“Everyone talking about hard rain”: Necessary Evil

“Necessary Evil” exists in two distinct places within my memory, and they map alongside the two phases of my experience with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The first time I was exposed to this story was in 1993 or 1994, naturally, as part of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine. Like “Rules of Acquisition” before it and “Second Sight” after it, this is a story I vividly remember from the episode synopsis printed in issue 7. At the time, I immediately recognised it as a modern classic in the making; a wonderfully dramatic noir mystery that fleshes out the backstory of Odo and Kira during the occupation and adds a touching nuance to their relationship in the present day.

It was not, however, an episode I watched on television at the time (or if I did I don't consciously remember it...The imagery certainly feels familiar). The first time I actually got to see the finished product itself must have been somewhere around 1999 or 2000. I'm not sure if Enterprise had been announced or the TNN Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns had started up yet, but either way the winds must have been starting to change: I was over at the house of some friends, two brothers who shared my love of all (or at least most) things Star Trek. One of them made the offhand comment that they had actually taped an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine live at the time as part of a larger collection of programming that also included one or more episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (for younger readers, you have to understand that in those days VHS tapes were capable of holding several hours of video at a time, so it wasn't uncommon to have single tapes that had entire days worth of material archived away. The catch was, of course, that the transfer quality was garbage). Knowing how passionate I was about the series and how eager I was to fill in the gaps in my understanding of this period in my life, the two suggested we give it a watch that afternoon.

The episode they had recorded (of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, not The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) was “Necessary Evil”. I immediately recognised it from the teaser and the name drop of Vaatrik, and I got very excited because I knew this was a good one. Then the credits ran, and I proceeded to be completely bowled over. This was the first time I had actually seen the intro credits to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in something like seven years, and it was the first time I remember consciously registering what I was seeing. I was utterly taken aback because I didn't remember what they were like and didn't really know what to expect: I guess I was assuming that the theme song would echo the motifs of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme song in some way instead of being something completely different. But man was I ever glad it was something completely different-I sat in complete rapturous stillness, my jaw most likely open as I watched that asteroid pass by and the camera pan around the station listening to that French horn and synthesizer. If there had ever been any lingering, vestigial doubt in my mind from seven years back it was most assuredly long gone now, because from that point I was completely hooked.

The episode itself did not disappoint. “Necessary Evil” was real, eyes-glued-to-the-set style television for me-I lapped up the dark cinematography, cyberpunk set design and high-angle camera shots over the promenade. For a television show, I thought the production was absolutely sumptuous, the writing and acting were both beyond brilliant and Odo's thoughtful and melancholy narration tied everything together perfectly. Everything felt so dramatically different from what I had come to associate with Star Trek in the interim seven years: Although I hadn't been watching any of it, I still had my reference books, action figures, magazines and the odd video game so I had a working knowledge of what I thought Star Trek had been, sadly mostly gleaned through the lens of obsessive Hard SF minutiae compilers. This was something utterly, wonderfully divorced from all of that, reading not so much as science fiction (or what I had come to understand science fiction to be), but as a serious, provocative drama in a science fiction setting. I think that awoke something in me...Or maybe it reminded me of a primordial state of being I used to occupy but had forgotten the path to long ago.

(Of course, I never used to see Star Trek as science fiction. I saw Star Trek as Star Trek-It was its own special thing, and the fact that it was set in outer space in some imagined pretend future on starships and space station was just part of what it was and what it did. More on that another time.)

I didn't get to see “Necessary Evil” again, or any other Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for that matter, until 2003 when the series started to be released on DVD (actually it was likely a year or so later as it took my awhile to get the second season box set, much to my consternation as that was the one I had the most visceral personal connection to). Once I got up to it, it was every bit as incredible as I remembered. Every time I rewatch this episode or an episode like it, I'm amazed by how aggressively this show doesn't play by the expected Star Trek clichés, although to be fair at this point I'm not even sure what I mean by “expected Star Trek clichés” anymore: I certainly wouldn't call the stuff Star Trek: The Next Generation has been doing this season hackneyed or rote either. But I would hold “Necessary Evil” up alongside any serious and venerated contemporary drama, and in fact it was probably this episode that got me to notice (and be annoyed at) how Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seemed to constantly get snubbed by the snootier critics because it was a drama where the players wore prosthetics and brightly coloured costumes.

Then there's my current revisit. “Necessary Evil” is certainly a triumph for writer Peter Allan Fields, quite possibly his masterpiece. The nuance and depth it affords its cast is obvious, especially Odo, for whom this is his definitive story. Odo is in masterful Columbo mode once again, but he's got a full slate of mesmerizing interiority this time: A shapeshifter who's always striving to stay willfully outside things and is always in search of a shape and identity of his own is confronted with the necessity to pick a side. Odo claims to be on the side of justice, but the mistake he made during the occupation was to associate “justice” with “the law”: For Odo, this is something firm and reliably constant he can fall back on, but true justice is rarely something that neat and tidy, and that's what Kira understands. That's what Kira understood decades ago: The moment Odo tells her that if she didn't kill Vaatrik he'll let her go, but if she did he'll turn her in and that “it's as simple as that” she makes her mind up. But critically, this is something Odo is able to learn from Kira: “Necessary Evil” is what helps us understand how Odo became the person we were introduced to in “A Man Alone”.

The final scene is a work of pregnant textual brilliance. The magazine synopsis talks about a “miserable silence” falling over Kira and Odo and about trust being betrayed, obviously to play to the presumed grimdark conflict demographic. But that's not at all what this scene is actually about-In reality, its an incredibly complex and interpolated moment of utopian storytelling. The key moment is when Kira blurts out that she was afraid of telling Odo the truth because she didn't want it to jeopardize her friendship, and Odo responds “maybe it doesn't have to” (and notice how he smiles when he does so: When Odo smiles, it's only on extremely special occasions, a gift he gives to someone important). Sure, Odo is rattled, but Odo also knows that Kira was right. True justice is rarely pretty, especially when you're fighting for liberation from a fascist occupying force by ratting out collaborators. And Kira only shot in self defense. It's utopian because Odo and Kira are still close friends, in fact, they're probably closer now then they ever were. But going through what they went through to get there was emotional hell.

