Pictured: Not Captain Picard.

With the show’s newfound brief to focus on character interiority, we’ve seen the creative team work hard to come up with a specific conception of who exactly these characters are. Now, it’s more than possible to argue that our main cast already had characterization, it was just characterization that was different then what this team eventually decided on and made canon (indeed, I think that’s precisely what happened), but regardless, the fact is the third season has had a series of episodes dedicated to nailing down a new set of personality traits for the Enterprise crew: We had “Evolution” for Wesley, “Booby Trap” for Geordi, “The Enemy” and “Sins of the Father” for Worf, “The High Ground” for Doctor Crusher, “The Ensigns of Command”, “The Defector” and “The Offspring” for Data, “The Vengeance Factor” and, uh, “A Matter of Perspective” for Commander Riker and, um, “The Price” for Deanna Troi.

Yeah, that doesn’t look so hot all laid out on paper now, does it?

The thing about this is that while this season in general and these episodes in particular get credit for “fleshing out” previously vague characters, I happen to think all that happened is that people like Ron Moore and Ira Behr got to completely reconceptualize the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation and they just happened to get lucky that theirs were the interpretations that wound up taking. Either way, perhaps surprisingly, the one character this team has had a particularly hard time nailing down has been Captain Picard. He’s been written particularly changeably this season, and upsettingly so as there seems to have been a trend to depict him as very tight-laced, stringent, stodgy and reactionary (I’m thinking particularly of “The High Ground” and “The Offspring” here, though he has had good moments in stories like “The Defector” and “The Hunted”).

To me, this is writing him horribly out of character. The Captain Picard I know, the one derived from the best moments of the first two seasons, is a boldly progressive and highly principled explorer infatuated with travel and the universe. He’s a romantic at heart, yet someone who is also in possession of a fierce moral code and still a bit socially awkward in places. Even so, Captain Picard should be the first person to stand up against the banal evil of the Federation and to remind humanity that its place is amongst the stars. He embodies all of the ideals the Federation lies to itself by claiming as its own. The Picard of “The High Ground” and “The Offspring” cannot possibly be the same person who stood firm against Federation neo-imperialism in “Too Short a Season” and “Conspiracy”, who made regular trips to the Holodeck to play games with his friends and who went to the hilt for Data in “The Measure of a Man”. He’s not even the same person who chatted with the crew about ships in bottles in “Booby Trap”, directed Henry V or took up painting.…

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What “The Enemy” was for the Romulans, “Sins of the Father” is for the Klingons.

This episode is frequently held up as an important turning point for the series and rightly so, as it defines a lot about what Star Trek: The Next Generation (and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine too, for that matter) is going to look like going forward. But “Sins of the Father” is also the kind of episode that’s exceedingly difficult for me to write about as it’s been extensively analysed and historicized by just about every major publication to cover the franchise. This is the kind of episode I hate because it leaves me with perishingly little new erudition to add to the glut of discourse that already exists. Yes, yes, this episode sets in stone pretty much everything we think of when we think of Worf and the Klingons, yes it’s a strong character piece and yes it’s a major step in the development of more explicit serialization in episodic Star Trek. Yes, the award-winning set design and matte paintings are all gobsmackingly good. And yes, it sets up “Redemption”, about which I have a lot to say, but I’ll save for the fifth season. That’s all true to be sure, but it’s also blindingly and bluntly obvious to the point I don’t even think it’s really worth taking the time to talk about.

But then what is there left to say about an episode like “Sins of the Father”? I could be my usual grouchy self and dispel some myths about the backstage stuff: This episode is frequently touted as being the moment where real characterization, serialization and world building was introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which would be true except for the minor fact it does none of those things. Maybe it’s just me and my judgment is clouded by over 25 years of familiarity with this show, but I haven’t had a hard time piecing down who people like Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Geordi or Data (or, much as I hate him, Wesley) are so far. The only characters who did seem to lack a bit of detail were Doctor Crusher (who got better) and Tasha Yar (who isn’t around anymore to complain and thus doesn’t matter anyway). So then the argument goes this is the first time a so-called “second tier” character like Worf got a large-scale story arc all to themselves, which would be a fine argument if you chose to conveniently ignore “Heart of Glory” and “The Emissary”. Yes, those particular story threads weren’t ever fully developed on after those episodes, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have been had the creative teams that worked on them stuck around for longer than one season apiece.

