TNG Season 6

The Borg are back.

“Descent” marks an important turning point in a number of respects. Up front, it’s the first time Star Trek: The Next Generation has done a cliffhanger season finale more or less only because this is the sort of thing it does to close off filming block seasons; in other words, the first time the cliffhanger finale structure is implemented as a matter of course and functional habit instead of being the result of unexpected necessity. “The Best of Both Worlds” was born out of a narrative-melting crisis springing from the chaos of the third season’s production as well as contract disputes with Patrick Stewart’s agent. “Redemption” was a double length story done to lead into the 25th Anniversary year and to accommodate the bombshell return of Denise Crosby, as well as closing off Worf’s epic story arc about his isolation from his Klingon heritage (oh how naive we all once were). And “Time’s Arrow” wasn’t even going to be a a two-parter until the building hype for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started to concern viewers that Star Trek: The Next Generation was going off the air.

Interestingly enough, much of this remains palpable swirling about the thematic and aesthetic core of “Descent”. Most notably, of course, the Borg. What’s important to remember about the Borg’s status in Star Trek is their joint role as extradiegetic challenge and interloping threat: The Borg are not exactly a dark mirror of the Federation, and while it’s tempting to call them purveyors of narrative collapse, they’re actually not. “The Best of Both Worlds” threatened to be a narrative collapse, but if it had been that would have been the show doing that to itself-The Borg winning was a symptomatic result of the show’s panic-stricken crisis, not the cause of it. The closest Star Trek: The Next Generation has actually come to narrative collapse is the forced artifice of “Chain of Command”, which examined the potential threat of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine dispersing its older sister by purging Bajor and the Cardassian occupation from it. Crucially, this story came not long after two other double-length episodes meant to reassure us this wasn’t going to happen (one of which even featured a cameo by the Borg). Since then, we’ve seen Gul Ocett on this side of the lot and there’s even a Bajoran extra in “Descent” itself.

In practice, the Borg are actually more of a counterfactual narrative invader. They come from Star Trek’s future, and as iconic as they may be to Star Trek: The Next Generation in pop culture they fundamentally do not belong here. The Borg represent all the darkness and ugliness the Star Trek universe inherits as part of its pedigree, the terrifying end result of science fiction’s teleology and technological determinism gone horribly right. And, keenly aware of the show’s perpetually unfulfilled potential, the Borg lie in wait for a moment of weakness to strike and appropriate.…

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A river, flowing to eternity. Frozen.

But even when frozen, water does not stand still. There is movement and kinetic energy at the molecular level, imperceptible though it might be to normal human senses. Water’s mercurial nature is in its ability to remain fluid throughout many different forms.

In the depths of space, due to the extreme temperatures, water does not solidify into the crystalline lattice commonly associated with ice, but ice still exists. It is still freezing. In space, ice forms as an amorphous solid, transitioning in an instant to a kind of cosmic glass. Amorphous ice is likely the most common form of water in the universe.

On Earth, a lake frozen over in winter appears still and silent as the world around it appears locked in suspended animation. But beneath the surface, life goes on: Some fish, such as trout, are actually *more* active during the winter, while many species of insect spend their larval stages underwater during the winter in temperatures that can average a balmy 1-4 degrees Celsius in places. Winter is not a finite cessation of life, but a part of the continuing cycle of life.

There are events still in motion even as the world seems to sleep, setting the stage for the inevitable spring. And so the cycle begins again.

There are few stories that have become so much a part of my being and existence as “Timescape”. Rewatching it the other night reminded me why. There are some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that instantly come to mind when I think of the series-I’ve already mentioned “The Chase” is one this season. “Timescape” is not one of those episodes. It’s in a category beyond that, existing only as a vivid sensory memory. When I think of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I don’t think of this *story*, I think of its *images*: The Enterprise locked in combat with a Romulan Warbird. The eerily silent dreamlike atmosphere of the ship itself as she and her crew remain suspended in the unfolding moment. Deanna Troi making her way through a frozen sickbay, visibly astonished at the sight of Doctor Crusher in the midst of being crippled by a disruptor blast. Those images have lingered in the back of my psyche as clear as they were on first transmission for over twenty years.

Not so much Captain Picard playing with the warp core breach in engineering, though it’s every bit as evocative and fitting. It certainly plays well for Tumblr, though.

