“All their greatest hits, together at last”: Shades of Gray

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. The Edosians look like William Ware Theiss didn't know what a 1980s was and tried to design something “hip” and “trendy” based on already dated Olivia Newton John music videos and half-overheard watercooler grumblings from his co-workers about “the kids these days”. The set doesn't help matters at all, and looks just as cringe-inducingly gauche as everything else about this episode does. The fact that it's actually a real place, the C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the San Fernando Valley, is just even more deeply unfortunate.

And, fittingly, the Holodeck returns in this episode to play a crucial part in the Bynars' plan. We have Minuet, a sentient, hyper-aware programmed being who exists in multiple worlds at once, and the interlink between the Holodeck and the rest of the Enterprise facilitates the Bynars being able to backup their history.

...“Angel One” is another in a long line of ham-fisted TOS-style allegories that handles feminism with the same care and nuance Dave Gerrold gave homosexuality in “Blood and Fire”...

(I will add one major issue of my own: I've always been particularly put off by the scenes with Riker and Brenna.)

I feel like I shouldn't spend the entire essay talking about Tasha Yar because the episode itself doesn't do her that dignity. She dies with all the grace and honour of an Original Series redshirt a third of the way in and, aside from a bizarre and pointless ship tease with Worf near the beginning, all she gets in this episode is an “emotional” goodbye scene at her funeral where she gets to act weirdly out of character to pretty much everyone in holographic form and that's *it*. Apparently the writers thought the death of a major character was of lesser import than watching Captain Picard debate a sentient oil slick about Sadism 101 on a sound stage.

If you're watching the Star Trek: The Next Generation version, though I don't know why you would be, things are a bit different, and predictably worse. That version pulls the Avengers # 200 trick of having the child and the father be the same person, and has him declare that he wanted to learn what it meant to be human, so he made himself experience “the most human experience of all”, being born, which is frankly bullshit. The original script was bad enough: Of Irska, Ilia/Icel comes right out and says “I was her first womb”, as if that's all she is, a womb, but this version makes it all about Ian. Troi's already been raped, which is fundamentally dehumanizing as is, but now Ian has the nerve to come in and push her even further to the margins of this story. It's taking the silencing and domination inherent in rape culture and writing that back into storytelling structure.

When Picard first speaks to Krogan on the Enterprise viewscreen, the bridge of the Klingon ship looks like it's inside a furnace, with so much visible heat radiating it's impossible to make out anything but the captain, an effect I thought made the Klingons look menacing and imposing in a way they never really do. This is helped by View-Master rendering the main viewer as sprawling and overwhelmingly dominant in a way the show itself hasn't since “The Last Outpost”: Once again, it makes things seem really vast and immersive.

(Also note how this episode gives us Star Trek: The Next Generation's first proper Original Series-style doofy fight scene. In pushing Starfleet back to its reactionary roots and doubling down on them, the Borg-id forces Star Trek to relive the demons of its past.)

The relationship between the Ornarians and the Brekkians does not map onto to that of street junkies and their dealers. Most drug dealers tend to get into that line of work out of necessity, hocking illegal substances as a part-time job to help make ends meet because dealing drugs actually pays better than most entry-level or minimum wage occupations. A lot of younger drug dealers these days do so because the legal job market outright has no place for them, or they need extra income to pay for things like college tuition, which is an actual criminal racketeering operation. In fact, far from the stereotypical dealer who goes around using “peer pressure” to “bully” upstanding little Johnnies to take drugs, it's usually the dealers who constantly have to worry about being assaulted and harassed by their customers. The clientele comes to them, not the other way around. Unless you're watching Miami Vice, which, as I've pointed out, is a special case, drug dealers do not live opulent lifestyles on the back of hooking their customers into a self-destructive cycle of addiction.

“Skin of Evil” isn't even all that good. I know I'm trodding on a lot of Trekkie toes here by saying this, but I don't care. It's not. I'm not quite alone on this: Jonathan Frakes famously hates this episode, for obvious reasons, though he has softened his position in recent years likely because he knows he'd get pilloried by Trekkies if he didn't. But Jonathan Frakes is also on record calling this episode flatly “absurd”, and he's on point here too. “Skin of Evil” isn't some highbrow commentary on the meaninglessness of death and war, it's sensationalism pure and simple to get people talking about the series and how edgy” and “risky” it is, and that's *before* you get to the sentient pile of shit. Even Vasquez got to die cracking one-liners and sacrificing herself so that Ripley could live and to prevent the Aliens from gaining the high ground. Tasha gets splashed with Metamucil and falls down. At the very least you could say “Skin of Evil” is supposed to be refutation of the Original Series' body count, but that's really a stretch because the show pointedly kills off the one character who, at this point in the show's history, nobody was ever going to miss. It could only have been safer if they killed off Worf or Wesley Crusher. Nobody cared about Tasha Yar.

The Ferengi are, of course, meant to represent unchecked capitalistic greed; the absolute worst aspects of late-20th Century Western society magnified and caricatured to dangerous extremes. Even their name, “Ferengi”, originates from an Arabic term for “foreigner” that's come refer to Westerners most typically in modern colloquial parlance. In this episode they even carry energy whips, a futuristic sci-fi update of the age old symbol of the oppressor and slave owner (and yes, while I know slavery did not originate with the West, they're the ones who made it a booming and lucrative global industry). I suspect the Ferengi would show a lot of art deco influences in their architecture and design, with copious flaunting of conspicuous consumption as a demonstration of the power, status and privilege it symbolizes and that they have managed to accrue through their capitalistic practices. There would be a lot of marble flooring, golden pillars, towering ceilings adorned with faux-classical art, neo-Gothic touches and busy offices looking out into space (all the more fitting, reminiscent as it is of those archetypical “dedicated” office workers we're always told to look up to who neglect their families and their lives to keep long hours at their job into the night). A Ferengi starship would look like a high-rise Manhattan brokerage firm.

This specific kind of transhumanism is, predictably, very grounded in technofetishim and materialism. The most recognisable manifestation of this in the contemporary political climate is likely the Church of the Singularity, a Silicon Valley-based faith that professes the rapid increased in digital computer technology over the past thirty or forty years is evidence of a looming “machine singularity”, where either our computers will become self-aware or will end up absorbing humanity somehow (a common version is the belief that humans will soon be able to upload our consciousnesses onto the Internet). It's the logical end result of the existentialist, positivist, materialist, technoscience-dominated flavour of Westernism that's come into vogue over the past few decades: When humans are reduced down to machines and , shortsightedness dictates that we can improve on the inherent randomness of nature with our Will through our evolved, superior deft mechanical touch.

With that in mind, you might wonder if Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Tasha Yar are acting out of character for the rest of the episode given how quick they are to distrust Worf. Riker I will say seems a bit off (he's unusually grouchy on the freighter when Geordi and Picard are talking), but Patrick Stewart, as usual, seems to push back against any problematic bits we might have expected Picard to get saddled with, and I'm sure any of that sort of thing can be explained by the tumultuous production history this story went through. As for Tasha, well, I'd say she was acting out of character if I thought she actually had a character to be acting out of in the first place. Sadly, Denise Crosby really has been reduced to just spouting random bits of exposition as the plot demands by this point. She does get two more good episodes coming up, but no surprises that one of them is her farewell performance. And speaking of foreshadowing, we get another hint about trouble brewing with the Romulans in the Neutral Zone here. In fact, “Heart of Glory” works so well as the start of that story arc it basically effaces “Angel One” completely, not that anyone was going to miss it. Certainly Picard's “Now there's a name we haven't heard in a long while” makes no sense otherwise.