Ultimately, “Necessary Evil” is a story about forgiveness. Odo forgives Kira for what she did, and Kira forgives Odo for the dangerous golden mean fallacy he used to define himself by. If anything, I'm reminded of the scene earlier this year in “The Circle” where Odo and Kira both talk about how they “smoothed out” each other's “rough edges”. It's also a story about reliving your past to make peace with it (literally in terms of the extradiegetic cinematic storytelling). Coming to terms with our past is part and parcel of shaping the person we want to be in the present, and sometimes a city like this brings it all back to us.

“Unloved”: Attached

Could it ever have worked?

That's a question failed romances and failed engineering projects seem to get asked all the time. There's an allure to the counterfactual, the idea that had just a few things happened a bit differently, than all our lives would have ended up immeasurably better as a result. When confronted with a failure, or a perceived failure, it's perhaps only natural that we would pick through the rubble and self-reflect after the fact. Sometimes we say things like “it was doomed from the start”. Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20.

In reality, no endeavour is ever “doomed from the start”. At the outset, each project has just as much potential for success, or for failure, as any other. Technology must always start as a fiction, and every fiction is equally real. What governs the success or failure of a technology is whether its constituent human and nonhuman actors can work together to keep it alive throughout the process of reification. It requires a sustained loyalty and commitment from all given players, and this is what we mean when we talk of love. Because that kind of unyielding resolve only comes about through a kind of love, because we can only ever be that committed to things we love very deeply. Actors need to adapt and evolve as time goes on, and they have to care enough about their project to have the willingness to adapt alongside it. From an engineering perspective, the moment where something is post-facto declared a success or failure only comes about when the actors resonate together in such a way that the project becomes what can be considered a material, tangible reality.

But this is not necessarily a healthy approach to take when examining romantic relationships between human (or perhaps humanoid) actors. There's no bigger or better sign of an aimless, self-absorbed and self-indulgent man who's completely lost his way in life (and let's be honest, this is almost always a man) then the guy who randomly calls up his ex to ask if things could ever have worked out between them and if they ever had a chance at “really going the distance”. In real life, romantic relationships typically end for a good reason, usually that the people involved have either grown apart from each other (which happens way more than people are willing to admit) or they've slowly realised that they probably weren't a great match for each other to begin with.

So the question has to be asked. Could it ever have worked out for Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher? And the answer, quite simply, as far as I'm concerned, is no. Firstly, I still maintain there's too much of an age difference between Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden, and thus their characters-Ten years is simply far too large a gap. That puts them, quite literally, in two different generations. And as much as Captain Picard may symbolically be linked to his younger crew instead of other people his age or older, there's still an unpleasant cultural precedent involved in pairings like this I feel Star Trek: The Next Generation should not be perpetuating. But it's considerably more complex than just simple dates of birth that are working against this ship: The biggest problem is that this romance plotline is a holdover from the Gene Roddenberry era and a handicap it took Doctor Crusher four years to break free of.

Beverly Crusher was literally created as a placeholder. Roddenberry created her for two reasons: To be a mother for Wesley and a love interest for Captain Picard (three, if you count the equally repellent “look sexy and walk like a stripper” directive that's incredibly in the series bible). You couldn't come up with a more offensively stock, rote and stereotypical female character if you sat down and deliberately tried to string together as many jaw-droppingly offensive hack writing pulp clichés as you could. Both Wesley and the romance angle were balls-and-chains that hampered Doctor Crusher from coming into her own character, and it's taken Gates McFadden a good chunk of the series (including rebounding from being fired. For being a feminist) to shed these trappings and heroically fight to make her character her own. At least she no longer has to worry about Wesley, but this lingering business with Captain Picard risks chaining her up all over again.

And this would be bad for Captain Picard too. Over the course of rewatching the series this time, I've come to the conclusion that Captain Picard is way more interesting if you read him as asexual and aromantic. I've always sort of entertained the notion that he might be, but I'm convinced now. To me it just fits with so much that's established about his character and personality: Though not antisocial, he doesn't always go out of his way to be the centre of attention, is primarily interested in his academic pursuits and has stated on numerous occasions that he's “not a family man” and isn't at all the sort who would enjoy settling down in a committed relationship and raising children (although, as we know from “The Inner Light”, it's not that he looks down at that lifestyle in the slightest-Indeed, he has the utmost respect for it, it's just not for him). And call me weird, but I can also see it in the way other characters seem to view him, namely Data, Deanna Troi, Guinan and Tasha Yar,

And you know what, the show deserves credit for saying “Actually, no. This isn't a good direction to take either one of these characters anymore”. It's handled in a reasonably elegant manner to boot-While I'd prefer if this angle had been just dropped completely and never mentioned again, the show actually tries to get a story out of it and ends up at the decently utopian message that people's feelings for one another can change over time because we're always growing and can't be expected to stay in the same place in life forever. Sure, it's effectively the same message as the backstory to Will Riker and Deanna Troi's relationship (yet another reason why the Captain Picard/Doctor Crusher one is pointless and unnecessary), but it works here well enough. Again, I'm just not terribly invested in the couple such that I would have gotten the sort of closure that this episode was clearly written with the intent to give to a certain kind of fan.

So while “Attached” is certainly not an episode I'm terribly fond of or that I would enjoy watching for fun, I have to respect it for demonstrating Star Trek: The Next Generation's willingness to adapt to changing realities.

