TNG Season 7

Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“I suppose it’s worth pointing out the possible significance in the fact that the first few acts of “Gambit” chronicle the crew’s search for Captain Picard, missing and presumed murdered, and their efforts to discover the identity of his would-be killer and bring them to justice.” 

“It’s exciting to watch Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Data all try to think around each other and anticipate each other’s moves so as not to put the undercover operation with the pirates or their safety in jeopardy. Pulling it off requires them all to have an absolutely peerless level of intimacy with each other, so this is a really fitting test to give to this crew, especially at this stage in their career. It’s especially noticeable and interesting with Data, who is forced to apply everything he’s learned about human(oid) behaviour and culture in order to ensure he doesn’t let the Enterprise down during his first real stint as acting captain.” 

“There are still some lingering problems, though. For one, it’s a bit annoying that it is once again Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Data who get the majority of the interesting dramatic and strategic stuff. Doctor Crusher gets one scene in the teaser and then never appears again, and, most egregiously, Deanna Troi is reduced to spouting hollow, tin-eared expository dialog when really she ought to be the one doing most of the heavy tactical and psychological lifting.” 

“Also, another thing that bugs me is that for a story about space pirates, these guys really suck at being pirates. Captain Picard is absolutely right when he tells Tallera that Baran is a poor captain because he relies on fear and intimidation. Ruthless though they might have been, pirate ships were famously democratic and egalitarian institutions for their time, and it was most certainly a better career move (from both a financial and safety perspective) for a sailor to sign up with a pirate ship than to enlist in the navy or merchant marine.” 

“Of course this line of thought, as well as Captain Picard’s rather brilliant recursive performance as Galen, just makes me really want to see a Star Trek: The Next Generation AU where the Enterprise crew are a bunch of outlaw space pirates who get their kicks fucking with the big galactic imperial powers.”

And now, the conclusion…

Every great pirate adventure story needs to have a quest to find a secret hidden mystical treasure out on a lost island somewhere. “Gambit” dutifully gives us “The Stone of Gol”, which is brilliantly split into pieces and scattered across the galaxy for aspiring treasure hunters, supervillains and legendary heroes alike to go questing after, just like in all good fantasy RPG video games. It’s a very fitting MacGuffin for the Star Trek: The Next Generation universe’s take on adventure stories because it’s explicitly connected to the most overtly fantasy-coded of their alien races, namely, the Vulcano-Romuloids.…

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I suppose it’s worth pointing out the possible significance in the fact that the first few acts of “Gambit” chronicle the crew’s search for Captain Picard, missing and presumed murdered, and their efforts to discover the identity of his would-be killer and bring them to justice. I will still stubbornly maintain that Star Trek: The Next Generation can’t live without Captain Picard, and the symbolism behind a plot twist like this to me seems obvious. A Star Trek: The Next Generation without anyone would be unthinkable, but especially him, the public face of the series to millions. The only other character whose death would be more openly and visibly catastrophic to the show’s continued existence would be the Enterprise itself.

Ironic then how “Gambit, Part I” is the moment where this season finally gets its act together and stops faffing around. Not that this show has ever been terrific at season openers, mind, but the one-two punch of “Liasons” and “Interface” was excruciating in a way we’ve really not seen in six or seven years. This is a story I’ve always remembered as a highlight of this year ever since I saw it as part of TNN’s reruns (I might have seen it when it aired as well, but I don’t have strong memories of it from that time period), and I was perhaps understandably relieved to see that it’s essentially as good as I thought it was. My favourite scene is the teaser, with the crew undercover at a seedy alien bar: They naturally play their parts perfectly, and, as counterintutive as it perhaps might seem, it really feels like they belong in an environment like this (more on that later). That’s another thing I remember vividly from this run of stories: Dank extraterrestrial dives with dark mood lighting, abrasive characters and a lot of grates and sheet metal (except for the one time it was a cramped bar with a lot of bright, gold colours). In hindsight, it was probably the influence and cross-pollination from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Of course Captain Picard’s not really dead, and from there we move to what is in my opinion a positively delightful adventure mystery story. It probably tells you all you need to know that this is a two-parter both the fans and writers alike have a rather negative take on: Even Brannon Braga, who talks sense more often than not, says that “Gambit” is of a genre that’s “not usually taken seriously” and that it’s beneath the show to do an episode like this. He’s also of the mind that it was a bad call to open up with the whodunnit cliffhanger, because audiences were never going to buy that the captain was really dead. Which, to be frank, just displays a startling lapse in media literacy and a lack of understanding about how cliffhangers and dramatic tension are actually supposed to work.…

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Is it bad I can’t remember what this episode is called? I’ve literally had to go look up how the title is spelled three times since sitting down to write this.

Over the course of this project I’ve noticed Star Trek: The Next Generation takes a roughly annual delight in a sub-genre of story I’ve decided to call “Let’s Torture Geordi”. Ever since the third season (hmmmm) the show, for want of anything better to do with Geordi La Forge, decides to put him through an increasingly mean-spirited and downright ludicrous series of wringers more or less because they can. This team has, in turn, given him a neurotic complex he never had before, turned him into the creepiest human being imaginable by having him get it on with pretend women, forced him to mutate into a neon sea slug and had him brainwashed into a killing machine by his batshit insane murderous alien ex-girlfriend. Even Michael Jan Friedman is not immune to the fun, writing the two-part story “Seraphin’s Survivors”/“Shadows in the Garden” about Geordi acting uncharacteristically defensive and oversensitive when his childhood friend/lover comes aboard, thus blinding him to the fact she’s a space vampire who eats people. A few issues later, he had Geordi entranced by space mermaids in “I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing” and almost blow up the ship in his reverie.