Because the Borg are, as we shall discuss far more in the future, in truth the Federation's dark mirror. Everything they claim to stand for and treasure most dearly taken to their most chillingly logical endpoint. The Borg are not merely what the Federation *could* become, they are what the Federation *will* become: An unthinking, blinkered, self-absorbed, monolithic collective of zombified capitalists bringing peace to the universe through banal economic and political neo-imperialism, just like the country it was modeled after. “We only seek peaceful coexistence!” they will implore, and they will be correct in their minds, for what, they ask, is more peaceful than voluntary subservience to a benevolent authority, such as a Philosopher King, a capitalist plutocracy or hegemonic modernity? The only price for utopia is your freedom of non-compliance and any remnants of heterogeneity in the world.

“Except, perhaps, a casual familiarity”: Peak Performance

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. In many ways, “Peak Performance” actually grants this central, inescapable criticism of Star Trek's undeniable militarism as much as it starts to show the way to move beyond it: The only way things like rank structures, military protocol and strategic thinking is ever going to be acceptable is if it's treated as a game; a charming diversion that can be occasionally engaged with for fun just as long as we remember none of it is actually real. I've previously complained about war games in the context of Star Trek when I wrote about the Star Fleet Universe, but this episode addresses every single one of my concerns by actually acknowledging that the artifice is the most important part of the experience at a textual level: For Captain Picard, Commander Riker and the crews of the Enterprise and the Hathaway, if not for Kolrami, the battle simulation is just a fun way to pass the time and bond with each other, completely divorced from the dehumanizing and imperialistic machinations of real combat. And so should it be for us.

Given how invested “Peak Performance” is in, well, performativity, it's fitting that it should feature one of Star Trek: The Next Generation's biggest invocations to date. The war game the crew plays here is canonically known as “Operation Lovely Angel”, and the planets in the Braslota system are actually called “Kei”, “Yuri” and “Totoro” (check the map the crew consults in the observation lounge if you don't believe me). This is very important as, much like “Peak Performance”, Dirty Pair frequently examines the role of performativity in regards to action sci-fi and sci-fi violence. The conclusion it constantly reaches and stresses, of course, is that all of this is only acceptable if we all acknowledge that it's make believe, and furthermore that it's far more interesting this way anyway because it keeps us engaged with the actual material process of reading and storytelling (Kei and Yuri aren’t pro wrestlers for nothing). And here we have Star Trek: The Next Generation echoing this sentiment practically diegetically: Even with the Borg breathing down the proverbial neck, Star Trek: The Next Generation is resolute and unwavering in its unwillingness to turn itself into a self-serving, self-destructive orgy of phaser blasts and explosions, and that speaks to quite a lot in my view.

Dirty Pair has also, of course, cast a very harsh eye on the concept of war gaming, most notably in the Original Dirty Pair episode “Who Cares If They're Only Kids!”. But even that was a bit more nuanced than it might have appeared at first glance: There the main issue was people, really boys and men who act like boys, treating real war as a game. These are warmakers who would and do strip all of the honour and ceremony from combat, thus further dehumanizing the process and the combatants (shades of Japan's warrior culture heritage are in play here to an extent). Kei in particular would be one to talk if she came down on war games, given her own love of arcade space battle games and first person shooters. But the Lovely Angels are not warriors per se, except in very particular circumstances, and nor do they go out and willfully cause destruction and property damage; that would be completely anathema to them and a rejection of the series' basic ethical stance. When they *are* forced to fight for real, they always treat the situation as incredibly grave and somber, and Dirty Pair is absolutely not ashamed of painting those who would intentionally go out and start wars as the most disgustingly reprehensible of human beings-Just look at Mazoho in “Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell!”, Orun in Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia the military in that very episode.

(And take note: Who are the ones who take things one step too far and escalate the playful war game into an actual real-life, dangerous armed combat? The Ferengi, via another inspired turn by Armin Shimerman. And then, of course, there's Starfleet and Kolrami, who similarly take things far too seriously.)

Though the Dirty Pair link is the most obvious and resonant one, the reference to Totoro is revealing in its own right: Star Trek: The Next Generation's connection to Hayao Miyazaki and his work is becoming intriguingly complex, what with Nausicaä stabbing Captain Picard through the heart in ritualistic combat and all. My Neighbor Totoro is debatably Miyazaki's most famous work, though it frequently finds itself competing with Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away for that title. One thing all of these movies share, however (with the probable exception of Princess Mononoke), is that they're all some manner of children's literature (Nausicaä isn't, and tellingly it's Nausicaä among all of Miyazaki's work with which Princess Mononoke shares the most similarities). Although he may be best known for it, Miyazaki's children's literature is atypical for both the genre and his own collective ouevre, which makes an interesting point of comparison with Star Trek: The Next Generation: Like a lot of Miyazaki's work, it inherits some aspects of the children's literary tradition, primarily by virtue of simply being idealistic, but it can't really be placed into the genre it tends to get pegged as entirely, leading to a goodly amount of confusion and lack of understanding in popular discourse as to what it actually is.

I think what all of this comes down to is that Western society doesn't really know what to do with adult works that are also utopian and idealistic, though this is probably true of modernist societies in general. There seems to be an in-built assumption that everything made for adults has to be cynical, dark and completely self-absorbed and that there's no room for stories that do something above and beyond caricaturing and sensationalizing the drama of everyday life. What Dirty Pair, Star Trek: The Next Generation and the works of Hayao Miyazaki all do is demonstrate examples of utopian conflict resolution and social interaction at both an interpersonal and a naturist-cosmic level. On top of that, they're also all unafraid to wear their spiritualism on their sleeve (it may not be as clear in Star Trek: The Next Generation yet, but it will be before this run is over), and I don't think that's something we as people raised in capitalist modernity quite know what to make of. Which is likely the reason why all three works are so badly, badly misunderstood.

True to form, “Peak Performance” makes this even more abundantly clear in its B-plot, where Data begins to question his judgment after losing his first Strategema match to Kolrami. it's a brilliant, brilliant showcase for not only Data (who dispels any lingering concerns about his humanity through his actions here, Doctor Pulaski even wryly states “the effect is the same”, whether caused by human emotions or “android algorithms”), but for Doctor Pulaski, who is 180 degrees away from her initial characterization at the opposite end of the year. This episode has always stood out to me as the definitive portrayal of both her character and the way she interacts with Data: She fully recognises his personhood and agency and has become just as much his friend as anyone else on the Enterprise, but she's also the one who can, like the best of doctors, cut through the navel-gazing trend in his metaphysics to get at the root of his thinking (indeed, and appropriately, she can do this for Deanna Troi as well: I just love “You may be able to sell Troi that line, but not me”). It's irritatingly fitting poetic justice for a year that's been marked by so much unsatisfying half-filled potential that Doctor Pulaski finally unambiguously works as a member of the Enterprise family in her penultimate appearance.