“The one I love”: Rules of Acquisition

Along with “The Homecoming” /“The Circle”/“The Siege”, “Rules of Acquisition” is probably the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story that became genuinely iconic to me.

As I've mentioned before, though I was familiar with the show before this run of episodes, my familiarity basically consisted of dissociated images-The water bath clone scene from “A Man Alone”. Some promotional art of a runabout. The offhand conversation in the shadows under a staircase somewhere. That elusive scene of Dax on the parallel bars that I'm half convinced I completely imagined. Vivid as it was, my memory of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in its first season was fragmented, consisting only of brief flashes of lucidity. This is very much a consequence of the way I watched the show at that point: I could only ever catch the odd glimpse of it while flipping through the channels, because my local affiliates stupidly ran Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine opposite one another, and I wasn't going to chance missing my favourite show to take a gamble on its younger sibling.

(This was not an uncommon happenstance, by the way: I am by no means the only one who made that decision when faced with similar circumstances, and that's a major contributing factor to the failure of every post-Next Generation Star Trek series.)

So while my experience with Star Trek: The Next Generation was similar, I was always better researched on that show and it didn't take me long to connect my sensory memories with actual plots and episode titles: I had enough reference guides, VHS tape rentals were not unheard of and eventually the reruns became commonplace enough I gained a working knowledge of that show rather quickly. But Star Trek: Deep Space Nine I pretty much literally never got to watch again for another ten years: Between the initial run of the first and second seasons and the DVD release in 2003, I had no material critical experience with actually physically watching the series whatsoever. As a result, there were only a handful of episodes of this show I was ever intimately familiar with at the time. And by no coincidence, these were the ones “novelized” in the issues of Starlog's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine that I owned, specifically issues five and seven.

The magazine itself is getting its own chapter in this book because it absolutely defined my exposure to and formative impressions of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's world so I have to keep myself from going into too much detail about it here. The reason it's relevant to tonight's episode is that “Rules of Acquisition” was the first episode covered in issue seven, which happened to feature our very own Jadzia Dax as its cover girl. This kind of sets the stage, because while I know “Rules of Acquisition” is kind of a sequel to last year's “The Nagus”, as far as I'm concerned this one is all about Jadzia Dax: This is the story where the Jadzia Dax I know and love finally emerges fully formed and in bloom. It's also, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first story that clarified for me how Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was supposed to operate, and it's still the standard I hold the series to today.

“Rules of Acquisition” works because it does two different types of stories simultaneously. Three, if you count the stuff it inherits from “The Nagus”. The story of Quark and Pel, its action centred around the bar, is almost a kind of noir plot. It's about star-crossed lovers and the systems that keep them apart set against the backdrop of a bustling city. But it's not noir in the Raymond Chandler or Frank Miller sense, it's closer in tone to the kind of thing Casablanca is doing: It's a melancholy romantic drama about love lost, loneliness and regret. This is a remarkably good kind of story to give Quark, because the Humphrey Bogart-inspired Ferengi barkeep is incredibly well suited to it, and there's an episode coming up later on in the season that proves the case even more: For one, Armin Shimerman is just really good at playing that kind of character, and not only is Quark just about the only person on the station who you could do this with, he's pretty much custom tailored for it, which is something the people who constantly write him as a sniveling latinum-obsessed comic relief never quite manage to get.

But the real star of this episode is Jadzia, specifically because this isn't her story. She has four comparatively minor scenes across the episode's runtime, but each one is absolutely defining for her because in each one she's interacting, and guiding, somebody else. In the teaser and in the denouement she's an interlocutor for Quark (as well as a counselor and a mentor, though he'd never admit it) and there's that absolutely brilliant scene in the bar where Jadzia express shock at Pel's revelation that she's a woman...after she figured out Pel was in love with Quark. There's also a scene with Kira where Jadzia concedes the Major's condemnation of the Ferengi as “greedy, misogynistic, untrustworthy little trolls” but seems not to mind.

This is a very Ira Steven Behr thing to write, because Ira Steven Behr thinks the Ferengi are more admirable and inspiring than the hero crew for reasons that, quite frankly, deeply disturb me. But this scene works on a separate level because it's coming from Dax, who is special: Although she presents as female (and femme), Dax is of course both male and female. This means she's ultimately not threatened by the Ferengi's misogyny, because her male energy renders her immune and her androgynous power places her hopelessly above and beyond their reach, regardless of whether or not the Ferengi are consciously aware of this or are willing to admit it. Because the Ferengi don't pose a threat to her in a way they might to a normal woman, Jadzia can easily see them for the ridiculous sycophants they are. Kira, in spite of her outward displays of masculine strength, is still inherently a very vulnerable character, and she might see the Ferengi as a threat. What Jadzia is doing here is trying to coax Kira to tap into more of her energy and to different sides of her being so that her gender fluidity becomes less superficially performative and defensive and becomes more an extension of her true self.

Scenes like this vividly define Jadzia Dax as an unforgettable character because they let her do what she was always meant to do: Play a support role. I don't at all mean to belittle her by saying that, rather, I want to glorify her: Being utopian fiction, Star Trek works best when its main characters behave more like what we would conventionally think of as supporting characters than protagonists, and Jadzia Dax is probably the greatest Star Trek supporting character of all. That's what I immediately latched onto about her in “Rules of Acquisition”: In this episode Jadzia is at once so unflappably confidant and so perceptively nurturing, caring and supportive all at the same time. That's a breathtakingly formidable strength of a sort I don't think I'd ever seen in fiction before, certainly not coming from someone who looked like Jadzia Dax. Lines like her “I'm going to miss her. And so will you” and “Nice try. But I know you too well” etched themselves onto my psyche like stone.

