The scene where Letek and his away team react with horror at the fact that Tasha is allowed to work alongside her male crewmates as an equal, and even *wears clothes*, is actually brilliant: Letek’s objection ticks all of the misogynistic pseudo-feminist boxes-He bemoans how Earth women are “forced” to work and wear clothes, arguing that the Ferengi prohibition of such things is a more noble and respectful treatment of women. Just think about how many male chauvanists have tried to keep women from holding the same positions of men while phrasing it as if they’re concerned about their well-being or consider women in some sense too special to do that sort of thing, or how many “Strong Female Characters” (in the Kate Beaton sense) refer to bras as “unnatural restraints”. It’s a dead-on satire of patriarchal gender norms and assumptions in contemporary Western culture. 

Lieutenant Commander Data, played by Brent Spiner, is an android built by “unknown aliens” who left him with the combined memories of their people before they vanished. Data was found by a Federation research team who reactivated him, and promptly asked for a position in Starfleet, seeing humanity as an ideal form to strive for. He got one once it was determined he was both alive and sentient, which was a moment of great pride for Data. Although he is superior to humans in every respect (memory capacity, physical strength and endurance, etc.) he steadfastly holds onto an “impossible dream” of becoming human. Primarily a comic actor and performer (one of his most notable pre-Star Trek roles was a reoccurring role on Night Court), Brent Spiner was under the impression Data was Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s comic relief, and made a point to play him that way every chance he got.

Though it may not be as catastrophically and disgustingly racist, as “Elaan of Troyius”, “The Dauphin” keeps every ounce of its insufferable sexism, as its entire plot can be succinctly summed up as “bitches be cray-cray”: In no short order, we have Commander Riker flippantly pointing out how someone like Salia won’t “have time” for Wesley (career women-such ice queens, amiright?), Salia giving stereotypical tsundere “hot and cold” “mixed signals”, Wesley actually bemoaning how confusing girls are and this gem of dialog between him and Worf:

Notice how O’Brien, who is an many ways the lynchpin character here if for no other reason than he spans both plots, gives a succinct, yet stirring, speech about being able to choose your friends and co-workers, but not your family. And notice how, in both cases, the story is resolved by an acknowledgment that the Enterprise is home: Worf discovers who his true family is when they re-create the Klingon rite of ascension on the holodeck and Riker decides to turn down the promotion to stay with his fellow travellers.

This episode, from beginning to end, is an aesthetic car fire.…

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The title has a double meaning.

A war game is meant to be a test of someone’s prospective performance in a real combat scenario. But it itself is also a performance; an exaggerated caricature meant to stand in for a supposedly real thing. Symbols and objects are one and the same and the idea of a war is a real war, but paradoxically it’s the very unreality of war games that makes them in the remotest sense ethically defensible. Captain Picard is only half right when he says that “Starfleet is not a military organisation” and that “its purpose is exploration”, of course: He and his crew may think of themselves as explorers and scientists rather than soldiers, but Starfleet is very much a “military organisation”-That is, in fact, its single greatest flaw.

Which is why it’s so interesting that the Enterprise should play a war game explicitly in lieu of the recent revelation of the Borg’s existence. Kolrami thinks this is a needed precaution to prepare for open warfare against the Borg but, even though he’s the only one so far who has witnessed firsthand what the Borg can do, Picard, very tellingly, doesn’t take any of this especially seriously: He remains opposed to the whole concept of the thing from the beginning, and makes it clear that if he and his crew must go through with it, they’ll do so on their own terms. Indeed, its this very “joviality” that Kolrami resents in Commander Riker, seeing it as a sign of capriciousness when really its how he builds trust, community and and camaraderie, as Captain Picard also points out.

The way the Enterprise crew justify their taking part in a war game here is the same one I use to justify my enjoyment of strategy games in real life: By emphasizing the underlying mental exercise while downplaying the unpleasant connotations that tend to accompany tactics and strategy in real life. Commander Riker plays Strategema with Kolrami not to challenge or prove himself against a more experienced opponent (remember the attempt the show made to draw a line between him and his father in “The Icarus Factor”), but for the honour of playing with such a master of the game and because it’s fun. Similarly, he and Captain Picard, and their respective crews, approach the actual training exercise is as essentially an overblown game of Chess or Go. The appeal of the game for them is to guess the thought process of their friends, which, if you look at it a certain way, is another way of showcasing the close, familial bond they share with each other that Kolrami and his Starfleet peers find so upsetting (think back to Dexter Remmick here too). I’ll bet if they had access to Nintendo Wars, the Enterprise crew would likely hang up their phaser rifles for good.

An embrace of the unreality of mental strategy games is a good example of the crew’s knowingly recursive performativity, and an even better example of Star Trek: The Next Generation remaining true to its heritage and themes.…

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Yo.