All in all, sounds like an eminently respectful and legitimate, serious grown-up series of dramatic performances to give to LeVar Burton, national treasure and cultural icon who reads to children on Reading Rainbow and played Kunta Kinte on Roots.

“Interface” or “Interphase” or “Whatever The Fuck It’s Called I Don’t Give A Shit Anymore” is the episode I would call the requisite “Let’s Torture Geordi” outing for this season, although we got a nice preview in “Descent, Part II’ when Doctor Frankendata sticks strobes in Geordi’s forehead and tries to infect his brain with the Replicators from Stagate SG-1. It’s two half-assed stories stitched together into an even more half-assed whole: The first a bog-standard mid-90s virtual reality piece and the second a look into Geordi’s family history. Which, this team being this team, we have to explore by brutally killing everyone off and watching drooling, leering and slack-jawed as Geordi bears his grief for us, publicly retreating into his own mind and memories in the vain, desperate hope to be able to feel something again.

Jesus.

This was not an episode I watched at the time, and thus isn’t one that contributed anything to the mental landscape Star Trek: The Next Generation inhabits for me. The only thing I remember is the ridiculous-looking interface device itself from a shot in a magazine somewhere, and that I kept confusing it with the equally bullshit mind-control contrivance from that stupid fucking Manchurian Candidate story with Commander Sela from the fourth season. You’d think, with this episode being about inner worlds and psychology and everything, themes I’ve often gone on record as praising in this season, this would be right up my alley.…

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There’s a scene near the beginning of “Liaisons” that kills the entire episode for me. It’s where Worf and Commander Riker are putting on their dress uniforms and Worf grumbles about the outfit being “too feminine”. This earns him a deserved reprimand by Riker, which I still hate for two reasons. One, I hate any scene like this where one character upsets another, especially a friend. Two, it’s impossible for me not to read the narrative as siding with Worf: Worf is manly and grumpy and the writers love him because of that, and they hate this lame stuff about “utopianism” and “equality” that constrains their beloved “conflict”.

You know what? Fuck off. This one scene is emblematic of absolutely everything that has ever been wrong with Star Trek: The Next Generation since these guys took over in 1989.

I’m really not motivated to look further into the episode after that, frankly. It’s not like “Liaisons” is a particularly beloved episode and it’s not like I’m missing a whole lot: The entire premise of “alien dignitaries trying to experience strange and unfamiliar human emotion by deliberately pissing people off” sounds like a brief for a particularly weak Original Series episode (or at least memorably weak, as they were, to be blunt, *all* weak). Bad Original Series knock-offs were passé in the first season. To have one show up in the seventh is frankly astonishing, and that’s another indication of something that’s always been wrong with this show: Nobody seems willing to take it on its own terms. Nothing can ever escape the shadow of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, even (especially) when it’s already been explicitly killed off.

The original pitch for this episode was apparently for a “Let’s Do” take on Misery, the Stephen King story about a famous author who is kidnapped by an obsessive, murderous fan after getting badly injured in a car accident. I am dumbfounded the team even bought the pitch, because for the life of me I cannot figure out how in the universe that *wasn’t* going to turn into a horrific disaster. Misery is frequently read as being about the perils of fan culture, and in the context of Star Trek: The Next Generation in its final year that could only be projected onto Star Trek fans. And applying that to Trekkers, even indirectly, seems like a crateringly awful decision that could go wrong in a myriad of different, equally appalling ways.

For one thing, it’s staggeringly hypocritical for a show made exclusively by and for Star Trek fans to be criticizing other Star Trek fans. Oh, so it’s bad now to be an overzealous Star Trek or science fiction enthusiast? I’m not disagreeing, but who in the hell are the biggest, most overzealous and overenthusiastic Star Trek fans in existence if not the people currently writing this show and using it as methadone for their sexually frustrated creative impulses sparked watching the Original Series as little boys (and yes, I’m using deliberately gendered language here)?…

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“’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.” 

“This is not the same as critiquing, say Captain Picard’s specific actions in that episode: In fact, the whole reason Alynna Nechayev is here is to further reinforce that he acted wisely and correctly-Let’s not forget that Nechayev is the first Starfleet Admiral *overtly* coded as actively evil. Her very condemnation of Picard’s choice lets us know that he made the right one. Rather, what “Descent” is attacking is the notion that moral choice was ever necessary: There is no moral dilemma in regards to the sanctity of life; it should be preserved and respected above all else no matter what, end of, and ‘I, Borg’ was stupid to insinuate that wasn’t the case and to put Captain Picard and Guinan in the position of neglecting that.” 

“Because what the Borg have done here in ‘Descent’ is, terrifyingly, assimilate the very concepts of individual positionality and human empathy themselves. They’ve taken two of the most sacred tenets by which Star Trek operates, ground them into the engines of capitalism and turned them back against us in an attempt to quell any resistance we could offer before we reached a point where we were prepared to effect change. 

The Borg’s endgame is, and always has been, to kill off Star Trek as Star Trek: The Next Generation before it transitions to the form that will do battle with them on their own terms. And even if they were to fail here, they’d still be ready for us in the future. Either way, they win.”

“And who better to mastermind it all than a psychopathic fascist android?”

And now, the conclusion…

It’s hard not to go into “Descent, Part II” without acknowledging that this is the beginning of the end for Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s televisual voyage. The news had broken over the summer, so there’s no point in pretending the shadow of cancellation wasn’t looming long over the seventh season. Let’s clarify a few facts first and foremost then: Yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation was prematurely canceled. Yes, it was canceled because Paramount wanted to launch a film series with the Next Generation cast. Production costs had gone up and, with the show as popular as it had ever been, they thought it would be more profitable to start a new film series than to continue the TV one. They were wrong.…

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