Jadzia's presence turns to noir narrative into a Star Trek: The Next Generation story, one whose effectiveness is heightened by the contrast of the subject being Quark. If the Ferengi are supposed to represent the worst of us, then Jadzia is the best of us and Quark the embodiment of the potential to learn and grow beyond what we are. It's hard to tell if Quark has actually learned anything by the end of this story, although when this plot gets revisited later in the year it becomes clearer.

I also have to wonder...Gender aside, Quark's relationship with Pel is very much a case where deep romantic affection is confused for Platonic admiration. Consider, if you will, Pel as a mirror inverse of Jadzia: A woman who is forced to present as a man to gain respect, rather than a joint male-female energy who chooses to present as female. In that case, perhaps Quark actually doesn't lust for Jadzia. Perhaps, just as he didn't want to admit that he harboured real romantic feelings for Pel, he doesn't want to admit that he secretly hero worships Jadzia Dax.

“...which opens to that primeval cosmic night”: Dark Page

Memory Alpha is *really* letting me down in terms of screenshots.

The first thing that struck me upon rewatching “Dark Page” was the Cairn. In prehistoric times, a “cairn” was an artificial stone pile structure used as a trail marker or burial mound, or in ceremonial astronomical rites. Some cairns, especially in German, Dutch and Inuit territories, were considered totemic figures: They were known as “imitation people” or “stone men”, and considered effigies and representation of human forms.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Cairn are a telepathic species who communicate purely on the level of images. It's an elegant and holistic form of communication that engenders a sense of cosmic oneness, and the show understands the real ramifications of this. The Cairn find verbal communication awkward and limiting, and the show makes no attempt to refute this assertion because it's true. Language is built around artifice, an inaccurate facade constructed to represent and stand in for the ineffable whose only hope for success is to convey a general idea for a concept through simile, metaphor and mimicry. The true nature of reality is that great cosmic interconnectedness of all things, and the only way we can truly perceive and understand this is at a heightened state of conscious awareness: The realm of images, emotions and memory.

It makes perfect sense that this would be something Star Trek: The Next Generation would instinctively know, at least at a subconscious level. Art exists in the liminal space between language and the eternal, and is meant to serve as the modern shamanic pathway from one to the other. Thematically, Star Trek: The Next Generation was always destined to reach this point eventually because the realisation is ultimately little more than empathy writ universal: The macro- and microcosm both of the divine cosmology. But Star Trek: The Next Generation has also always been an artistic evocation whose true self lies within aesthetics-The utopian dream lives in the image of the navigator and is evoked through the picture of a brilliant blue voyaging starship adrift in deep space. It's not the show and never has been the show: It's the idea of the show and what the show inspires within us through the ideals it signifies. 

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I relate to the Cairn. I relate to the hopeless struggle of trying to express yourself with words you don't have, visions you don't know how to communicate and images whose depths you may or may not even fully understand. That is, ultimately, what the story of this phase of Vaka Rangi is: You can never truly know what Star Trek: The Next Generation means to me and I can never truly explain it. And some days I don't even feel like trying. Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn't even fully understand itself, and it's through the Cairn it's finally openly admitting this to us. The show is a performative simulacrum of its true self and its true potential and always has been. Maybe it was always destined to be this. Time and again we have caught glimpses of the transcendent eternal that exists within and just beyond our senses and have felt the longing to grasp it, and time and again we have failed to reach it.

And so it has to be Lwaxana Troi who serves as our intermediary to the Cairn, and who is transformed herself through knowing them. Lwaxana has a working understanding of the true nature of the universe; we've known this since “Haven”. But Lwaxana is also “Classic Star Trek” incarnate, deliberately, diegetically and extradiegetically reminding us of the way we willfully stunted our own spiritual growth. Of course she has a dark personal secret that haunts her with could-have-beens. Guilt and regret are the province of the ego, and the nagging feeling that things could be and should be better than they are reminds us of our true calling and untapped potential in its own small ways.

“Dark Page” has a resoundingly negative reception amongst Star Trek fandom, and this makes me actually kind of angry. Firstly because it is visually one of the single most iconic moments in all of Star Trek for me, and I mean like “seared into my psyche at a primordial level” sort of iconic. The scene where Deanna is exploring her mother's subconscious, as represented by the darkened corridors of the Enterprise, has lingered in my mind since I first saw this episode in 1993, *especially* the scene where she sees a hole opening up into space at the end of the corridor and boldly jumps into it. You would think all that, well, dark imagery would be frightening, but I never once remember being scared by it. Instead, I was transfixed by the surreal dream logic of the scene and recall somehow just intuitively “getting” it at an innate, instinctual level. For me this was formative to an absolutely incalculable degree: This experience utterly defined not just how I conceptualized Star Trek: The Next Generation, but my understanding of Deanna Troi as a character and a person as well. “Dark Page” is, as far as I'm concerned, *the* definitive Deanna Troi story.

(This is also why “Where No One Has Gone Before” always resonated with me too: I remember connecting the scene in that story where Captain Picard almost falls into open space to the shot of Deanna freely jumping down into it of her own volition here. Connecting the dream imagery of these two stories with that of episodes like “Birthright, Part I”, “Timescape”, “Phantasms”, “Eye of the Beholder”, “Emergence” and even “Genesis” forged a link to an intellectual thread that I felt was self-evidently present all throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation. To me, this is the purest expression of the show's creative drive and ambition; a visual presentation of its truest self.)

