“Now will never come again”: Time's Arrow

Writing fanfiction was probably the earliest way I ever dynamically or critically interacted with media. I guess I always found it the most intuitive and instinctual to express ideas and concepts through the voices of particular characters. Perhaps it's something like Lwaxana Troi said in “Cost of Living”: All those little people who live inside of us, each of them voicing a different facet of ourselves. I suppose part and parcel of being the sort of person who undertakes a project of this scope and magnitude is that these particular characters, or at least versions of them shaped by my own perspectives, readings, interpretations and projections, are always going to live inside of me.

In a sense, this is nothing more than an extension of the way we read. The overall impact a text is going to have on you is largely contingent on the positionality you bring to the text itself. When we're talking about speculative fiction, we're talking about a genre that, perhaps more than any other, is designed to stimulate and inspire imaginations. And a hallmark of storytelling has always been its mutability: That multiple storytellers can and do take familiar characters and stories and tell them in different ways, bringing something a little bit new and different along with a piece of themselves into the tapestry of myth.

“Time's Arrow” is a good episode. More of a straightforward adventure story than maybe some other episodes, but well done. The two things that have always stuck with me are the Devidians themselves and the part at the beginning when the time travel stuff is first introduced, which dovetails into what's actually a quite good allegory for mortality for what it is (Deanna rather aptly uses the term “terminal illness”, and her cute little imitation of Data is another sign of her current status as a character because that's not at all Deanna Troi, but it's pure Marina Sirtis). It's a fitting way to close off a season that's dealt so heavily with time travel (indeed, time becoming unbound, which will return with aplomb next season), death, the afterlife and counterfactual alternate realities exiting simultaneously and coming into contact.

So here's a small alternate reality of my own. When I was watching the scene where Geordi and Data are talking in ten forward about Data's imminent death, I still had “The Next Phase” fresh in my mind, so my thoughts drifted back to Laren and how she might take all of this. And then all of a sudden, this exchange popped into my mind. Laren isn't in “Time's Arrow”, but this is something I thought she might say given everything that's been going on lately. I imagine this scene taking place just before the one between Geordi and Data. I swear this isn't even the kind of fanfiction I normally like to write-I typically couldn't care less about filling in blanks in aired stories or adhering to the televised canon of events too terribly much, and I actually surprised myself that I came up with this. But it's an exchange I felt compelled to write, for whatever that's worth.

 

INT.TEN FORWARD (OPTICAL)

 

Geordi is sitting alone at the bar. He's clearly pensive, trying to work through the events of the past few days. Trying to figure out what to think and what to say. From behind him in the background, Ro enters and takes notice of Geordi. She stops herself in her tracks, hesitates for a moment, then moves into the foreground. She comes up to Geordi. 

 

RO

Do you mind if I join you?

 

GEORDI

(Preoccupied)

Oh...Hi, Ro. Sure.

 

RO

I hope I'm not intruding or anything-You look like you'd rather be alone. But, well...You also look like someone who wants someone to think they'd rather be alone, but secretly hopes that will get that person to come talk to them anyway. Now I could be wrong...But Guinan tells me that nobody comes to Ten Forward to be alone.

 

Ro sits down across from Geordi and looks straight at him. He turns away from her, shakes his head and grins.

 

GEORDI

Well, I guess you've got me figured.

 

RO

I speak from experience. Trust me.

 

They are silent for a beat as they look down at their drinks. It's Ro who speaks up first.

RO

I heard about Data. I'm so sorry-We were all his friends, but I know you were really close with him and...

 

Ro suddenly catches herself and realises what she's saying.

 

RO

(Frustrated)

“Were”? Listen to me, going on in the past tense. He's not even dead yet and here I go talking like he's already gone.

 

GEORDI

Don't worry-This has been hard on all of us. But yeah...Data was the first friend I made on the Enterprise. We met working together on the bridge...

 

He thinks for a moment, and tries to force joviality to lighten the mood, however briefly.

 

GEORDI

I used to have your job, actually-Did you know that?

 

RO

You were a pilot...? I know Captain Picard said he met you piloting a shuttlecraft, but...

 

GEORDI

Yeah...Started out as one, but always wanted to work with propulsion. Was lucky enough to make chief engineer our second year out.

 

A beat, as they both realise this tangent isn't going to take.

 

GEORDI

You know, what always struck me about Data is that for someone who claims to have no human emotions or desires, from the beginning he always seemed to have such...an imagination. He sees things differently, hell, probably better than anyone else, but he's always eager to learn from us. He probably doesn't consider himself an artist, but he is – He's always trying so hard to express himself and share what he sees...Sometimes in spite of himself.

 

RO

Maybe that's why you get along with him so well.

 

He does not pick up on the message she's trying to send him. He continues

 

GEORDI

It's like...You build up so much of your life used to always being around some people. You're with them every day, coming and going and living, day to day. I guess you could say you almost take it for granted. And then suddenly...They're not there anymore. I guess it makes you think.

 

RO

I've been thinking about it a lot lately too. I mean, we've been dead. That's bound to change your perspective, right? But I was also thinking about the Captain's experience with the Ktaan probe.

