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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Possibly the single most iconic shot of the season.

One common story structure going forward from here is what’s been described by numerous writing staff as, essentially “Let’s Do X”, where X is some non-Star Trek work of fiction that the show can bang out a more-or-less straightforward translation of with minimal edits needed to translate the story to a science fiction setting. Arguably the most prominent example we’ve seen so far could be called “Let’s Do Moby-Dick”, as the Original Series did that an astonishing three times over the course of its existence, the first two impressively even being in the same filming block, and the rest of the franchise promptly decided that wasn’t overkill enough and did it three more times.

But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here: Nicholas Meyer (and a fair few Original Series creative figures, if we’re being brutally honest) leaned on Moby-Dick (and Paradise Lost, King Lear, A Tale of Two Cities as well as about a billion other things plucked from the reading list of a high school English class) because he pretentiously thought it made him and his work look intellectual and cultured. When Michael Piller’s creative team and its descendents do an adaptation, it’s largely due to equal parts money and time saving concerns (it’s much easier to take a script from pitch to screen in a week if all you have to do is take a familiar archetype and plug in the names of your characters) and a desire to pay homage to an existing work that they’ve found inspirational, formative, or just that they thought would handily fit the narrative and ethical sensibilities of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in a pinch.

We’ve already seen the team do something like this already with “The Hunted”, which is quite obviously “Let’s Do First Blood”-Even though it was a freelance submission, it was something that went through a (somewhat infamous) rewrite process. What we see this week is basically that but more so: The genesis of “A Matter of Perspective” is quite easy to identify as “Let’s Do Rashōmon”, and because this is another story the entire creative team worked together doing rewrites on, it belies a particularly knowing cinephile’s touch about it that befits the source material. Rashōmon is a 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa based on a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa about a samurai and his wife who meet a bandit travelling on a road. A series of events transpires, and then the samurai winds up dead. The bandit, the samurai’s wife and even the dead samurai himself (via a psychic medium) each come forward in turn to explain how the murder happened and, baffilingly, each claim sole responsibility for it. The film follows a commoner, a woodcutter and a priest sitting beneath the titular Rashōmon city gate in Kyoto, today known as Rajōmon, attempting to piece together precisely what happened as each story flatly contradicts each of the other ones.…

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A lovely effects shot and an apt visual allegory.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation goes wrong, it’s almost never due to incompetence or sloppiness (“The Price” would seem to be an exception). It’s almost always due to creative decisions that, while they may have seemed like good ideas in the moment (or were the only option on the table), in hindsight turn out to have been particularly ill-advised and regrettable.

And boy does it ever go wrong here.

There are bad creative calls, and then there are crushingly poor ones that manage to cripple the show’s entire ethos, dynamic and sensibilities. That’s what we’re looking at today. “Deja Q” is an episode that finally takes the metatextual voice of the universe who challenges us to justify our utopias, reminding us to constantly better ourselves and never settle for complacency in the process, and turns him into a complete mockery. Yes “Hide and Q” had already done serious damage to Q’s efficacy, but “Q Who” had managed to make significant inroads for the better in restoring a lot of that while also going some way towards restoring his original edge. “Deja Q” undoes all of that in one fell swoop by stripping Q of his powers to tell a hackneyed, hackish story about sacrifices and “inner humanity”. “Deja Q” is unquestionably near the top of the list of episodes I most dreaded having to cover, and it remains one of my least favourite episodes in the entire franchise. This is Star Trek: The Next Generation at its absolute most cloyingly unwatchable, from its sappy milquetoast humanism to its unbearably forced, tuneless, shockingly out-of-touch cornball “zaniness” and its dangerously slipshod grasp of utopianism.

The fact that this is the exact same story that we saw in DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation miniseries three years ago is concerning enough without the fact the licensed comic book tie-in, while histrionic and fluffy, actually handles the brief with far more nuance, tact and maturity than the offering from the professional group of television veterans. At least I can point to a definitive reason for why this episode turned out the way it did, as opposed to the inexplicable clusterfuck of “The Price”: Simply put, Gene Roddenberry was wrong. The original draft for this episode, according to Michael Piller, would have had Q pulling an elabourate feint on the Enterprise crew, *pretending* to have lost his powers to get himself onto the ship and acclimated with the crew so he could prove his worth to them during an imaginary standoff with the Klingons. The point of the story was going to be that Q was trying to show the crew why they needed him and the kinds of talents and skills he could contribute to their betterment, with or without his powers. It was a really cool sounding pitch, and would have built nicely off of the themes of “Q Who”, where Q was, at least on some level, trying to get the Enterprise crew to trust him.…

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A sizable portion of Star Trek fans would, if you polled them, likely state that the franchise’s biggest strength is in its ability to do so-called “social commentary” on the issues of today in a futuristic science fiction setting. When they say this, what they’re referring to is the interpretation of Star Trek that I’ve somewhat flippantly chosen to call “Roddenberry’s Fables”. This is the kind of story where our crew beams down someplace, encounters an alien civilization that either operates under a structure or is facing a situation that very closely mirrors a social debate in the real world. Back in the Original Series, this usually took the form of quite literally punching the moral of the week (typically Gene Roddenberry’s Opinion on something) into the guest cast, but with the advent of Star Trek: The Next Generation. we’ve by and large been more interested in helping our one-off characters work through their problems in a constructive way.

How interesting it is than that the one time the creative team did explicitly decide to Say Something Important about a major social issue of their time is largely considered to be a disaster.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann compare “The High Ground” to “The Hunted”, by saying both involve a dangerous, violent man whom the Enterprise crew nevertheless find some manner of sympathy for, but point out that “The High Ground” was far more controversial, being banned in several countries for varying lengths of time. What they’re too polite to say is that of fucking course “The High Ground” was more controversial, because it deals with terrorists and openly, diegetically draws comparisons to several real-world terrorist campaigns. It’s a brazen move to be sure, and the show comes dangerously close to endorsing violent uprising as a valid form of material social change, even while it justifiably tries to stay ambivalent about the ethical underpinnings of it. Where things go wrong, naturally, is that the script ends up a little *too* ambivalent and, apart from making the dramatic crux of the plot hinge on yet another kidnapping of a female main character, basically just ends up reciting a bunch of vague platitudes about terrorism and violence that don’t actually *say* anything. As Michael Piller says:

“Another show that I wasn’t particularly happy with. We set out to do a show about terrorists. What was the statement we made about terrorism in the show? Was it the point where the boy puts down the gun and says, ‘Maybe the end of terrorism is when the first child puts down his gun?’ It was effective in the context of that show, but is certainly not a statement that provides any great revelation. You must be prepared to say something new about social issues.”

While Ron Moore puts it more bluntly when he calls it

“an abomination.

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