Of course, another reason “Dark Page” is so maligned in fandom is precisely because it's a Deanna Troi story. In fact, not only is it a story custom-tailored to play to her strengths, dealing quite heavily and maturely with actual psychology and grief counseling, it's a mother-daughter story to boot about Deanna's relationship with Lwaxana. And obviously, any female-led story about relationships between women written by a female author is going to rankle the sci-fi nerds. But what really bothers me is how hollow and easily refutable the case against “Dark Page” really is: The argument tends to go that the revelation about Kestra comes out of nowhere and only builds upon Deanna and Lwaxana's pre-existing relationship in a strangled and unrealistic way. First of all, OK, no, everything Lwaxana does in this episode is perfectly in keeping with her character as previously established. In fact, she's far more believable now than she was before: We can now understand and respect, if not condone, Lwaxana's nervous pressuring of Deanna to settle down and get married. Because she's terrified something might happen to Deanna and that she can't protect her, just like she feels she couldn't protect Kestra.

This even builds on “The Forsaken”, where we learned that a lot of Lwaxana's public persona is a conscious and deliberate act to cover up her insecurities about never quite being good enough. If she's blamed herself for Kestra's untimely death all these years, that just compounds any self-worth issues she may have had previously and explains really a great deal about why she acts the way she does. And Deanna treats the situation with absolutely peerless utopian strength and professionalism, Marina Sirtis giving an absolutely formidable performance playing both Lwaxana's counselor and her daughter at the same time. Deanna knows, and we must remember, that we have to forgive our parents, and sometimes that involves helping them reach a place where they can start to forgive themselves.

One last thing I want to address in regards to the complaints that get leveled against “Dark Page” is the argument that the reveal Deanna had an older sister who died young and whose existence was kept secret from her from her mother was an unrealistic narrative stretch. Or, somewhat amazingly, that the post-facto grief Lwaxana was shown to be carrying with her bottled up such that it was destroying her mind was unbelievable melodrama (do I sense a potential grimdark double standard at play?). Quite simply, no it's not, and it's a bit insulting for you to claim otherwise. I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail, but, suffice to say, there are aspects of “Dark Page” that I relate to on one or more personal levels that go beyond just the outstanding writing/direction/acting and the unforgettable dream sequences. So, speaking from experience, I'd just like to politely tell those critics who might look down their noses at a plot like this without having lived through a similar one themselves to, respectfully, shut the fuck up.

Once again, utopianism doesn't need to mean a world where everything is perfect and free of strife. Sometimes it can mean healing ourselves or another person and learning to move beyond our griefs, regrets and personal traumas. Rejecting the healing process, trying to wallow in our pain or pretend it doesn't exist, is inherently self-destructive. You have to ask yourself if you think there's any hope of creating and achieving a better existence. It's the divide between aspiration and apathy that defines the difference between grimdark nihilism and utopianism. If you choose to be utopian, you have to start with yourself.

“Love is Zero G”: Melora

Both this episode and its titular character are concepts that hail from the early days of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's pre-production. Melora Pazlar was originally going to be Deep Space 9's permanent science officer, but she was replaced by Jadzia Dax in part, ironically, for the very reason she has a tough time adjusting to the station in this story: The low-gravity environments she was adapted to proved too time-consuming and expensive to convey on a regular basis. The station, in a very real sense, could not accommodate her; a theme that underwrites this entire episode.

As an episode of television exploring the topical message it takes on, “Melora” is very good. It was put in the best possible hands: Writer Evan Carlos Somers, who served as a Guild intern during Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's first season before getting a shot at pitching his own stories in the second, was a wheelchair user himself and pushed for the chance to build a story around a the abandoned concept of a Starfleet officer from a low-gravity planet who had to use a wheelchair to navigate Earth-like environments. Somers also wrote “Melora” as a direct rebuttal of the appalling ableist issues of “Ethics” from the fifth season by showcasing a disabled person who is proud and accepting of who she is and the perspective she brings and doesn't want to change to suit anyone else.

Understandably given his own perspective, Somers' treatment is as laudable a depiction of mobility issues as we could expect. This episode always reminds me of a conversation that transpired during one of my seminars while I was still in the university system doing academic work in social studies of knowledge: One of my colleagues at the time was a disability advocate, and during a panel one day the question was posed to him whether “disability” was an appropriate term to use in his work. He felt that, from his experience, both “disabled” and “differently abled” were equally valid terms because while the people in question most certainly were not ashamed by their positionalities and in fact championed them, the infrastructure of modern society is not built with their needs in mind, and they are thus disenfranchised and excluded by it. So in a sense while they are merely “differently abled”, the material realities of modernity also leave them “disabled”. I think this a paradox that Somers captures incredibly elegantly in “Melora”.

Unfortunately, and by his own admission, Somers didn't give himself enough time to groom his script with the level of care and attention that it really deserved, necessitating a successive series of rewrites by Steven Baum, James Crocker and Michael Piller. Though Melora herself is predictably handled well in Somers' original draft, the other characters aren't so lucky. From what I've seen of it, Melora actually comes across as a bit of a Mary Sue in it and ends up lecturing the rest of the crew, who seem to have collectively lapsed to a level of ignorance and thoughtlessness about her condition they really ought not to have. And while it's become trendy in recent years for fandom to slag off the episode as aired, I want to stress that Baum, Crocker and Piller deserve a heck of a lot of credit for their repair job here, successfully managing to restore the voices and characterization of the regulars while preserving the important message Somers had hoped to convey.

(I will quickly add, while the vast majority of the writing staff's edits improve the story, there is one that I think was a poor call. In the original draft, Melora didn't struggle with her crutches in Ops: Instead, she stayed in her chair at the foot of the stairs in front of the office, Commander Sisko came down to greet her, and they would have held their meeting in a different location. I really liked that scene because it struck me as such a very welcoming and utopian thing for Commander Sisko to do: He knows the station isn't built with her in mind, but he's going to go the extra length himself to accommodate her as much as he can. Speaking of...)