Yeah, I could have made a really cheeky joke about Benjamin Sisko and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine here, but I didn’t feel like it.

Although she only makes four actual appearances across the franchise, Suzie Plakson is one of Star Trek’s most beloved and memorable guest stars. She’s an incredibly talented performer who can work wonders with parts of any size and wields the broad-strokes brush incredibly deftly. We’ve already seen her once this season as Doctor Selar in “The Schizoid Man”, the specialist who studies Ira Graves and who Captain Picard calls in to help discern what’s happened to Data. Her most memorable Star Trek role, however, is unquestionably K’Ehleyr, who is introduced in “The Emissary”.

K’Ehleyr’s existence is something of a messy subject in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There’s a massively problematic aspect of her character arc (really, the entire arc itself), but that doesn’t come into play until the fourth season, so I’ll save complaining about it until then. At this point, K’Ehleyr is just a one-off guest character: Merely one more example of the second season production team tossing things at the wall in a desperate attempt to make something stick. She’s something like the sixth new character introduced and teased as a potential regular or reoccurring character *this season alone*, which is so embarrassing it frankly speaks for itself. However, K’Ehleyr stands among her wannabe peers as interesting, not only for the fact she actually does come back (albeit only once), but because she overtly replaced one of them. The team were looking to explore romance themes with Worf, and K’Ehleyr was straightforwardly brought in to facilitate that. But she wasn’t the first choice: Indeed, it was Suzie Plakson’s previous character, Doctor Selar, who was meant to be Worf’s paramour.

This is actually fascinating, because Worf stands apart even among his Star Trek: The Next Generation shipmates for having a royally screwed up love life. He’s a character whose canon romances and fan-preferred ships tend to be dreadfully boring and uninspired, but with whom the potential always existed to say something really clever and imaginative about culture clashes and cultural diffusion through them. In this regard Selar is an incredible choice, especially had she become a reoccurring fixture of the Enterprise sickbay. Klingons aren’t supposed to like healers because of their obvious privileging of honourable death in glorious battle, and Selar isn’t just a healer, she’s a Vulcan: If there was one person on the ship who reads on paper like the complete polar opposite of Worf, it’s her. But Worf, at least Worf as we’ve seen him so far, isn’t exactly a full-blooded Klingon traditionalist. He grew up completely disconnected from his people, and while he has an academic understanding of their culture and certainly is no less Klingon than the next proud warrior guy, this does mean his heritage and experience is tempered by his life outside of them.…

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I’ve no particular lead in to these two episodes. They’re both bad, and they’re both bad in ways that are easily explainable and honestly don’t bear much repeating at this point. One would imagine that as the production year finally drew to a close and the slush pile of scripts finally dried up, things would start to get more formulaic and more desperate…which they do.

I’ll say this for “Up The Long Ladder”, though: It’s impressive that Melinda Snodgrass is credited with penning both one of the absolute best episodes in the series (“The Measure of a Man”) and one of the absolute worst (well, this). Knowing who the author is, it is worth attempting to come up with at least some defense of “Up The Long Ladder”, because science fiction fans are all too eager to poke holes in stories written by women. And there are very noble roots in its conception: Snodgrass meant for it to be an overt attack on anti-immigrant sentiments in general and the United States immigration policy in particular. Snodgrass wanted to convey how immigration policies are deliberately designed to make the process as difficult as possible for no other reasons than straightforward xenophobia. There’s also a laudably overt slam against the pro-life movement (how deliberate it was seems to be a matter of contention, though Snodgrass is explicitly on the record as being pro-choice) where Commander Riker immediately destroys the clones of himself and Doctor Pulaski, declaring that the cloning was done without his permission and that he has the right to control his own body. The major issue being, of course, neither theme is particularly prevalent in the episode as aired.

There are three major criticisms of “Up The Long Ladder”. the first is for the aforementioned pro-choice statement, which we can safely disregard as not worth paying any sort of attention to, and the second is the accusation that Captain Picard was wrong because he violated the Prime Directive, which I’m likewise going to ignore. The third is the only one that’s really worth engaging with, and that’s the fairly inarguable contention that the Bringloidi are racist and stereotypical depictions of Irish people. The backstory does seem to be a bit more complex than in “Code of Honor”, however: Instead of being the result of employing actual racists, the missteps here seem to be more the result of sloppy and rushed rewrites. Maurice Hurley is Irish himself, and it was actually he who suggested to Snodgrass making the displaced colonists the descendents of Irish immigrants and was largely responsible for their characterization in the final script. I also haven’t heard about Colm Meaney raising any objections here, and it’s a matter of historical fact that Meaney did at least once step in and request script alterations when he felt the depiction of Irish people was not up to Star Trek standards. This doesn’t necessarily defend the aired product, naturally, but, like pretty much everything about the second season, there might be something to be said for the fact the production team didn’t want things to turn out as badly as they did.…

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