No. Unforgivable. Fuck this and everything about it.

Yes, you’re all in luck today. Been awhile since I’ve done a proper polemic on this blog, but here we are: “Reunion” is simply godawful. This one deserves to stand with “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor” among the series’ absolute lowest lows. This episode is pretty much everything I hate about scripted drama in general and Star Trek in particular all neatly wrapped up in a gift bundle.

Unless this is literally the first thing of mine you’ve ever read (in which case, hi! And sorry you had to come in on such a crap episode! Please go read something I enjoyed writing about instead!) you know why I hate “Reunion” as much as I do. What happens to K’Ehleyr is a textbook example of fridging: Randomly and unceremoniously killing off a female character solely to give her male significant other something to lament about. With no agency of her own, she’s treated as a disposable satellite of a male character’s dour, angst-ridden narrative existence. It’s a flagrantly sexist (and in this case, borderline misogynistic given a few concerning habits the show’s developed over the past couple of years and with an eye on one or two specific episodes coming up this season) approach to storytelling that Star Trek: The Next Generation not only has no business engaging with, shouldn’t even be something conceivable to someone working in it.

It tells you something about how rotten and vile the concept of fridging is given that I’m not even a *fan* of K’Ehleyr and I *still* think she deserved better. Every woman does. Yeah, I still think K’Ehleyr was a not-entirely-functional attempt to “spice up” a show and cast the second season creative team didn’t really know what to do with: Her big contribution, setting Worf on a path to put the Klingon and human sides of his personality in better harmony, could have been done a lot of other ways. I mean, isn’t it *also* sort of sexist to have that all wrapped up in a single, female package? That’s just the infamously-dubbed Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, which is just another form of objectification. It’s always a warning sign when men expect you to breeze into their lives, straighten them out and help them figure themselves out. Those are men who don’t know how to grow up.

But you know what? None of that actually matters, because you don’t fridge characters period, not even Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Once again, what does it say that this creative team is so sadistic and creatively bankrupt their first instinct is to wheel in a former one-shot guest character and put a bullet through their head to give one of the mains some more precious “conflict” to deal with? Fuck off. Fuck off and think about what you’ve done.

K’Ehleyr’s death is also stands in for a unanimous vote of no confidence in Suzie Plakson as a potential new member of the Enterprise extended family, which hurts for its own reasons.…

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You would think the moment where Star Trek: The Next Generation finally outlasts Star Trek would be a special occasion and cause for celebration. And yet “Legacy”, a morose, funereal affair that follows on thematically from “Remember Me” in taking a long, hard look at feelings of loss and the contemplation of that which we’ve left behind, is anything but. Surprisingly for a show that was supposedly more popular than it had ever been before, Star Trek: The Next Generation, for the first time, seems to feel apathetic, directionless and depressive.

Whose legacy are we looking at here? Is it Star Trek‘s? Apart from a requisite and hyper-obscure in-joke in the teaser about Camus II and archaeology, there’s nothing really about the Original Series here. Is it Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s? Isn’t that a little premature?

There is someone on everyone’s mind tonight. Of course, that person is Tasha Yar. Her absence weighs heavily both diegetically and extradiegetically: Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s long, dark season of discontent and introspection has finally forced it to come to terms with its biggest and greatest failure. The universe has long changed since the trauma of “Skin of Evil” and it’s going to change again, dramatically, in the not-too-distant future. But this doesn’t mean the ghosts from our past have entirely dissipated, and in order for that new universe to come to pass the show will have to somehow square away its remaining baggage and try to divinate some good from it. If we’re all about “facing our inner demons” now, it’s only fair that we should tackle the biggest one of all head on.

I’m not entirely convinced “Legacy” does that, though. It’s a definite theme to be sure, it’s certainly about this need on some level, and it’s telling Star Trek: The Next Generation is aware of this. But Michael Piller says that if you were to strip away all the backstory about Tasha, you’d be left with a perfectly serviceable, though middling, story about extracting Federation personnel from a crisis situation, akin to something like “The High Ground”. And he’s right: Far from engaging with the spectre of Tasha Yar one-on-one, “Legacy” uses her as window dressing to doll up a filler episode. Which, as much of a kick to the gut as that is, is probably actually more fitting. Piller does say that it’s a very good drama, because it hinges on the betrayal of an innocent (Data), which is always a gripping trope. Once again, Tasha’s story and positionality is rendered a subservient subset of Data’s. Just as it always has been.

Even “Turnabout Intruder” had the courtesy to at least be a fascinatingly hot mess of confused gender roles.

But Michael Piller speaks the literal truth. The man knew his drama, possibly better than anybody else. And “Legacy” is in fact a good drama. But being a good drama does not make it good Star Trek: The Next Generation: That is not, and has never been, sufficient.…

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As is is befitting a show contemplating loss and nostalgic regret, “Remember Me” plays quite knowingly and powerfully over our own memories of that which we have left behind. In our case, memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season: A year that, while comparatively speaking not all that distant from us all things considered, given recent events feels like a whole lifetime away.

Most obviously, of course, this manifests in The Traveller returning to play a pivotal role in the episode’s resolution, bringing with him all the provocative concepts of thought-form magick, reminding us there was once a time when Star Trek: The Next Generation would not be so quick to run away from such things. But it’s not just “Where No One Has Gone Before” that is invoked, but also “11001001”, though the re-use of most of that episode’s iconic effects shots, most notably the Enterprise approaching and mooring inside Spacedock. It’s bittersweet that these, two of the most vividly iconic, haunting and defining visual landscapes of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s inaugural year, would be the ones to be revisited now. I already feel a pang of nostalgic sadness and yearning for the feelings I associate with those images, even though the part of me that recently wrote a whole book on the historical era they’re from remembers how even then the show had its slew of bungled opportunities and bad decisions. And even though I know what’s just around the corner.

“Remember Me”’s central themes about people and memories tending to fade with age if we’re not careful and letting people know you appreciate them while you have the chance are fairly obvious. Textually overt, even, what with the fact the whole warp dimension was conjured up out of Beverly’s thoughts as she was going through those particular emotions, as multiple characters take care to point out for us. And yet there’s real synchromystic power and resonance in doing this story now, at ground zero in the aftermath of the Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s traumatic exorcism of its past self. You may think it odd that a show currently in the process of trying to essentially reboot itself would suddenly become so backwards-thinking, what with how much “Remember Me” seems to be desperately trying to grasp at the spectre of the dearly-departed first season. But I actually think it’s entirely to be expected, and welcomed, for that matter: The strength of memory is what it can remind us about our own past lives, both positive and negative. Ideally, we should want to learn not to repeat the mistakes of our past while trying to reconnect with things we might have known back then, but have since forgotten.

Put that way, “Remember Me” is also a re-evaluation of “The Battle”, and maybe even “The Neutral Zone”: The past cannot truly remain the past, because it is always with us guiding our actions in the ever-unfolding present.…

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