So the script and episode work, but there are paratextual issues surrounding it that give me some pause for concern and they all surround Melora's diegetic and extradiegetic disability. In the episode, there's a plot reason for Melora having to use a wheelchair apart from her background as an Elaysian: The corridors of Deep Space 9 are not wide enough to fit her anti-grav chair. This is actually true behind the scenes as well: The team had originally wanted to use the hover chair that Admiral Mark Jameson uses in “Too Short a Season”, but the prop would not fit into the deliberately narrow and cramped sets of Deep Space 9. The chair was designed for the bridge of the Enterprise, a very open and spacious room that even features ramps on both sides which Andy Probert *deliberately* placed there to accommodate wheelchair users. Part of Star Trek: The Next Generation's utopianism lies in the fact the Enterprise was designed from the ground up to be a safe and welcoming space for people of all levels of mobility: Just take a look at the windows on the saucer section of the six foot model next time you watch the first season or stock footage from the first season if you want further evidence of that.

(Although that said, all you have to do is take a glance at poor Geordi La Forge if you want proof of how tone-deaf Star Trek is on accessibility issues across the board.)

But Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was envisioned as a show about conflict, and starbase Deep Space 9 was created to be the antithesis of a safe and accessible space. Instead, the conflict was built into the design of the station itself: It's cramped. It's claustrophobic. You have to step up, over and around things all the time. Had Melora transferred to the starship Enterprise, she would have had absolutely no trouble living and working there with all the same opportunities and privileges as everyone else onboard. It's only on Deep Space 9 where the annoyances and aggravations of everyday life become so overwhelming she briefly considers abandoning a vital part of herself just to cope. And I really have to wonder if this is the right message to be sending. Yes, “Melora” is an excellent science fiction metaphor for how differently abled people are disabled by modern society every day. It's a classic Star Trek morality play “Issues” story of the sort that's made the franchise famous since the days of the Original Series, and one of the best.

But it's not utopian.

You have to seriously ask yourself, is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine *really* served by having inaccessibility built into its very fabric like this? Is it really such a good idea for it to be constantly, overtly trying to contrast itself with absolutely *everything* Star Trek: The Next Generation does at every turn, especially the things that are actually good about Star Trek: The Next Generation and make it unique? This is a show that ostensibly wants to be about healing, rebirth and reconstruction, but its mesmerizing fetish for conflict is fundamentally incompatible with these stated goals. Sooner or later this show is going to have to pick one side or the other to definitely cast its allegiance with. Maybe it's true that you can't make utopian scripted drama. But utopian fiction *is* a valid form of storytelling, and an inability to commit to it says more about the writer than it does about the story.

“The register of machined-being belongs to the milieu of dream logic”: Phantasms

Warning: Star Trek: The Next Generation is going to resist you.

An alarm sounds. Dare you answer? 

Hello, Sil. 

“Do you ever have nightmares?” 

... 

“I have them. I think they tell me who I am.” 

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED. 

Do you think Star Trek: The Next Generation is afraid of something? This is my diagnosis: A show haunted by the spectre of technocracy. Data was created as the ideal technoscientific glorified body: A sublime machine Vitruvian Man, a posthuman figure with no humanity. And this is what Data fears might be the sum total of his existence: An autocratic vision of humanity's utopian future. Data fears reductiveness, because he fears reductiveness is built into his being. There is not that large of a gap between Data and Lore (“Descent”), and Data's programmatic logic and rationalism does not by definition make him a progressive figure (“Gambit”). 

Arch-rationality seeks to purge itself of the marginal waste products that do not fit into its master narrative. Barbarians at the gates of Rome would tear the Enterprise down bit by bit, othered monsters who take the form of working class labourers. But the biggest threat of all is Deanna Troi, the scientist of the arcane: Female, feminine and tainted by the forbidden knowledge of the so-called “soft” sciences, she is the Eve figure upon who is projected the insecurities of the rational, patriarchal world. Rationality is gendered at its core, as is must be because rationality gets to define who is and isn't “us”, and thus who is and isn't deserving of a voice. And the fundamental other from the dawn of civilization is woman and the feminine. 

Data is afraid because he fears this part of himself. 

“There are no longer any haunted houses, but there are haunted beings”. That's what Anne Dufourmantelle once said. She didn't say it to me, but I overheard her say it in conversation with somebody else. Data is haunted by the ghosts of his past, which is his heritage. He may not like what he might hear if they call him. 

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED.

0.0.1 “You are watching me. I am talking, and you are listening” 

Technology is the praxis by which fiction is reifyed. All technology is fiction because all technology begins as an idea, and ideas exist within the imaginal realm. A book gives a fiction material form by conveying a simulacrum of ideas through the technology of printing and bound organic tree matter. The process of technolgizing a concept gives politics (both in the general sense of social connections between human and nonhuman actors and in terms of hierarchical systems of power) material and tangible form. Our dynamic interactions with technology, perhaps one could call it an addiction to technology, will then in turn reiterate the political concepts into daily life. A master narrative is a fiction, but it's a fiction we voluntarily choose to live our lives in accordance with through the way it is invoked through and evoked by technology. 

A book is patriarchal technology that breeds patriarchal sentiment in turn. It is the discrete material husk of a dead story being delivered to us from an authoritative figure intended for passive consumption. A gospel, or Word of God. It bears a veneer of discontinuity and authoritativeness that, though it falls apart through the act of critical reading, remains a superficial characteristic. A selling point, if you will. 

So the question becomes, how does one bring about a progressive, utopian technological philosophy? Or perhaps more to the point, how do you take a technology that isn't utopian and make it utopian? One way to do this is through reading: The act of critical reading is itself a radical act, because it brings to life truths and meanings from a multiplicity of realities. 

This gets at the inherent limitations of written and linguistic communication in general, but that's not this story. “Stop being so literal”, as someone might say. Or was it “literary”? 

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED.