As much as it feels a bit too little too late, and history shows it certainly was so for this production team, “Peak Performance” is, along with “Elementary, Dear Data”, “A Matter Of Honor” and “Contagion”, among the scant handful of iconic moments that define the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation for me. Doctor Pulaski's exchanges with Data here are, for me, right up there with the Sherlock Holmes romps, the 3D Enterprise dioramas and the Iconian gateways. Whenever I think about what this year looked like, felt like and sounded like...at least when it was actually working...These are the stories I think of.

“I'm half human. On my mother's side.”: The Emissary

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.

This has been pretty clear in the big Worf episodes and scenes that have been made to date: There's the Tea Ceremony from “Up The Long Ladder” that explicitly acknowledges Worf's respect for healers in general and Doctor Pulaski in particular and that would have served nicely as a lead-in to a story arc with Selar. But we ought to have expected this, as earlier, in the first season, the entire point of “Heart of Glory” was that Worf was a *different kind* of Klingon thanks to his living aboard the Enterprise. This is what happens when you become a traveller: Your sense of spatial and cultural identity that's tied to one specific location or one specific group of people starts to fade as you pick up and internalize different little things from the people and places you visit. And it helps you grow as a person: Worf can take the best parts of his Klingon heritage and combine it with what he learns about human culture to create his own unique sense of personhood. He's not fully Klingon and he's not fully human, but *none* of the characters who live on the Enterprise are fully human either-That's the whole idea.

So with that in mind, my big problem with K'Ehleyr and “The Emissary” is that they both represent a rather massive step backwards in terms of Worf's character development. The central message is that K'Ehleyr is more human than Klingon and more Klingon than she'd like to admit, which is supposed to both contrast with Worf and highlight different aspects of his own personality. But in practice it comes across as Worf being a die-hard Klingon fundamentalist: His whole attitude in regards to the bonding oath as being a sacred “point of honour” paints him as a fussy traditionalist who K'Ehleyr's spunky, independent modern career she-Klingon swoops in to shake up. While it is possible to read Worf as in essence a “convert” to Klingon culture given the fact he grew up isolated from it and it has been said that converts can be the worst fundamentalists of all, that's not really who Worf is. He's already been established as being atypical for a Klingon of even the 24th century, and his relationship with K'Ehleyr is really difficult for me to read as bring something other than the season 2 team once again seeing their regulars as “square” and looking to “liven up” the status quo because they're incapable of seeing the wonderful potential they already have.

In a year that's already given us things like Sonya Gomez, and even Doctor Pulaski, Miles O'Brien and Guinan if I was inclined to be particularly uncharitable (which I'm not, don't worry), it's very hard for me not to be rubbed the wrong way by K'Ehleyr, in spite of how lovely Suzie Plakson might be in the part. Especially considering what a gold mine Doctor Selar sounds like she could have been: That relationship could have been such a terrific example of how travel broadens one's horizons and how we naturally becomes closer to fellow travellers than the people we leave back home. As Tracy Tormé, who had introduced Selar, said, the Worf/K'Ehleyr pairing is sadly “obvious”. Of *course* K'Ehleyr represents Worf's dual heritage with the contrast dialed up and of *course* their relationship is meant to be complimentary and of *course* they're both too stubborn to see it. I mean the fact that “The Emissary” can be called mediocre speaks volumes about Star Trek: The Next Generation even here, but there really, really isn't a lot else for me to say about either it, K'Ehleyr or the relationship itself: I can see why it works and I can see why people like it, but I can't see how it's preferable to the alternative.

“You Can Go Your Own Way”: Up The Long Ladder, Manhunt

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.

(I will add one major issue of my own: I've always been particularly put off by the scenes with Riker and Brenna.)

The one part of “Up The Long Ladder” I do quite like and always have, however, is the subplot with Worf and Doctor Pulaski. The Klingon Tea Ceremony Worf shares with Pulaski in sickbay as thanks for preserving his honour and dignity after being stricken down by what amounts to measles is such a lovely character moment for the both of them, and it definitively establishes what Doctor Pulaski's role on the Enterprise is. Given her relationship with Worf here, with Riker in “The Icarus Factor” and with Troi at numerous points in the season, Doctor Pulaski is in some ways a reclaimed mother figure for the crew, especially given the casting of Diana Muldaur. And yet she's not quite that either, because she never quite becomes their elder, which is appropriate considering the Enterprise is largely a ship of peers.

The wisdom, experience and perspective Doctor Pulaski imparts is truly unique amongst the Star Trek: The Next Generation pantheon, which in many ways really does mark her as the show's definitive chief medical officer character, at least as typified by DeForest Kelley in the original Star Trek. Once she comes back, and in particular near the series' zenith, Doctor Crusher reveals herself to be a brilliant life scientist and a capable, commanding leader, swiftly becoming an away team and bridge staff regular. But that's a very different role than the compassionate, yet professional behavioural psychology of Diana Muldaur's Doctor Pulaski: If anything, rather than demonstrating one doctor to be better than the other, what this season reveals to us is that there really was room enough on the Enterprise for both to coexist equally and harmoniously.

Even here though, the unending problems of the second season are apparent: The Tea Ceremony scene contradicts Pulaski's behaviour in “The Icarus Factor” and arguably even in “A Matter Of Honor”, and this feels less like character development and more like basic inconsistent characterization. Furthermore, as good as it is, this scene has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the plot and functions just as well in complete contextual isolation from the rest of the episode, if not more so. Even “The Icarus Factor”, as rocky and uneven as that story was, at least managed to maintain some sense of thematic consistency: Both the A- and B-plots had at least something to do with the concept of family and where one makes it. I mean there's a rough unifying statement you could make about tolerance and understanding of other cultures, but that's too nebulous to be even worth expanding upon in my opinion.

A scattershot and dissociative approach to vignette storytelling also seriously compromises “Manhunt”, whose most immediate problem is that it feels like it was written just to loosely string together vaguely conceptualized comic bits related to Lwaxana Troi's return (because it was). Now, there's nothing wrong with doing an episode that's largely comedic in tone, but the comedy here simply isn't good: Most of the “jokes” Lwaxana brings are straightforwardly and unabashedly recycled from “Haven” (Mr. Homn, the suitcase, and so on), or worse, based on poking fun at Lwaxana's libido. Lwaxana brings absolutely none of the intriguing symbolism that characterized her debut to this episode, and her being a middle-aged woman with a healthy sexual appetite is portrayed as being something that's comically revolting, leaving all the men of the ship running in terror. Especially considering the show has a female story editor again, it's deeply concerning this show has done three episodes in rather close succession that have such egregiously sexist elements in them.

The Holodeck stuff is similarly half-baked, very obviously just being there for the sake of being there with no even subconscious attempt to engage with any sort of metafictional fun. It's plainly only there to set up the joke of Lwaxana hitting on a holographic character, which director Rob Bowman even pretty much outright *confirmed*. The equally empty Antedean dignitary plot, however, is at least supposed to be a Shaggy Dog story and does actually manage to be funny (and it's neat to see Mick Fleetwood there), I just only wish it could have backed up a better A-plot.

(Also fun to note: "Manhunt" was the first Star Trek: The Next Generation credit for makeup designer Allan Apone, who helped create the look of the Antedeans. His previous job? Miami Vice.)

