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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