long time and certainly earns the classic status is accrues along with its predecessor.…

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It’s almost facile, trivial, in fact, to read “Unification”. The fandom narrative is both obvious and trite: The unification of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or to be more precise, their fans. Collectively the first and second parts of a three-part 25th Anniversary gala celebration that will heal once and for all the acrimonious rift in Star Trek fandom that has existed since 1986, or so the story goes. In truth, this is all merely comforting platitudes designed to hide a reality deeply uncomfortable to Trekkers; that there is no such thing as a Star Trek fan. There are only fans of specific incarnations and philosophies of the meta-work, something that the looming premier of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is only going to highlight all the more starkly.

Those classical Star Trek fans, who knew everything about everything and everybody, are now so small a minority as to be statistically irrelevant. Perhaps things are beginning to swing back to the other pole these days in the age of Netflix and binge watching, but this was most certainly the state of affairs in 1991. I know this as well as I can know anything because I was there. I was fully present and entirely swept up in the Star Trek 25th Anniversary fervor. A deeply strange celebration for me personally, I should add, as I knew next to nothing about the thing that was actually turning 25, and, to be honest, I didn’t much care to learn. All I knew was that the show I sat in front of the TV set transfixed by late at night was now suddenly everywhere and everyone I knew was talking about it.

We’ve of course established that Star Trek: The Next Generation was never a cult show, but even by its admittedly lofty standards things had definitely been kicked into high gear. Some of this is on me, as I never really talked about this sort of thing with other people (for the simple fact that I had nobody else to talk about it with: I don’t mean the show was unpopular, I mean I had no neighbours and my only friends were the people I was related to). But even so, I do seem to recall that this was the first time I started to become aware of Star Trek: The Next Generation existing as kind of large-scale media phenomenon-As if from nothing, there were suddenly Star Trek: The Next Generation toys showing up on the shelves of the local five-and-dime, which filled me with equal parts delight and astonishment. This was also around the time I started to get entertainment industry magazines like Starlog, and Star Trek: The Next Generation was the only thing on anybody’s mind. It felt exciting and affirmational to be a part of something that so many people clearly had so much affection for.…

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Oh, hell no. Fuck this. Fuck everything about this.

It’s never a good day when Wesley Goddamn Crusher shows up. Doubly so when he stars in a horrid piece of youth-hating reactionary drivel. It’s bad enough he’s back in insufferable early first season “Wesley Saves The Day by Out-Thinking the Ship Full of Trained Scientific Professionals” mode without the show then putting him in a plot reminiscent of a Bush-era After School Special.

“The Game” is about a bunch of aliens trying to hook the Enterprise crew on an addictive video game that’s really a mind control device in disguise in order to spearhead an invasion of the Federation. And in 1991, at the height of Sonic the Hedgehog mania and the dawn of the fourth console generation, there’s really only one fucking way to read that. Even though we’ve not quite arrived at the defining video game moral panic of the 1990s set in motion by Mortal Kombat and Doom, there was still mounting concern over the industry’s rapid rise to prominence throughout the Long 1980s and “video game addiction” was certainly starting to become a popular buzzword and the hip new way for moral guardians to clutch their rosary beads and fret about the poisoning of the youth. And with this episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that had a not-insignificant level of clout with kids, is throwing its lot right in with them.

Although he makes overtures to Invasion of the Body Snatchers too, even writer Brannon Braga explicitly confirms this is what this episode is about. And of course it is. Literally, what else could it be about? And while video game addiction is an actual thing (in fact, it’s probably way more of a thing now then it was in 1991), I do not want to hear the hyperconservative Long 1990s take on this issue ever again, and *certainly* not from Brannon fucking “I now write 24 and that awful fucking reboot of Cosmos” Braga. Don’t get me wrong, the man’s terribly underrated as a creator and has his talents (and we’ll get to them in another season or so), but he doesn’t make a convincing case for himself at all in his debut outing as a staff writer. Seriously, when your story makes Codename: Sailor V look progressive by contrast, something has gone irreparably off the rails somewhere along the way.

Ashley Judd is in this episode. She is good. That’s all I have to say about that.

I suppose I’d better provide some background context to all this for those reading who didn’t live through more video game hardware cycles than they’d care to admit or spend way too much of their free time in a Sisyphean endeavour to write about the industry positively and productively. The transformation of video games as both a medium and an industry over the course of the Long 1980s is an interesting one (Well, to me it is at any rate): To start out with, and I know how hard this is to believe looking at them today, but video games actually started out as a pastime for active social adults.…

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