The biggest problem both “Up The Long Ladder” and “Manhunt” have is not that they're just vignettes, in fact they're not even that: They're just collections of random and half-thought out ideas being thrown at the wall by a production team that's clearly running on empty. And you can't entirely blame them either: With the now-ridiculous writer's guild strike putting any and every attempt at progress on ice, it's become a Herculean effort simply to get any television made week to week at all. As it is, the episode count for this season was cut down in part because of the strike, and also due to the ongoing budget trouble the show's had since last year. The only remotely interesting thing in either episode, frankly (apart from the Tea Ceremony), is Commander Riker's statement in “Up The Long Ladder” that the Mariposa hails from the 22nd Century, a tumultuous time that not many records of which are known to survive (and that among the ships that served during that period there was apparently an SS Tomobiki and an SS Urusei Yatsura). Just knowing the historiography of the Star Trek chronology to this point, and indeed knowing what will eventually become of it, that one line has in hindsight proven to be hauntingly prescient and resonant.

It's not all that surprising, for a number of reasons, that these episode would come so soon after the introduction of the Borg.

“Oh Yupa! I don't want to go to war!”: Samaritan Snare

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. The implication is that, had be been in this situation instead, Captain Picard wouldn't have made the same mistakes Riker did. The very diegetic questions Worf and Troi raise against Riker's judgment that Bailey rages about in his piece and seems to think are indications of sloppy writing are there quite clearly to telegraph that Riker is obviously making the wrong calls and is going to be putting Geordi and the ship in serious danger.

The problem is not with the plot itself, which is about a trap you could imagine a fresh-faced, bullish and perhaps overconfident XO character to fall into, but that it's actually out of character for Riker to be making those kinds of mistakes in the first place. Although, like everyone else aboard, he travels aboard the Enterprise to learn and grow, *also* like everyone else aboard, he wouldn't be there in the first place if he wasn't already at a certain level of intellectual and emotional maturity such that he can serve as an ideal and role model himself. And like as we talked about in “The Icarus Factor”, Riker isn't macho or competitive: Telling a story about this kind of mistake isn't wrong, but that's not the kind of mistake Riker would make. “Samaritan Snare”s big problem isn't in having its characters make catastrophic mistakes they have to learn from-That's just a standard dramatic trope, after all. It's problem is forgetting that you can't actually *do* this on Star Trek: The Next Generation because that sort of plot is incompatible with the show's unique setting. That's not to say the show can't do character development, as you can't rightly have a show about learning and personal growth if nobody does either of those, but it has to be handled a certain way. Which, it must be said, “Samaritan Snare” doesn't do.

(Another thing Bailey refuses to grant Maurice Hurley and Melinda Snodgrass is the small matter of the writer's strike. He prefers to lay all the blame on one target, seemingly completely oblivious as to how hellishly unworkable this show was this season purely due to external factors far beyond the control of anyone in the writer's room.)

There are other problems with “Samaritan Snare”: The Pakleds alone bring with them a whole host of unfortunate implications, the most glaringly obvious being a particularly nasty case of science fiction race essentialism. Compounding the fact that he's acting out of character in the first place, having Riker so sneeringly dismissive of an entire species the show wants him to write off as being stupid and subnormal...I mean, ouch. I'm a strong critic of the accusation Star Trek: The Next Generation acted elitist and superior, but there's not a whole lot of other readings for that scene. But none of this is what I actually want to talk about here. What I'm far more interested in is what we learn about Captain Picard's backstory. Picard is out of character too, it must be said: He really should have patched things up with Doctor Pulaski by this point and if “Q Who” didn't paint him as arrogant necessarily, this episode sure does. It's a throwback to the plot of “Time Squared” where everything goes wrong because Picard thinks the whole ship revolves around him, which he shouldn't and normally doesn't.

I'm speaking of course of Picard receiving an artificial heart transplant as a result of getting stabbed in a bar fight with a group of alien bruisers. If we read Picard as someone who may have lived through the “Old Generation”, which his status as an established “Starfleet legend” would seem to imply, then this is telling. Though he may have coexisted with them, Picard is not of them (if he was, he wouldn't be on this show), and this means he's meant to travel and grow, thus modeling himself into an ideal. The crass bull-headedness of the Old Generation doesn't get you anywhere anymore (and notice how this is also a deconstruction of the Original Series' incessant testosterone-laden, consequence-free brawling), but more importantly, his artificial heart becomes a metaphor for his enlightenment by fiery trial. Picard's near-mortal injury has allowed him to become diegtically augmented in some form, which returns the show to the transhumanist themes it examined at the opposite end of the season, albeit far more subtly this time. Sometimes in order to become a better person we have to endure experiences that seem catastrophically tragic in the moment.

And in one of the most shocking and transformative moments in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it's revealed the person who almost killed Captain Picard was Princess Nausicaä.

Of course the aliens who are mentioned offhand in this episode were not named after a character from Homer's Odyssey. They were named after *the* Nausicaä: Hayao Miyazaki's guardian spirit, the angelic warrior-shaman at the heart of his sprawling and incomparable Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. This is one of the most powerful invocations Star Trek: The Next Generation has ever cast and it's absolutely stunning that the show would pit her *against* Captain Picard. This is, on the surface, even more damning than anything the Borg could have ever done: What kind of heartless, thoughtless, vile brute deliberately goes after someone like Nausicaä? It's practically a miracle Picard survived at all: Nausicaä will fight tooth and claw to uphold peace and the harmony of nature at any cost, up to and including that of her own life. Under absolutely no circumstance can anything redemptive or positive be discerned about *anyone* who would oppose Nausicaä on the basis of her values, and though she is loath to start fights, she is very, very good at ending them and won't hesitate to strike with the full force of a planet enraged.

But...That's not what this is about. “Samaritan Snare” doesn't put Captain Picard in opposition to Nausicaä, it's claiming the two characters, or really, the two ideals, exist in a delicate symbiotic relationship that manifests in the form of ritual combat. Both Nausicaä and Captain Picard are some kind of shaman, and shamans exist in both the divine and material realms. They're also both travellers, which is in many ways the same kind of thing. But shamans are part divine because they wear the stylized masks of the spirits in an attempt to convey their message through performative storytelling, which means divine rituals can play out and re-enact themselves each time a story is told. And because time is not what we think it is, this can spiral out to reach into the past-future and future-past: In her stories, Nausicaä has a fellow traveller named Lord Yupa: He's often called her mentor, but it's far more accurate to say he's a special person to her by virtue of being a kindred spirit whose presence guides her to take action: The reality of their relationship is that Yupa learns far more from Nausicaä than she ever does from him because her role is manifestly *not* to go through character development (as Miyazaki says, she doesn't change, we just get to know her better).