Vaka Rangi is an interdisciplinary switchboard. It has a multiplicity of identities that I alternate between depending on what I think would be an appropriate angle for the topic at hand. First and foremost it is an examination of the image and archetype of the voyaging starship, and how that manifests in a variety of different modern science fiction works over the second half of the 20th century. My personal thesis is that the best possible interpretation of the voyaging starship archetype is as a western version of the philosophy of Polynesian navigators, where the voyaging canoe was a microcosm of the universe and represented the basic interconnectedness of all things. My personal politics, philosophical background and even aspects of my own blossoming spiritual outlook can't help but contribute to the way my conception of this has evolved over time. 

It's also a personal journey for me to revisit a specific media artefact that had a major impact on my life in my formative years (Star Trek, namely Star Trek in the years 1987-1994) through the medium of critical history in an attempt to discern what meant to me back then, what it means to me now and how much it truly shaped me into the person I am today. Furthermore, it's a narrative itself, or rather several narratives, because I can only convey my personal experiences through a theatrical pantomime of metaphor and allegory.

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED.

Sigmund Freud's approach to psychoanalysis has been widely discredited, and yet his theories remain fundamental to the field. There is what engineers would call a “design flaw” within psychoanalysis; technoscientific code for a disconnect between two sets of actors. We might call it a “failure to communicate”. 

Data understands that Freud's theories are inherently flawed, and yet he summons him as an actor anyway. In fact, he consults him long before he considers calling on the heretical Deanna Troi. But this Sigmund Freud is a holodeck simulation, and thus a phantom channeled through the medium of Data's positionality. This is what media studies scholars might call a “redemptive reading”: Although Data acknowledges the flaws and shortcomings in Freud's approach, he still cares enough about him to wish to speak with him. And Freud further manifests himself to Geordi and Captain Picard as the representation of Data's subconscious in the collective dream. 

Data invokes Freud, literally calling on him, because he sees something in Freud's work that is worth preserving in spite of whatever other faults may be present within it. This is an act of unconditional love wherein the reader glorifies the text by making it into something more than it was before. We only criticize because we care. 

Do you love Star Trek: The Next Generation? 

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED.

Although it probably doesn't reach the level of a serious medical condition, I have what I would consider a form of telephone anxiety. I do not like communicating through it and I refuse to own a cell phone (a decision I feel is validated by the fact smart phones are exquisitely designed agents of social control). 

I got part of this from my father, who served in the Vietnam War and was trained to treat any form of electronic communication as a potentially bugged information trap and to view any and all telephones with latent suspicion. But I also grew up in a family that was isolated from the outside world for both voluntary and involuntary reasons and, over time, the only time the telephone would ring in our house would be for calls from telemarketers and collection agencies. The only time I had a phone of my own was in college, and the only people I ever talked to were judgmental administrators, financial aid organisations looking for payments and the harried and overworked boss at the mismanaged part-time job I worked who would call me up late at night in a rage to blame me for some breakdown in communication further up the line. 

For me, the telephone has always been an invader. It's an assailant into my environment that demands my attention and subservience to its authority with a latent threatening presence. There's the famous Cold War story of the “nuclear hotline” or “red phone” that would only ring in the event nuclear war was declared, a call the entire world would wait in dread anxiety to hear. And in World War II, the Nazis mobilized both the telephone and radio: For Hitler the telephone was a weapon, an instrument of surveillance, propaganda, recruitment and brainwashing. The legacy of fascism leaves the telephone at least a partially fascist tool that appropriates and subjugates its listeners. 

Even Joseph Campbell's “Call to Adventure” is phrased in telephonic terms. There is a call from someplace absent and distant that summons someone to a pre-ordained mission they cannot refuse. And thus is perpetuated the master narrative.

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED.

Spoken word predates linguistic communication. Mantras (translated in Chinese as zhenyan, literally, “true words”) are sacred syllabic and melodic vocal constructs thought to be older than language itself. And in many indigenous societies, shamanic practice involves ritualistic chanting to enter into trance to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual worlds. In populist language, hypnosis is synonymous with brainwashing. Yet in practice, hypnosis can be a joint act of guided meditation through which participants can attain a heightened state of conscious awareness. It doesn't work if both parties don't jointly agree to play along. 

Can we reconceptualize this as a form of communication? Not on a conversational level per se, but perhaps at an empathic one. Maybe reach the imaginal realm in tandem is the way to understand both yourself and another, because in doing so you'll have attained that truth together. And if the subjective congress were to be read in microcosm, then 

Click.

“Set course for home”: Cardassians

The imaginatively titled “Cardassians” is a solid story about innocent bystanders whose lives are upended by political gerrymandering. There are the Cardassian War Orphans, most notably the young Rugal, who are ripped away from the lives and families they know on Bajor in order to cover up a potential scandal involving a number of military higher-ups. But there is also the crew of Deep Space 9, namely Commander Sisko, who end up tasked with the unpleasant duty of uprooting these children from their homes as part of their jobs in order to avoid a diplomatic incident.

Like last season's “Progress”, “Cardassians” examines the repercussions of life for administrators and local officials trying to do their best to represent their people, but who are ultimately at the whims of powerful governments and other systems of centralized authority who wish to consolidate power regardless of whether or not it serves the best interests of those who live under them. There's no way to argue that being forcibly relocated to Cardassia, a planetary society he fears, distrusts and doesn't even know, is going to be a net benefit for Rugal, so I'm not going to address it. Apart from the false equivalence in critiquing Rugal's hatred of the Cardassians by paralleling it with the decades of brutal oppression those selfsame people inflicted on the Bajorans, there's also the rather uglier implication that adopted children are always better off with their biological parents in every circumstance (the episode by no means endorses this perspective, but it doesn't do enough to refute it either). But ultimately, this is a story about the Deep Space 9 crew having their hands tied in order to prevent them from making the obviously correct choice and exploring how to react to a situation like that.