 

GEORDI

Really? What about it?

 

RO

I was listening to him in sickbay talking about this...whole other life he had lived. For years, decades. Do you remember what he told us he had told his daughter...well, I guess it would really be Kamin's daughter...when they found out their sun was going to go supernova? He told her to “seize the time”. To “make now always the most precious time”.

 

There is a beat, and she continues

 

RO

My people believe it's very important for the dead to make peace with their past lives. I'm starting to believe we can do that when we're still alive. I think Kamin was right. Maybe we all need to remember to always live in the now, and to treasure the time we spend with each other for what it brings us, because those moments will never come again.

 

Geordi considers Ro and her words for a time, then smiles.

 

GEORDI

People come in and out of our lives all the time, and each one has something to teach us. I guess it's up to us to make the most of whatever time together we have.

 

It looks like he's about to say something to her, but then Data enters from behind them. Ro notices him, and gets up to leave.

 

RO

(Hurriedly)

I'd better get going.

 

GEORDI

Wait, Laren...I'm going to be free again in a couple hours. Maybe...we could get together to check out a holodeck program or visit Miles and Keiko in the arboretum or something?

 

She looks down at him and smiles.

 

RO

I'm going off-duty at 0700. See you then?

 

With that, she turns to leave, gently squeezing his shoulder on her way out. She passes Data, who looks at her quizzically before moving into the foreground to the bar. As Data comes up to Geordi, Ro moves into the background and leaves ten forward, the doors closing behind her.

 

 

“Spirits Within”: The Inner Light

There's really nothing much to say. It's simply one of the single greatest moments in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and probably all of Star Trek. It deservedly won a Hugo Award back when the Hugo Awards actually meant something. If it's not the single greatest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation it's a contender; the connoisseur's pick for those who don't want to tow the fandom line and pick “The Best of Both Worlds”. It's damn near close to perfect. You don't need me to tell you that.

It's almost funny though that “The Inner Light” gets all the accolades, because to me it runs so contrary to everything we're told makes “good drama” and a good episode of this series in particular. There's no “conflict” about Captain Picard's suppressed darkness and nobody learns a lesson about the lengths they'll go when pushed and there's no angsty, broody mediations about how life is pain. Rather, this is a story about performativity and storytelling. In fact, it's a story so willfully about performativity that it's not even really about Captain Picard at all, even though it was envisioned as a story about “Picard's unlived life” and features some of Patrick Stewart's very best acting to date. The probe is described as a form of “ancestor simulation”, and that's such a wonderfully loaded term-One I'm obviously quite drawn to. It's Eline's (or rather, a manifestation of her's) final words that spell it out: “Now we live in you. Tell them of us”. Words to remember and return to.

If you were for some reason inclined to be negative about this episode, it is possible to read it as a particular kind of “down to Earth” story, showing how travelling the universe in starships is less preferable to settling down to raise a family and spend the rest of your life with your soulmate in a quiet, sleepy little village somewhere. In fact this is bolstered by the one line in the whole production that does grate on me a little bit, namely when Kamin says “I always believed that I didn't need children to complete my life. Now, I couldn't imagine life without them”. As someone who is childless by design this stings a bit, smacking as it does of heternormativity and reproductive futurism. But the thing to remember here is that this is technically Kamin speaking, not Captain Picard: One of the reasons why this is such an oustanding Picard episode, possibly the definitive, is how it plays on the narrative role he's always had. Since the very early days of the show being hamstrung, one of Captain Picard's strengths as a character has been his ability to fill whatever narrative role the diegetic philosophical fiction requires (you could, actually, probably redeem “I, Borg” a bit by thinking about it in that light), and this episode simply takes that and writes it back into the text.

So there is already that level of performativity built in from the outset. But the curious thing is that this isn't exactly the way “The Inner Light” operates. Not entirely, anyway. There's a whole other level that truly makes this story a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, and it's the reason “The Inner Light” isn't just another classic, it's one of Star Trek: The Next Generation's rare truly defining moments. It's Jay Chattaway's haunting, Celtic-influenced score (one of his all-time greatest in my opinion) that gives us the first hint as to what this is really all about. Recall how ancient tales of the Otherworld spoke of heroes who would travel by invitation to the Fortunate Isles across the sea where time stands still to live among the faery and Elven gods and goddesses in an eternal summer of youth. Sometimes they would be cautioned against returning to the mortal world, where entire ages might pass in the wink of an eye, as they might find everyone the knew and loved to be long dead, or they might succumb to rapid aging and die themselves. Because this is what “The Inner Light” really is: A fairyland epic for the science fiction age.

But it's a very peculiar kind of fairyland epic. This is not a story where a voyaging hero from the mortal realm crosses the sea to abandon his rustic origins. But it's not the opposite either; that would be an epic about a god becoming mortal extolling the virtues of heteronormative wedded domestic bliss amongst precious transience. “The Inner Light” does touch on this by relating how happy Kamin and Eline are throughout their many decades together, but this is subverted at the end by returning to Enterprise and all throughout by the fact that this isn't really Captain Picard, more like Captain Picard playing Kamin's role and bringing elements of his positionality to the performance. And then there's that tiny little niggling thing about how time works in this story. Kamin spends several decades on Ktaan waiting for their sun to die, but for Captain Picard and the rest of the bridge crew it is, famously “only twenty-five minutes” (speaking of the bridge crew by the way, I have to give a shout-out to poor Marina Sirtis, who is MIA for what's possibly her show's finest hour).