There's a scene early in both the manga and film versions of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind where Nausicaä is enraged by the actions of the Touromekian soldiers (offending the forest by breaking sacred taboo in the manga and killing her father in the movie) and flies into a blind rage, utterly slaughtering the entire deployment before Yupa steps in to separate the combatants, taking a blow from Nausicaä's sword and being wounded in the process. This is not, it should be stressed, necessarily Nausicaä's fault: By this point it had already been established she speaks for the land and operates on a higher level of morality than what ordinary humans understand. In this scene, Nausicaä is the avatar of the natural order and the cosmic godhead's revenge against retrograde forces of toxicity. But as a shaman, she also must speak for ordinary humans, and Yupa's intervention is what clears the stage so that Nausicaä can demonstrate this other side of herself. The reason I bring all of this up is that when Disney produced its English language dub of the movie in 2005, it cast Patrick Stewart as Lord Yupa, thus, intentionally or not, firmly re-establishing Star Trek: The Next Generation's symbolic connection to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Just as The Little Mermaid and the Disney Renaissance could not have happened without Hayao Miyazaki and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, a truth Disney chose to honour by casting Jodi Benson in that same dub, Star Trek: The Next Generation revealed its own true heritage by invoking Nausicaä herself in the show's official canon, and Nausicaä in turn sealed the partnership by allowing their ritual battle to play out once again through Patrick Stewart. And so Nausicaä cuts out Captain Picard's heart so that he might transcend the counterproductive and destructive tendencies his relationship to Star Trek shackles him with to become a far greater ideal, and Captain Picard retells the story in her honour by symbolically falling on her sword once more so that her own greatness might be revealed to us. And so the cycle begins anew.

And wouldn't you know it, where does Captain Picard go to get treated by Doctor Pulaski on Starbase 515? A hospital that features none other than a “Kei/Yuri Therapy Unit”. I have a suspicion the joke here is supposed to be that anyone who survives an encounter with the “Dirty Pair” needs therapy, but I think we all know the real truth is that it's Kei and Yuri themselves who dispense the therapy. It might not look like it at the time, the singularity looks like the apocalypse from below, but wherever and whenever the Lovely Angels happen to show up, things always happen for the better. Even if we can't notice it at the time.

“There's a terrible hatred hiding inside of me. I won't be able to control it anymore.”: Q Who

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”. So he consolidates his two contradictory characterizations into a new one of his own design: And thus, “Q Who” sees the birth of Q-the-Trickster-God.

Guinan too slips into a number of different roles as it becomes necessary: She's already all but supplanted Deanna Troi in the role of adviser and confidant (which will necessitate Troi's own functional shift later in the series), and here she also takes up the reins that Q was forced to leave behind as a result of “Hide and Q”. Oh sure, diegetically Guinan is supposed to be a bitter rival of Q's, but that would also make a degree of sense if we put ourselves in her place and try to find a way to explain this subtle shift textually. Critically, Guinan *agrees* with Q's damning assessment of humanity's hubris: It's most clear during the conference scene where she keeps pleading with the staff to, well, basically not do everything they go about doing, but it's also evident in the final denouement in Ten-Forward. Revealingly, Whoopi Goldberg plays Guinan the same way she does in “The Measure of a Man”: She prompts Patrick Stewart/Captain Picard to explain why he thinks Q “did the right thing for the wrong reasons”, tacitly challenging the assertion that he didn't. Like her legendary “that seems a bit harsh” line, her rhetoric and her actual feelings very clearly do not sync up. Guinan is a master of psychology and debate; her words are not what she's actually trying to convey.

Even Captain Picard, who seems to be the one once again on trial here, is not straightforwardly playing the role he's supposed to-Rather, he's carefully, dexterously weaving different narrative functions in an attempt to emphasize and highlight specific, critically important themes. This is not a story about Picard or the Enterprise crew more generally being arrogant and needing to swallow their pride, it's a story *about* arrogance and blinkered thinking that the crew put on a play to call attention to. What are the common examples cited about Picard's “arrogance” here? That he stopped to explore the uncharted Delta Quadrant he'd just been flung into instead of retreating at Guinan and Q's request? The he allowed Commander Riker to take his team over to the Borg Cube? Isn't “tucking tale” and turning back precisely the thing that Q was mocking him for? Is not trying to learn and take risks precisely what the Enterprise is supposed to be out here doing in the first place at a textual level?

As for turning down Q's initial request to join the crew, it seems pretty clear that Picard wasn't being smug, he was being skeptical. He doesn't trust Q, and has every diegetic right not to trust him because Q has by this point been forced to abdicate the moral high ground he had in “Encounter at Farpoint”. Compare how quickly Picard capitulates to Q's accusations in that episode once the evidence of history is stacked against him to the haughty tone he takes with him in “Hide and Q” (or indeed the first volume of the DC comic series). Q being forcibly transmuted is yet another example, albeit a particularly big one, of the tumult and unrest Star Trek: The Next Generation has been thrown into. No-one's quite sure where they stand anymore at this point, and everyone's just trying to get their bearings, regroup, and decide the next step to take.

One way to look at what's happening here is as a combination stage production and piece of classical philosophical fiction, as befits the backgrounds of all our esteemed players: Characters are not necessarily behaving in a manner that befits their own interiority, they're deliberately inserting themselves into particular roles on various sides of a debate that they've noticed are vacant and need to be filled pronto to salvage the work's effectiveness. And yet crucially, as performers they also make it clear to us this is what they're doing, which, with its overt performativity, calls attention to the shared artifice we've mutually agreed to concede for the time being, while at the same time reminding us of the (now-secondary) pre-existing reality of Star Trek: The Next Generation. With none of the regular roles *really* being handled comfortably or effectively, the cast doubles up, shuffles things around and re-orders the production into something a little more coherent. Q becomes the challenger and instigator, Picard his formal rebuttal and Guinan the moral conscience. As for the Borg...The Borg are the topic at hand, an undeniably, irreducible reality that everyone regonises as something that must be acknowledged and discussed.

The Borg are, as is explicitly stated several times in this episode, something the Federation was not yet meant to deal with. They are from the Federation's future in numerous respects: Most obviously, they are a “future enemy”, but they are also quite literally the Federation's future. A monoloithic hive-mind that lumbers around blindly absorbing anything it comes into contact with is exactly what Western, modern democratic federalist capitalism is destined to become. Capitalism worships efficiency and democracy touts egalitarianism, and there is *nothing* more efficient or egalitarian than the Borg. They are evolutionary survivors to the Nth degree because they can adapt to anything and everything you throw at them will simply be compensated for and added to the collective whole. The Borg are not evil, they don't even have a specific motivation or desire one way or another-They simply *are* and *do*. The Borg are the ideological concept of the banality of evil given shape and form. Even their catchphrase is the most blase, nonchalant, matter-of-factual statement ever:

We are the Borg.

Lower your shields and surrender your ships.

We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.

Prepare to be boarded.

Resistance is futile.

This isn't a command or a declaration or a pompous, evil speech, it's a casual, almost resigned, admission of truism. The Borg don't care who you are, what you do or what you think, they just exist simply for the sake of existing and perpetuating that existence...Regardless of whatever consequences that might come from the way they go about ensuring it.