Then there’s the argument that “Sins of the Father” was the first episode to introduce serialized, arc-based storytelling to Star Trek and that this was manifestly a Good Idea.…

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“The Offspring” sees us introduced to another new face who will become a reoccurring figure on Star Trek: The Next Generation and beyond. Not, perhaps controversially, Data’s daughter Lal, but the story’s writer René Echevarria. Like Ron Moore, Echevarria is another success story of the open submissions policy, discovered on the back of his spec script (this one) and then asked to come out to join the writing staff by Michael Piller. It just takes a little bit longer with Echevarria, who doesn’t come on full time until next year, despite having one more submission this season.

Indeed it’s a something of a miracle he managed to last even that long, considering he’s another in a long line of writers who, by his own admission, waltzed into the writer’s room convinced he was going to teach them how to write Star Trek because he was a die-hard Original Series fan unreasonably upset at Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ira Behr jokingly recalls his first impression of his future collaborator being that of a “pretentious” New Yorker whose only experience was in theatre. But, once aboard, Echevarria stays with Star Trek for the next decade, penning some of the franchise’s best and most memorable stories.

It’s somewhat endearing then to learn that his debut story is as much the result of early career jitters as it is his obvious talent: In regards to “The Offspring”, Echevarria recalls how Michael Piller openly called it the single best spec script he’d ever seen in his career to that point, but he was disappointed in the revised version enough to do an uncredited rewrite on it with Gene Roddenberry and the outgoing Melinda Snodgrass. The behind-the-scenes story is especially interesting here, as it reveals a lot about Michael Piller’s philosophy as it pertained to Star Trek: Piller recalls that his big issue with “The Offspring” as originally conceived was that it was all about Lal, her journey and her interiority, and since one of Piller’s big rules is that every story had to be fundamentally about the regulars in some way, it needed to be rewritten to be primarily about Data and his experiences with parenthood.

I both agree and disagree with this. While obviously I think it’s important to have the characters you actually get to see every week be involved in the action to some degree, I also think it’s important to not swing too far to the other side with this and remember that the regulars are ultimately ideals, and a big strength of Star Trek: The Next Generation to date has been its ability to help its guest characters solve their problems and grow in a healthy and constructive way. On the other hand, it’s both noteworthy and praiseworthy that neither Piller, nor Snodgrass nor Roddenberry put their names on the finished product: As Ron Moore would later recall, the attitude was always that the because the writing staff had far more power and money than the freelancers (not to mention better job security), it would be unbecoming to take their credit and residuals as well.…

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A volley of canon-fire and the future we had anticipated disappears in a cloud of cosmic dust.

A vision of my past life stands before me, its sparkling azure hue as vibrant and as clear as I always remember it to be. Memories wash over me as I’m reminded of the person I was and the way I saw things before. Hope for a future that never came, but perhaps should have.

My past, present and future exist at once together because time is not what we think it is. The grand cycle of the cosmos turns over once again and we find ourselves once more where it all began. We exist and we live. It’s not linear, but we live. We are defined by the power of the moment that can last both a brief instant and for all eternity at the same time. To remove or deny those moments is to deny identity, for it is through living in these moments that we learn who we are.

Symbols have meaning and power, but it won’t always be the same for every person in every context. I can try to explain the things I’ve seen to you, but language is merely a tool and there’s only so much of a discrete confluence that a tool can stand in for. But I try anyway. You may not have seen the same thing, as I, but I’ll wear a simulacrum of what I saw and put on a performance for you. And the fact remains you still saw something.

Memories of a time and place take on lives and identities of their own long after the moment of congress has faded away. Some call it a cheating distortion of reality, but reality is made every day through the act of people muddling by trying to read it. Seeing you again in this moment is like seeing you for the first time because our timelines diverged after you went away: The reality where we stayed together seems so very different from the one that I’ve forgotten.

A dream means something.

Is it bad that when I remember you, and even when I look at you now, I don’t see you for the way you were, but for the way I imagined you to be? That’s disingenuous I know-It’s certainly not relationship material, that sort of thinking. And yet neither are we: We never had the sort of relationship that would have required us to intimately know and trust one another, did we? It was always a matter of perspective; of me projecting things based on what I saw and what I felt. That’s the thing about heroes: We never see them for the people they really are, at least not all the time. We see them for the ideals and the qualities we figure they stand for and that we want to take into ourselves. And the act of meditation transforms spirit and shaman both.…

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