The regulars themselves are a slightly mixed bag on this front...Commander Sisko is generally excellent, as are Garak and Doctor Bashir, but I disagree with some of how Miles O'Brien is written. His speech to Rugal near the end about how it's wrong to write off an entire people with generalizations, stating that he himself has met some Cardassians he liked and some he didn't, is beautiful knowing his backstory and an utterly perfect Star Trek moment. Or at least it would be if the chief's history with the Federation-Cardassian War and the dismissive speciesist feelings he once suffered as a result of it were left unspoken and implied. Instead, the scene earlier in the episode where Miles expresses concern to Keiko about Molly associating with Rugal sort of undermines that moment's effectiveness for me.

I know it was meant to show moral ambiguity and that racism is difficult to overcome overnight and how even good people can slip back into bad habits from time to time. But the thing is I don't agree that was a good call. That's not a Star Trek: The Next Generation message. This series is supposed to be showing us how we can *overcome* our various foibles and vices. Not that we don't necessarily have them, just that we can overcome the ones that we do. And the point of “The Wounded” was to show Miles getting over whatever leftover baggage he had from the Federation-Cardassian War, his assisting Captain Picard and Gul Macet's efforts to track down and apprehend Captain Maxwell his moment of growth and redemption. That's what gives the Minstrel Boy scene its power: Having shown that he's grown beyond his anger, Miles proves to Captain Picard that he can be trusted to beam over to Maxwell's ship and do the right thing.

Even if you choose to ignore his subsequent growth in Michael Jan Friedman's comic book line due to canon concerns, that's self-evidently what “The Wounded” at least was about. “Cardassians” doesn't add any nuance to Miles O'Brien's character by having him say that sort of thing, its actually *undoing* character development, which sounds like the sort of thing this creative team would be opposed to (I guess “conflict” was more important). But more to the point, this scene is effectively a relapse, and relapses just aren't a Star Trek: The Next Generation to do. This show is supposed to be about growing and moving forward, not regressing, and the episode's final moments would have been considerably more powerful and effective had it embraced that angle.

But now that I've squared that away, I want to talk about another aspect of this story. Rugal is one of the more notable examples of a cultural transplant in Star Trek, and the comparative detail afforded to his backstory, along with the fact it's set against the backdrop of the heavily symbolic Cardassia/Bajor conflict, allows us to examine some important themes about cultural identity and belonging. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a show about rebirth, healing, reconstruction and starting anew. Most everyone on the station has come to it from somewhere else, and everyone is looking to set aside their past and begin new lives as honourary, if not ethnically, Bajorans. Commander Sisko is moving beyond the trauma and grief of Jennifer's death, and while he is not technically “Of Bajor”, he is destined to be the Emissary of the Prophets. Major Kira feels self conscious about her past as a terrorist and, while she didn't want the job at first, has come to see Deep Space 9 as her home. The O'Briens moved to a new city and have to adapt to new jobs. Jadzia Dax literally gave birth to herself as a new person. Odo doesn't know where he came from, but he's slowly starting to realise that doesn't matter because its his actions in the present, not his heritage, that define who he is.

And the same is true for Rugal, who is Bajoran even if he wasn't born on Bajor. And yet Rugal is an interesting case, because he is descended from Bajor's former occupying overlords. Temporarily setting aside the larger latent political issues with the Federation, within the show's logic the Starfleet officers of Deep Space 9 effectively represent immigrants. They came from somewhere else and consciously cast aside their past in order to reinvent themselves. The Cardassians, however, including Rugal, are the descendants of imperialist colonizers who continue to live in the lands their ancestors conquered and stole away from its native peoples. This breeds a different sort of person, I think: Although some amount of intermingling can occur, colonial societies tend to live purposely apart from indigenous societies of the same geographic area, either walling themselves away in continent-sized gated communities or forcing the indigenous people into smaller and smaller reservations so they're out of sight and out of mind.

In his book Changes in the Land, environmental historian William Cronon dispels the myth that Native Americans in New England lived in a pristine, untouched wilderness prior to the arrival of European colonialists. Pointing out that ecosystems can never in fact actually be inert, Cronon shows how the Native Americans actually carefully maintained the land by working in tandem with it. Their intimate familiarity with their environment, as all indigenous people have, allowed them to recognise and respect the way the various natural cycles manifested locally. Therefore, while they did alter their environment, they did so in an empathetic fashion that was mutually beneficial to both the people and the land. The Europeans, by contrast, were strangers in New England-They didn't know or understand the land and were often fearful of it. Thus, they attempted to “tame” and “dominate” the environment, forcibly bending it to their will and perceived needs, paying no heed to whether or not their actions were sustainable or not.

I'm beginning to develop a theory that this is the original sin that lies at the heart of Western modernity. Because of our imperialistic roots, we have always grown up in societies distant and detached from the lands our ancestors conquered. Because it's not our land and we didn't come from here we never took the time to truly understand the places modernity assimilated and, as a result, we behave recklessly, destructively and shortsightedly. But also, we lose a sense of cultural identity: Westerners are a people without an actual home, and that gives us a crisis of identity and spirituality. I think this may be the root cause of not just capitalism's environmental destruction, but also the temptation of cultural appropriation. Since we don't really have traditions of our own (or the ones that we do are too odious and embarrassing to embrace), we try and adopt those of others in our joint ignorance and desperation.

Are voyaging and immigration the solution to these deep-rooted problems? Can you, like Rugal and the crew of Deep Space 9, ever truly become connected to a land and a culture you weren't born and raised in? As someone who is the descendant of immigrants and possesses an undeniable wanderlust, I'd certainly like to think so. But that's not a question I feel qualified to answer.