Star Trek must, by its very definition, square off against the Borg because so much of Star Trek is wedded to the Federation. And they're the same damn thing, just in different evolutionary forms. But the pressing question here is whether Star Trek: The Next Generation must be the one to carry this burden. Does Star Trek: The Next Generation deserve to be the one to face down the methodical-yet-relentless march of the Borg Modernity? No. No it doesn't. Like Guinan says, it's far too early: The Borg are an enemy for the future, but also, this was supposed to be a golden age for Star Trek. History, in spite of what the textbooks tell you, is not teleological. It's entirely possible for societies to regress on themselves at certain times. That will happen to Star Trek someday, but, in spite of everything that's happened in the past twelve months or so, the age we are in now is not one of regression, it's one of material progress. The Enterprise is a place of constructive sanctuary apart from the retrograde ideals of the Federation. Star Trek: The Next Generation does not deserve to face the Borg because Star Trek: The Next Generation is not arrogant and imperialistic.

Even Q says he was impressed by and proud of Picard asking for his help. And Picard is not embarrassed by the position he's been placed in or too prideful to admit when he needs support, he simply knows what he has to say and says it. As Q says, a lesser man would have been humiliated to say those words.

But Star Trek: The Next Generation bears the Star Trek name, and its constant production troubles mean its ideals are not taking root as fast as they should be. So it takes the bullet. Captain Picard takes responsibility for the mistakes of the Federation and Star Trek: The Next Generation takes responsibility for the past and future mistakes of Star Trek just as Geordi took responsibility for the mistakes of Sonya Gomez. Once again, Captain Picard and his crew have to stand trial for the crimes of humanity.

(Speaking of Sonya Gomez, absolutely nothing about her works whatsoever. Intended to be yet another major new cast addition, as sure a sign as any of a show that's gotten dangerously self-conscious, she was meant to bring some “slapstick charm” to “lighten up” the show's atmosphere. In practice, she comes across as the production team thinking they hadn't done enough to dismiss and belittle women in “The Dauphin”.)

It's perhaps too early to tell if this sacrifice was made in vain or not. It is certainly concerning that the Borg become immediately popular precisely because they are antagonists who can't be reasoned with. It does sometimes feel unpleasantly as if Star Trek fans feel comfortable with the Borg because they can be shot at with impunity and a free conscience. Leaving aside for the moment the even more disturbing sorts of fans who actually *root* for the Borg and think they're *cool*, it's as if those very imperialistic tendencies they would pledge to oppose in the Borg are what gives them the zeal to fight them with the righteous fervor they do. And it's a matter of record that Q's speeches here about corners of the galaxy breeding unfathomably wonderful and dangerous things has, frighteningly, been used to justify doubling down on Star Trek's in-built militarism and xenophobia.

But like I said, the Federation isn't too different from the Borg. And neither are we.

“Shut up, Wesley!”: The Dauphin, Pen Pals

Part of the original justification for adding a child character to Star Trek: The Next Generation was to show how regular teenagers could come to terms with regular teenage issues in a utopian setting such as this. The idea was that in this place and at this time, teenagers' perspectives would be valued and respected as much as those of any other person, and they would be able to resolve their inner conflicts in ways kids don't always have the opportunity to do in the real world. It's a nice conceit, and you can see how it would be in theory easy to weave this theme in as a manifestation of the show's children's television for adults motif.

And then there's Wesley Crusher. And episodes like these.

Both of these episodes deal in some way with developing Wesley as a character and both of them fail pretty conclusively at it. To be fair to “The Dauphin” and “Pen Pals”, there isn't really a whole lot for them to actually go off of to begin with: Of all the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters, and with the utmost of respect to Wil Wheaton who consistently and gamely does the best he can with often unworkable material, Wesley Crusher is the one who has the most seriously and egregiously fatal conceptual flaws, and this makes it *extremely* hard to get behind anything he's involved in. “Pen Pals” isn't even expressly about him; his plot only comprises the B-story of an episode that is largely about Data. Problem is, Data himself has picked up Wesley's slack from the first season to become badly overexposed himself this year, and his story ultimately boils down to another Prime Directive runaround which means it sucks by default. Frankly, the fact that the Prime Directive has gotten us to a point where it would condone us leaving an innocent and adorable little alien girl to die on a planet that is literally exploding should tell us all we need to know about how cartoonishly evil, simplistic and impractical it is as a philosophical worldview.

The only thing remotely of interest in regards to the A-story of “Pen Pals” is Captain Picard's objection to helping Sarjenka's people, that the destruction of her planet and civilization might be part of a larger “cosmic plan” the Enterprise is not meant to be a part of. This is obviously intriguing considering the ethical foundation of Dirty Pair and all the Dirty Pair references that have been showing up in Star Trek: The Next Generation lately. Typically when Kei and Yuri inadvertently bring about the destruction of a planet, it's because something had marked its people very early on in the story as dangerously self-destructive, toxic or reactionary. It's also not usually the case that the girls' investigations end in a 100% fatality rating: More often than not there's a remnant that survives as a reminder to the readers that their mission is a positive and constructive one in spite of what it looks like, and that those who survive will probably end up with a better life than they started with. When the universe *does* have Kei and Yuri Kill 'Em All, there's usually a very good reason, like how the warring factions of “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture were a threat to themselves and others, or how the prison station in “Prison Uprising. We Hate People with Grudges!” was a monument to Panopticism.

So the question becomes, did the Dremans do something that was somehow *that bad* to warrant being doomed to be wiped off the galaxy? We certainly never get any indication of that anywhere in the episode, and furthermore this kind of plot becomes exponentially more worrying when taken out of Dirty Pair (where extraterrestrial life doesn't exist, or if it does it's so beyond our comprehension such that it's practically indescribable and ineffable, so we're only dealing with humanity in the general) and placed in Star Trek, where we're talking about entire species and ethnicities, and that's not touching on the latent militarism and imperialism that still haunts Star Trek. Maybe that's why Captain Picard eventually does allow the Enterprise to help. Perhaps we could say Sarjenka and Data were meant to find each other just as the Enterprise was in the system conducting geological surveys precisely such that it would be in a position to help her and her people. That's certainly a nicer twist on the plot that would be befitting of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Funnily enough, “Pen Pals” is the first episode in awhile that doesn't have an explicit Dirty Pair reference I was able to spot.

(It's also worth briefly noting the choice of characters here: Melinda Snodgrass campaigned for Data to be the one to talk to Sarjenka, because his literal-mindedness as an android gives him a childlike veneer that works nicely with the story's themes.)

So with that all said let's talk about Wesley Crusher. In “Pen Pals”, he takes his first command as the leader of the survey team that studies Drema IV and must face such crushing command decisions as how to react to his science officer questioning him and daring to point out how his positionality might mean there are some things he's not as informed about as others. But, as Commander Riker so helpfully points out, Wesley is in charge just like Captain Picard, and since nobody questions the captain’s authority (I guess we'll forget about “Lonely Among Us” and “Time Squared” for the moment) nobody should question Wesley's either. And, sure enough, the remarkable, brilliant and wonderful boy makes the crucial discovery that saves Sarjenka and her people.

This actually ties nicely in with “The Dauphin”, which was a similarly solipsistic yarn about how uniquely tortured and special Wesley Crusher is. It was supposed to be a love story about awkward teenage feelings and emotions but, seemingly in a dogged attempt to sidestep every single one of its core themes and values, Star Trek: The Next Generation forces us to watch Wesley going on about *his* pain and *his* confusion in a rote recitation of every single godawful young adult story about teenage boys that has ever been written since the dawn of time. The plot is basically “Elaan of Troyius” without the racism, as it features a beguiling young woman duty- and honour-bound to bring peace between two warring factions who tragically has no time for love from our sincere and eager Nice Guy.