I sometimes forget who else is stuck with Deanna outside in normal space-time. Not because Captain Picard, Data or (Prophets forbid) Geordi are low-key or forgettable presences, but because Deanna is the person I seem to have fixated on the most in these sets of images. Perhaps I’ve subconsciously connected “Timescape” with forthcoming episodes like “Dark Page” and “Eye of the Beholder” that share the same space in my memory, are equally dreamlike and in which Deanna also plays an important role.…

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Wait…Didn’t I already cover this one last season? Oh well, it was a great issue worth hyping up again, even if talking about it here almost a year later loses a lot of the context of reading it as part of its story arc. Anyway, so this is issue four of the story arc I dubbed Separation Anxiety after the title of issue three. The story on the whole deals with the saucer and stardrive sections of the Enterprise being flung to opposite ends of the galaxy after an encounter with a mysterious alien relay station. All the while, the crews of both ships are engaged in combat with a territorial race called the Sztazzan, who new transfer officer Terry Oliver has had tragic prior dealings with.

A major theme of this story are bridges, both actual starship bridges and structures that can either bring people together or keep them apart. Terry Oliver hates the Sztazzan for a previous skirmish she was involved in that resulted in the destruction of her former ship and the deaths of its crewmembers, and she’s paralleled with both Chief O’Brien (this was originally released before Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered, you understand) and Ro Laren, both of whom have had similar traumatic experiences with enemy combatants, but whom have been able to deal with their grief and trauma in more positive and constructive ways. But this issue was a turning point for Terry, because on an away team mission led by Doctor Beverly Crusher, and following a conversation about moving beyond hate with Chief O’Brien, she finds a wounded Sztazzan officer and…

Fuck, that’s not the right “Second Chances” is it? Dammit.

Unlike the comic book that shares its name, this “Second Chances” is about a transporter accident that split Will Riker into two halves during a mission on one of his old ships. And also unlike the comic book “Second Chances”, this episode is a piece of shit.

It’s never sat quite well with me, even back in the day (“back in the day” here referring to the early 2000s, as this is another episode I didn’t watch on original transmission) how the show felt the need to jump through a bunch of rhetorical and technobabble excuses to come up with a second Riker who could be more rakish and insubordinate for a *lot* of reasons. Firstly, it once again smacks of conflict-for-conflict’s-sake childishness, but it also idolizes the wrong parts of Will’s personality (or what people seem to think Will’s personality is). And don’t you for one minute think this writing team didn’t 100% prefer writing for Thomas over writing for Will: There was even an idea floating around early in this episode’s pre-production that Will would be killed off and Tom would take his place (or rather Data’s, who would have been promoted to first officer), because nobody was going to expect it and it would have shaken up the crew dynamic.…

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I don’t know how you screw up a concept like “Klingon Ice Monastery”, but they do.

You know, I think I’m just done listening to stories about Worf and Klingon heritage. Especially as told by Ron Moore.

Here’s another episode I vaguely remember liking that completely turned me off on the rewatch. It’s not one I have really fond memories of from back in the day-This was an episode I only caught once TNN started rerunning Star Trek: The Next Generation in the early 2000s. Consequently I’m not super broken up about having “Rightful Heir” fall flat for me as I don’t have any particularly potent nostalgia affixed to it and this season has been strong enough it can afford to give us a few duds at this point in the year….Even if we do seem to have, since “Suspicions” (and looking ahead to next week), crossed over into the Enterprise variant of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s month and a half long water-treading session.

None of you need to hear my reasons for being alienated by this episode. I most certainly do not need to go into my litany of disagreements with Ron Moore’s philosophy, writing style and approach to characterization again. My issues with “Rightful Heir” are the same ones I had with “Redemption”, only magnified to an even greater extent because I no longer have the time or patience to humour them. Worf is by now cripplingly overexposed as a character and has had way, way too many showcase episodes, even just this season alone. And the only reason he is so overexposed is because he’s the only character (on either show, frankly) that Moore actually enjoys writing for because he’s also the only character Moore knows how to write for. That’s a big problem for a showrunner, and an ever-present one.

(Moore isn’t the sole showrunner of The Next Generation by a longshot, but given Rick Berman and Michael Piller’s promotion to franchise overseers, the complex web of the producer/writer relationship and Jeri Taylor’s position, he definitely is one of them. He’s certainly the most senior staff writer by this point. This does not, however, make him the best.)

