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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There’s a joke I read in Cracked magazine once that stuck with me and that I enjoy paraphrasing. It was in an article about no-budget knockoff animated films and is along the lines of “the most good these movies could ever do is inspiring a baby to pursue a life of filmmaking through helping them realise they could actually have done better themselves”. Though it’s describing an undeniably more negative form of inspiration arguably tied to a certain egoism, the joke definitely touches on a real phenomenon. Sometimes art sparks our creativity not because we resonate with its message and sentiment so much as we are incensed at its structural incompetence.

It’s become a common story in fan circles that “Samaritan Snare” is a textbook example of this, as it upset writers Dennis Russell Bailey, David Bischoff and Lisa Putnam White so much in its opening moments that it drove them to write “Tin Man” a year later in a deliberate attempt to show a production team they considered to be wholly and completely incompetent how “proper” Star Trek should be written. In a now somewhat infamous interview, Bailey absolutely rails against this episode, calling it an “idiot plot” relying on the assumption both the crew and the audience are completely stupid and nitpicking pretty much every major action the characters take throughout the entire story, basically using it as an excuse to trash Star Trek: The Next Generation by comparing it unfavourably to the Original Series. Here’s the thing though. Aside from being a textbook example itself of the reality that whiny, obsessive, nostalgia-driven fan discourse that gets irrationally angry at every single plot hole has existed since the birth of genre fiction and conceding that “Tin Man” is in fact bloody brilliant (and momentarily setting aside the fact the show’s production team in its third season was *completely different* from the one in its second and that Bailey et al are blaming Michael Piller’s crew for the alleged sins of their predecessors), Bailey’s argument blatantly ignores several crucial details about what “Samaritan Snare” was trying to say.

No, this is not the show’s finest hour. I absolutely grant that. But its problems are generally distinct from the so-called Idiot Plot: As Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann point out in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, there really is only one idiot here, and that’s Commander Riker. And there is something of a redemptive reading to be had here, as Riker dropping the ball in regards to the Pakled situation was not written into the story out of ignorance or incompetence (in life, it’s generally a good idea to assume your interlocutor is in possession of the same mental faculties as yourself, and isn’t Star Trek supposed to be teaching us empathy?), but rather in an attempt to show that, in spite of rapidly rising in fame and accolades, as first officer, Riker is still young and perhaps not quite ready for prime time yet.…

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One thing should be established right away: This is not the first Borg episode. It is, depending on how you count, anywhere from the third to the fifth, with the deciding factor being how you choose to view “Angel One”, “Coming of Age”, “Conspiracy” and/or “The Neutral Zone”. “Q Who” is not a last ditch effort to give a floundering Star Trek: The Next Generation a life-saving jolt of creative restructuring, it itself is the strangled product of a powerless production team trying to sync up and distill half-formed, disparate and mutually contradictory ideas left behind by their predecessors in an attempt to keep the show as it exists now running a little bit longer.

The only reason, for example, the Borg look the way they do is because it would have been too expensive to make them insectoid as Maurice Hurley originally imagined them, thus severing this episode’s link to “Coming of Age”/“Conspiracy”. Furthermore, the writer’s guild strike prevented anyone from penning a proper follow-up to “The Neutral Zone” (not to mention the fact “Angel One” sucked), so the original intent of making the Romulans Red Herring antagonists who have been wrongfooted by the Borg’s unspeakable ruthlessness is similarly abandoned. There is an attempt to tie it back together in the most forgettable of throwaway lines where Worf describes the planet they come across as bearing the exact same signs as the outposts destroyed along the Neutral Zone, but if you managed to catch that you deserve some kind of medal. It’s a longshot to get people to pick up on that something like that *today*, when everyone marathons TV on Netflix for days on end let alone in 1989 when home video was impractical and you’re asking people to remember what happened in one episode from one night over ten months ago.

That’s not to say the team didn’t try their best under the circumstances to make “Q Who” work: They did, it does, and it shows. The team adapted, which is something of a theme for tonight. “Q Who” is a story about Star Trek: The Next Generation trying to reconstruct itself; it doesn’t quite yet know what it’s going to eventually become, but it knows it has to be something other than what it is now. Every actor in play here seems aware things are more than a little off, and they scramble to compensate and adjust in an effort to make something a bit more tonally resonant. As usual, the key is that each character here is consciously playing some sort of role, but what’s crucial and different this time is that they’re also consciously ad-libbing and playing understudy to each other in an attempt to salvage a performance that’s gone off the rails. Q is the most obvious case: He quite clearly wants to go back to the way he was in “Encounter at Farpoint”, as is right and proper, but because Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn’t allow itself negative or otherwise fungible continuity he can’t ignore “Hide and Q”.…

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