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:

"No. Men do not roar. Women roar...and they hurl heavy objects...and claw at you..."

"What does the man do?"

"He reads love poetry. He ducks a lot.”

So that can pretty much fuck all the way off.

In the end, of course, Wesley shows up all of his inept peers and elders by simply visiting Salia's room and talking to her, because of course he does. And that, right there, sums up the problem with Wesley Crusher so neatly: He's cishet male privilege given form. Both of these episodes in one respect or another deal with Wesley being reassured of his natural, God-given authority because he's either male, he's in a position of power or because he's a Nerd (as if there was actually a meaningful difference between those things anyway). If there's every any conflict, it's *always* brought upon him by *other people*, all of whom are some manner of scary, different, confusing or less competent than he is. All Wesley Crusher ever has to worry about is the haters and the little people who keep bothering him and cramping his style. And what's up with that? After all, he didn't do anything to them, right?

For real, fuck this. Fuck him. Fuck these episodes. This is the exact wrong kind of “children's television” Star Trek: The Next Generation ought to be trying to mould itself as and is precisely the reason why I can't stand Wesley Crusher.

“Loser Sons”: The Icarus Factor

Of late, Star Trek: The Next Generation has been trying to flesh out its characters a bit beyond the one-note briefs they were originally conceived as. Though the show started strong displaying its potential to be a powerful ensemble series, the first season frustratingly did end up as basically “The Picard, Riker and Data Show”. This season, in spite of everything, has at least made attempted inroads to correct this, with strong highlights for characters like Geordi, Worf, Deanna, O'Brien, Guinan and Doctor Pulaski (the latter if only because they were new additions to the cast).

That's not to say there haven't been a huge amount of exposure for the would-be triumvirate though: Picard and Data have both essentially worn out their quota for the entire year already, and Riker isn't far behind with this episode. Although that said “The Icarus Factor” is straightforwardly the sort of thing that Star Trek: The Next Generation ought to be really good at: At its heart, it's an interlocking series of vignettes about Riker, his father, Doctor Pulaski, Troi, Worf, O'Brien, Data, Geordi and Wesley, and this is pretty much the ideal structure for this show to handle character pieces because it takes a slice of shipboard life and shows how all these different characters react to a given situation and the kinds of relationships they have with each other.

Unfortunately, “The Icarus Factor” is also something of a hot mess.

This *should* be a relatively simple A/B plot structure with both halves of the narrative demonstrating the themes of family and where you make your home. Riker is (justifiably) estranged from his father because of his behaviour when he was a child while at the same time contemplating a promotion that would take him away from the Enterprise. Kyle (and actually Captain Picard, for that matter) acts as if Will is going to accept even before he's made a decision precisely because it would put him in charge of a dangerous mission and they assume that he, like his father, can't resist a challenge. Meanwhile, Worf is feeling lonely and isolated because he's missing an important Klingon rite of passage meant to be shared with family, and he has no Klingon family to speak of and doesn't think his friends on the Enterprise will understand. There's even a bit of overlap when Worf asks to join Riker on his new assignment because the high risk would give them an opportunity to die in glorious battle together, and Worf considers Riker a comrade.

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.

The problem is that nobody is behaving the way they're supposed to and there are logic holes big enough to drive a truck through that are strewn about everywhere. The story is trying to show how Riker is different from his father; that he forges authentic and meaningful personal connections that last while his father smooth-talks everyone he meets. And furthermore, that Will does not chase challenge just for the egoistic satisfaction of competition and proving himself-that he's a far wiser and more seasoned person than that. Will is genuine, while Kyle hides behind a veneer of charisma to distract us from the fact the only way he knows how to interact with people is to compete with them. Will's also supposedly better at conflict resolution, which makes sense as he lives on the Enterprise: He apologises to Doctor Pulaski for intruding on her personal life when Kyle has never apologised for anything in his life. And yet at the same time it tries to make Will out to be as bullishly and indelicately male as Kyle: The script has Doctor Pulaski tell him to “jettison [his] personal baggage” and there's that completely inexplicable scene in the observation lounge where Deanna gives an unwatchably to-the-note sitcom “Silly-men-can't-live-with-'em-can't-live-without-'em” grump.

Don't get me wrong, there are *plenty* of reasons to criticize and laugh at masculinity, but reiterating stock “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” sitcom cliches is the absolute wrong way to go about doing that. And furthermore, what does any of this tell us about who Will Riker actually is? That he's a bastion of utopian maturity except when he isn't? That he's moved beyond the shallow macho posturing of his father except when he hasn't? Hardly. Will Riker isn't Jim Kirk (or even Will Decker), except in the absolute most superficial sorts of comparisons that predate “Encounter at Farpoint”. Certainly not now when his backstory is more fleshed out and he's got his now-explicit Alaskan heritage and that whole North Woodsman aesthetic going for him (that I do admit I kinda dig) and we shouldn't be expecting him to embody the same kind of “masculine virtues” Kirk did (or was supposed to at least, considering William Shatner takes one look at a phrase like “masculine virtues” and laughs his ass off). Let's leave that back in the 1960s, shall we? That's not for us. It's for people like, well Kyle Riker.

(I suppose that's one reason why the Anbo-jyutsu ring that's the site of Kyle's defeat and Will's personal epiphany is adorned with the sacred marks “Kei” and “Yuri”. Although in this case the more appropriate ones might be “Lum” and “Ataru” and “Urusei Yatsura”, the series from which they hail: Urusei Yatsura is about farcical cosmic bad luck that happens to programatically idiotic men and the offbeat, quirky, and oftentimes equally idiotic, women who put up with them.)

But the bigger problems for me are in the Worf half of the plot. Geordi, for one, acts *completely* out of character, hypocritically claiming his ego isn't at stake while fuming at the Strafleet team going over his work and arrogantly brushing aside Wesley and Data's concerns about Worf. He should be the first person to notice something is troubling Worf or, if not, he should be the one who reaches out to him by organising the celebration on the holodeck. It feels like Geordi is being cack-handedly shoved out of his proper role in order to put Wesley back in his insufferable “I know you better than you do and can fix anything” first season characterization that, following a season of tiring and repetitive overexposure, Data is now perilously close to sharing with him.

While Doctor Pulaski is generally excellent in the Riker plot, she's out of sorts in the Worf one because of her reticence about Klingon culture: No, “Up The Long Ladder” hasn't aired yet, but Pulaski has already shown herself to be at least somewhat familiar with Klingon customs in “A Matter Of Honor”, so there's no reason for her to act so squeamish here. The only person who's remotely on point here aside from O'Brien is Captain Picard, because Patrick Stewart so jubilantly sells Picard's glee at Riker's upcoming promotion: Clearly, Picard doesn't like thinking of Riker as a subordinate and is not only proud of him, but giddy at the prospect of having an official excuse to treat him as an equal.

(Then there's the small matter of Worf asking to join Riker on the Drake. The point of the scene is to emphasize the danger of the mission Will would be taking on by having Worf insist on accompanying him to protect him. Only problem is this scene happens before it's revealed how dangerous the Drake's mission is going to be. Oops. I'm not really one for plot nitpicking, but this sort of oversight does torpedo the episode's logistical coherence and effectiveness some.)