I mean should I even make an attempt to derive some erudition about the Klingons from their depiction in this episode? What more is there to say? It’s Moore-type Klingons. Ridiculous cartoon Viking/Dwarf stereotypes who like to eat, drink and stab in no particular order. Even the monks. Especially the monks. There’s a ghost of an interesting idea where the Kahless clone calls out the Klingons at the monastery for forgetting the reason why they fight and it almost seems like the story is going down a kind of jihad route by framing this in terms of a righteous struggle. And then it doesn’t, because of fucking course it doesn’t. I should have given up my hopes to see non-warrior caste and non-cartoon Klingons after the first season ended.…

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And this would be a good example of *why* Star Trek: The Next Generation is straining against its material constraints.

I was originally planning to criticize “Suspicions” for being grimdark-Just another boring and juvenile “lengths they will go”, “doing that which must be done” exercise in false depth. But in reality if it’s grimdark, it’s only halfheartedly so, because “Suspicions” is halfhearted everything. The grimdark stuff feels like going through the motions, as if there’s just this assumption that any story about a murder investigation simply has to be grimdark for the portagonists to have any stake in solving it (tracing grimdark’s lineage back to Frank Miller is almost a cliché these days, but the comparison does need to be drawn in this circumstance as those are his signature beats to the letter, albeit really watered down and done in a middling fashion). And, for that matter, that we need token “character development” every week to hold the show together. Which, if we’re being perfectly honest, is precisely the kind of assumption it’s reasonable to guess was floating around this production team’s offices, even if it’s not as dogmatic as it might be amongst their colleagues across the street.

But more to the point, “Suspicions” is just a boring and inept production. The flashback and voiceover stuff is resoundingly pilloried in fandom (which is something of a surprise for me to learn, as I’d always figured this episode was rather well liked for the aforementioned grimdark), and there is something to be said about the hackneyed use of such noir staples to the point it’s become an almost instantaneous signifier of the parodical. However, given that this precise format is going to be used to astronomical success and wild acclaim in little under a year just with Odo instead of Beverly, I’d be careful about writing that off as a fault of “Suspicions”. Maybe then Star Trek: The Next Generation is just bad at this kind of story: While writer Naren Shankar doesn’t say that, he does say that he didn’t think he was very good at writing murder mysteries.

While I can’t speak for Shankar, I do think it would be silly to argue this crew can’t do murder mysteries. It’s true that given its setting Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a little better poised to handle a brief like this, but it’s not impossible to do it over here. “Aquiel” from earlier in the year was a damn good one as far as I was concerned, and it was successful because it remembered the major strength of Star Trek, and especially this version of it, is competency porn and that this crew shines the brightest when you let them do the things they’re good at in service of working together to solve the mystery. And that the best way you do that is essentially write a kind of procedural, but the most naturalistic and engaging procedural you’ve ever seen.…

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It was only a matter of time before we returned to the dark recesses.

In many ways “Frame of Mind” is Brannnon Braga’s archetypal Star Trek: The Next Generation story. It certainly bears all of his trademarks: A bold and unafraid examination of genuinely dark psychological horror themes done with a deft and ambitious surrealist flair. Braga is also flatly unafraid to throw us some undiluted theory, with copious quotations, citations and visual nods to the work of Carl Jung. It’s a candid and refreshing bolt of unashamed intellectualism that goes a long way towards letting us know what Braga thinks his show’s audience is like: Star Trek isn’t exactly patronizing, or at least not as much as a lot of other television is, but even so it’s still rare for it to be this frankly and openly (and literally) philosophical, and every time it happens it feels like this really should be the way the show always operates. Pretty much nowhere else are you going to get a 200-level course on Jungian psychology and dream theory told through a mini piece of abstract sci-fi cinema on primetime television.

Braga’s debt to his idol David Lynch is certainly on display tonight. We wouldn’t expect to see blatant body horror on Star Trek: The Next Generation (…yet), but the suitably dreamlike (or should I say nightmarish) flow to the story brought exquisitely to life through James L. Conway’s direction remains undeniably Lynchian, and also very, very Brannon Braga. And yet in spite of the entirely deserved wild acclaim this episode gets from fandom (it’s yet another stellar highlight of an absolutely astronomical creative period), when you sit down to watch “Frame of Mind” it actually comes across as one of Braga’s more restrained and subdued offerings: As haunting as the concept of perceptive reality being in constant flux and turmoil is and as absolutely gripping as Jonathan Frakes is as the beleaguered Will Riker (unquestionably one of his absolutely finest hours on the series, end of: Frakes should have at least been nominated for something), the central premise remains surprisingly pedestrian, at least by Braga standards.

As the series is obviously not going to undo six years of character development and world building in 45 minutes, we know from the start the “real” world is the Enterprise, or some manifestation of it. The game then becomes trying to guess how many iterations we have to pass through and the meaning of a handful of specific psychological signifiers. Unlike Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, which I once compared to “Frame of Mind” long ago and far away, there’s never any genuine doubt cast here onto the true nature of observable reality, it’s always just a matter of getting to the bottom of the mystery that’s caused things to go all meta-Lynchian and freaky this week. Even when compared to the utterly sublime dreamworld symbolic logic of Braga’s own “Birthright, Part I” a few weeks back, “Frame of Mind”’s hook of “Riker wakes up in an insane asylum and doesn’t know how he got there” feels fairly straightforward and almost simplistic.…

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“The Chase” is definitive Star Trek: The Next Generation for me. It’s one of those episodes I find truly iconic, everything I want this show to be and one of the first stories that comes to mind whenever I think of it in passing. There’s quite a lot of those this year.

And yet I’m finding it hard to come up with things to say about it that aren’t obvious. I guess I’ll address the only real potential criticism I can think of straight away: The von Dänikenism stuff at the end is a little bit iffy and arguably anthropocentric, even if it does fit into the continuity of the established Star Trek universe without incident. But that’s sort of the problem with this kind of writing, isn’t it? Science fiction writers can focus on details like world-building minutiae and miss the larger social implications of their work. It must be said, however, that Ron Moore and Joe Menosky cite Carl Sagan’s Contact rather than Chariots of the Gods? and “The Chase” does provide the interesting wrinkle that the protohumanoids were responsible not for the cultures and religions of the species they gave birth to, but to existence itself, theirs being the only intelligent life in that part of the galaxy (and I like the stipulation “this part of the galaxy” because it hedges against the common sci-fi tendency to downplay the immense size of the observable universe: Maybe intelligent life evolved in other forms elsewhere in the universe. Maybe even in our galaxy, like, say, on the other side of that wormhole near Bajor).

I also adore the protohumanoid’s speech: It’s such a beautiful and fitting Star Trek message delivered with warmth and conviction by Salome Jens. And from a Vaka Rangi perspective, it’s even more appropriate: Cherish and respect life, because we are all living beings bound together by consciousness. And it’s entirely fitting that this is a message we hear at the conclusion of a vast, galaxy-hopping adventure (and it’s a testament to how much progress we’ve made this year that I don’t even feel the need to point out how well served the cast is, with everyone getting to show off their skills in an effective and memorable way to help solve the puzzle): It’s a perfectly effective Star Trek metaphor for the very things we voyage to understand.

Jens’ one-scene wonder also showcases what an absolutely killer week this is for guest stars: Apart from her, Norman Lloyd is absolutely wonderful as Captain Picard’s old archeology professor and mentor, and he brings a lovely and moving bittersweetness to every scene he’s in. Just in passing, Professor Galen’s subplot with Captain Picard is a naturalistically flawless demonstration of what’s become such a hallmark of this series: An examination of your life guided by awareness, and acceptance, of the weight of your past on your present self. Jean-Luc’s words to Beverly about the weight of the past resonated particularly with me: I think it’s the best depiction of this theme in the season, and one of the best in the whole series.…

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I’m afraid this is going to be another one of those essays where I don’t have a whole lot to say or anything refreshingly new and interesting to add to the discourse. “Lessons” is bad, it’s bad for boring reasons and it’s bad in ways I’ve actually already discussed at great length in other posts. Normally this would be the kind of episode I’d throw into a multi-episode post, and while both this week’s Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are both equally terrible, they have the obnoxious gall of not being terrible in complimentary ways, which precludes me from doing that.