“The Icarus Factor” is an episode I've been harsher on than was probably strictly necessary. It's got some important character moments and has one or two nice scenes, but it's structurally and conceptually a sloppy mess, and that's concerning as it's yet one more example of Star Trek: The Next Generation ineffectually trying to redefine itself. That it's another mediocre episode in a run of mediocre stories from a mediocre season is telling inasmuch as it shows us quite clearly what the new mediocre looks like...and yet Star Trek: The Next Generation is supposed to be at least in part about constant self-improvement. It's imperative that it *never* settle for mediocrity precisely *because* it needs to be always striving to to improve itself. And once again, it's not being allowed to.

“Dead Alive”: Time Squared

There came a moment while watching “Time Squared” when I was suddenly reminded for a brief moment of what it felt like seeing Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time over twenty years ago. Somewhere, in betwixt Commander Riker making breakfast, Geordi and Data trying to figure out how to get the shuttlepod operational, Geordi's later tech briefing to the staff in the conference room and Deanna's conversation with Doctor Pulaski in sickbay, this momentarily stopped being “the show I write about for work” and once more became “the show I remember”.

This might be partially because the central conceit of this episode, a causal time loop, reoccurs again a few seasons later in “Cause and Effect”, which is one of my very favourite episodes in the series. Not that the actual plot of “Time Squared” is any sort of precursor or that “Cause and Effect” is derivative; what happens here is far more oblique and mysterious than the time loop from the later story. It's a bit more accurate to say that what we see here is an example of a branching dimension, and Troi even says as much at one point during the episode. One way to read this would be to roughly compare it with an actual physics theory called the “many-worlds interpretation”, which, put general, states that when witnessing the spin state of an electron, there are two possible observations: One where the electron is observed to have a positive spin “up” and one where it's observed to have a negative spin “down”. Well, the many-worlds interpretation states that for every individual instance where the particle is observed to spin “up”, there is another world where, for that same instance, the particle is observed to spin “down”, and vice versa. This is frequently extrapolated to the level of physical actions by humans on the macroscopic scale in the pop discourse.

So in “Time Squared”, we have two possible worlds: One where Captain Picard leaves the ship in the shuttlepod in an attempt to save the Enterprise from the energy entity and one where he doesn't. What would appear to be happening is a temporary intersection between these two universes, and the dilemma the crew faces is that they know from the log tapes that Picard's attempt to save the ship in the “leave the Enterprise” universe proves to be futile, but they can't figure out what the other observational state is. And here's where Star Trek: The Next Generation shows itself to be better than other science fiction, because not only does it not stop here (it would be perfectly acceptable, after all, for a Hard SF work to make a big deal just about doing a story built around the many-worlds interpretation, leaving it at that and waiting for us to tell it how clever it's being), but this gimmick isn't even the real point of the episode: Instead, it's a narrative device to tell a story about Captain Picard.

The reason Picard is so freaked out at seeing his alternate dimension counterpart is because they are in fact so very explicitly the same person, and the only thing that sets them apart is how they acted in one crucial moment. Our Picard cannot accept the idea that he would abandon his ship and his crew in their time of need, and yet he has to because there exists a world where he did precisely that. Of course, as the timelines start to sync up it does go a ways to redeeming him when it becomes clear he only did it because he thought it was in the crew's best interest and the only way to save them. And yet that in itself is revealing and where the alternate Picard made such a critical mistake: His assumption was that the entity saw the Enterprise as a living thing with himself as its brain and wanted to absorb him...And how freaking presumptuous is that? Even when Picard is trying to make a selfless act, he still does it in such a way that he makes it all about himself. He even tries to make a big dramatic heroic sacrifice that plays right in to the notion of him being this romantic and tragic leading man: The mistake is in forgetting Star Trek: The Next Generation is an ensemble, and you can see this revelation shakes Picard to his core when he stands alone in the observation lounge at the end of the episode.

Wonderfully, it's Doctor Pulaski who realises this. She immediately recognises what's troubling Picard and worries he might get so panicked and despondent she'll have to relieve him of command, and flatly warns Troi she won't hesitate to do so if she feels she has to. This is an interesting bit for how it provides yet another example of how the actors often give very counterintuitive readings and performances that directly contrast with what the written intent would seem to be: This is a Maurice Hurley script, and he seems to want to give the moral high ground to Troi here, having her sputter indignantly at Pulaski's doubts about Picard's mental and emotional state. But both Marina Sirtis and Diana Muldaur seem keenly aware that the far more effective way to deliver that scene would be to give it to Pulaski, and that's just what they do. Sirtis plays Troi taken aback and wrongfooted, trying to retain a facade of haughtiness while scrambling to tell Pulaski off: In a way, Troi comes across almost as arrogant and self-assured as Picard. Muldaur, meanwhile, remains calm, collected, remorseful and understanding-I adore how she tries to play the voice of reason and dejectedly sighs and shakes her head when Troi storms out of sickbay. The body language of both actors is out of this world, and, combining that with their delivery, they just knock the whole scene out of the park.

(In fact, given this and the pre-existing metatextual relationship we know the two characters have with each other, I'm inclined to read this scene as another instance where Troi's shipboard counselor role is showing signs of being deprecated.)

This theme of forcing the Enterprise crew to confront their own hubris isn't all that surprising once you learn the original draft of “Time Squared” had Q behind everything and that this episode was meant to be a lead-in to “Q, Who?”. Hurley says Gene Roddenberry prevented the team from using Q two stories in a row for whatever reason and that this hurts the final product-I'm not so sure about that, as I think the episode works well enough on its own, but I can see how adding Q would have reinforced its central concept a little bit more. But the question that merits raising here is whether Star Trek: The Next Generation *in particular* needs to be knocked down a few pegs the way this episode, “Q, Who?” and debatably “The Measure of a Man” (if you're inclined to read that episode that way) would seem to imply it does. It's not like the show is in an amazingly healthy state right now: Given the writers' guild strike and the calibre of stuff it's been tossing out this year, it's really not in a position to be boastful about much of anything. And it's certainly not the case that Star Trek: The Next Generation behaves with the same ham-fisted didacticism as its predecessor: It's proven that many times over by now.

And yet the threat is still there. The very last episode to air before “Time Squared” was “The Royale”, which was nothing if not an unapologetically retrograde throwback to the Original Series. And this wasn't the first time this show has done that, hell, it wasn't even the first time the show had done that *this season*. One gets the sense something is in badly need of being shaken up, regardless of whether or not it's even Star Trek: The Next Generation's fault that this needs to happen. It may someday turn out to be the case that the show will need to take the fall for things it didn't even do and isn't responsible for, and that's an eventuality we should be ready for. Whether it deserves to or not, Star Trek: The Next Generation has to face the prospect of answering for all of Star Trek's previous (and sometimes future) sins, which is why the spectre of Q looms over affairs even now. My Captain Picard doesn't have this on his conscience, but a reality exists where Captain Picard does, and that's not something I can completely ignore.

And this is maybe why “Time Squared”, while quite a good episode that works significantly towards building a thematic consistency in a lame duck season of television, only gave me a fleeting glimpse of that intangible ideal of mine. There are days where I really hate writing about visual media.