I would say that the one unique thing I could say about “Lessons” is my statement of dislike itself…I was under the impression that while not considered a great classic or anything, this episode was reasonably warmly received by mainline fandom-A necessary next step in progressing Captain Picard’s story arc after “The Inner Light”. But even mainline fandom seems to be agreeing with me in this case, at least judging by the reaction this episode gets both on Memory Alpha and in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365: Its wiki page as of this writing looks neglected and incomplete and doesn’t even feature the usual quotes and statements from the production team in the notes that most Star Trek stories get, while Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann couldn’t even be bothered to do anything more than halfheartedly re-state the story’s diegetic plot and themes in their own words.

I mean, let’s address the obvious points you know I’m going to bring up right off that bat. Doing a sequel to “The Inner Light” is stupid. Trying to set up a me-or-them contrast between voyaging, especially aboard the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, with a long-term relationship is a false dichotomy. Doing a naval (and navel-gazing) “involved with your subordinates” drama is hackneyed and trite. Captain Picard’s entire attitude feels off, the romance plot is 90s sitcom quality and Commander Riker acting like a jealous schoolboy envious of the teacher’s pet is an asinine and spectacularly out-of-character way to force banal conflict. That much should be obvious. But from my perspective, the problem here is that I’ve essentially already written the essay I wanted to write for this episode, except I did it for “The Outer Light”.

The whole reason I covered “The Outer Light” in the first place was to contrast it with “Lessons”. My idea was to set up my imagined plot for “The Outer Light” (which is not at all what the actual “Outer Light” was) as the proper way to do a sequel to “The Inner Light” while calling out “Lessons” for being rote, derivative and too hung up on an adolescent conception of materialism to add anything to the story worth hearing. My imaginary version of “The Outer Light” (which is not at all what the actual “Outer Light” was) had Captain Picard attending a summit of historians and scientific experts on Kataanian life and culture, all of whom had been contacted by the probe and experienced a slightly different version of the ancestor simulation programme.…

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Superficially, “Starship Mine” resembles a basic, unpretentious action plot done pretty much just because Patrick Stewart wanted to take his shirt off, quip and shoot things. Which it is. But just like “Power Play”, this is an example of Star Trek: The Next Generation doing something counterintuitive with an action brief that we might not necessarily expect from an action sci-fi show that proves how aware of itself and its responsibility it’s finally become.

This is also something *only* Star Trek: The Next Generation could do, at least in 1993. That’s not to say the cast of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine couldn’t have handled a brief like this or that the setting would have precluded it, but the writing staff on that show has something of a problem handling action without it coming across as unreconstructed, bloodthirsty and grimdark and that’s ultimately what’s going to end up killing the series. That didn’t have to happen, of course, but circumstances will eventually dictate that’s what the final obituary will read. But that’s thankfully not for a good while yet. By contrast, Star Trek: The Next Generation has long since become keenly aware of its status and place in history, and a lot of careful thought went into ensuring that, while undeniably fun, “Starship Mine” never crossed the line into becoming a mindless run-and-gun military fantasy. And in fact, this story ends up being one of the most intriguingly provocative out of a year that’s been so stellar already.

Much of this is due to writer Morgan Grendel and Michael Piller. Grendel hates the moniker “Die Hard on the Enterprise” fans tend to appellate “Starship Mine” with (even though come on, it self-evidently is. Grendel even pitched it to Piller as exactly that) and prefers to read it as a story about how Captain Picard loves the Enterprise more than anything else and is willing to go to any lengths to protect it, citing the old naval “the captain goes down with the ship” trope. This is a problematic (and ahistorical) narrative device, but that Grendel invokes it here reveals some interesting things. Even (well, especially) divorced from the naval symbolism I like this idea because it shows how Captain Picard is someone who lives and breathes the spirit of voyaging so much he can’t conceive of ever doing anything else.

I particularly like the scene at the end of the teaser where he’s alone on the bridge, the last person on the ship before the “cleaning crew” comes aboard. He dawdles and takes his time, and Patrick Stewart’s expressions and body language sell the emotions of the moment. He’s in no rush to beam down to the starbase and takes no particular joy in being away from the Enterprise-None of the crew do. The Enterprise is their home and where they belong and they’re never going to be truly happy if they’re apart from it: They’re always going to act a bit restless and awkward, always going to be a fish out of water without someplace to go and discoveries to be made, just as the crew are at Commander Hutchinson’s reception.…

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