See, this is kind of the reverse of how Otherworld stories tend to operate. Picard seems to spend years and years in another land when it's really only been a few minutes. Why? Quite simply, because Captain Picard didn't go to the Otherworld. He's not a mortal hero who travelled to the land of Faery, he's a Faery God himself who spent a few years out of his immortal existence among the mortals, learning how they lived and loved and using that knowledge and experience to enrich his own life back on the Fortunate Isles. An enlightened, extraterrestrial and divine anthropologist and also the archetypal voyager: Someone who can live an entire fulfilled, satisfied life and still keep on living. Still keep growing. It wasn't his life, but it's a life he understands, respects and treasures. And he's a better person for having lived it.

This actually isn't the first time Star Trek has tread near this territory, but it's the best. Way back in the Original Series there was a story aptly called “Wink of an Eye” that could also be read as an inverted fairyland epic, but that reading is hamstrung a bit by the fact it was the Original Series and the third season and therefore sorta kinda a train wreck. The utopian interpretation for that episode, as was the case for all of that show, needed to be grafted onto it after the fact. “The Inner Light”, by contrast, is perfectly exquisite. It says everything it needs to say and does everything it needs to do humbly and sublimely. Damn straight this won an award and is remembered as an unmitigated classic: It's one of the few stories that actually earns all the accolades it gets from fans, and is actually probably entitled to a few more. It's a flawless execution of everything Star Trek: The Next Generation is supposed to stand for and be about coming right when it was needed the very most. This may actually be the definitive Star Trek story period.

In the end, we're all only left with the memories. Images of times and places and people imprinted on our souls. Part of learning more about who we are involves coming to terms with what those mean to us, because it's them we turn to when we need to know ourselves better. People and experiences come into and out of our lives and while very few of them stay with us always in the present moment, they all help shape us to one extent or another. I think this may be the root of the deification of ancestors in many cultures: To paraphrase a thinker far more talented and perceptive than I, you worship them because they went through it long before you did. And then there's that “ancestor simulation” thing again. What is a role model but someone you turn to in order to emulate their best qualities? Their soul and their works live on through you and everyone else whose lives they touched throughout their being.

It's interesting that I should reach “The Inner Light” when I do. Part of Vaka Rangi, the most important part (for me at least), is about making peace with a huge portion of my past, trying to understand fully the role it played in shaping the person I became, but also in a sense laying it to rest in order to move beyond it. My life since beginning this project has been a positively uncanny example of life imitating art in this case, and I was just thinking earlier about how disappointed I've been in this run of stories; how so many of them fell short of the (in hindsight inevitably) overinflated memories I ascribed to them. It's a continually dispiriting process for me to keep seeing just how much I personally projected onto this particular bit of pop culture ephemera from the late 1980s and early 1990s. And yet even so I can't shake my loyalty to certain things about it, or at the very least least to the process of growth and self-discovery it will forever be linked to in my mind.

Some part of all this will live on within me, forever and always.

“No, it's not 'just a phase'”: The Next Phase

Yes, it's very, very good. Thank heavens. This is my favourite Geordi episode. It's also my favourite Laren episode. It may well be my favourite Ron Moore episode. But I have to stop myself, because I'm perfectly liable to spend the entire essay just squealing about Geordi and Laren, and that's going to entertain nobody but myself. So I'll save that for the end and get all of the other things that are good about “The Next Phase” out of the way first.

And there are quite a lot. Dealing with themes of coming to terms with death and loss is nothing new for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and certainly not for Ron Moore. No surprises from him there. What *is* new, at least to this show, is the idea of looking it it from beyond the veil, so to speak: It doesn't go too far down this path, of course, but even so “The Next Phase” does leave open a few tantalizing possibilities for those inclined to read what happens here critically and laterally. It reminds me in this regard a bit of “Power Play” (coincidentally another story where Geordi and Laren featured relatively prominently together, but again I'm getting ahead of myself) where a seemingly supernatural phenomenon (again, ghosts) is explained away by some form of technobabble...But the show never actually goes so far as to debunk the supernatural explanation or claim that the two forms of situated knowledge are not in truth describing the same thing.

And again just like in “Power Play” the story is very good about choosing which specific kind of technobabble to invoke. In the previous episode, the entity possessing Deanna's body claims that consciousness can live on in the ionic storms of a planet's atmosphere which, even though it's technically a lie to mislead Captain Picard and accrue his sympathy so she can take advantage of him and the Enterprise crew, still opens up some particularly interesting avenues of thought. To me, it was a very appealingly animistic way of conceptualizing things fittingly translated into Star Trek: The Next Generation's blend of sci-fi fantasy. This time it's a kind of “interphase cloaking device” developed by the Romulans that renders the user not just invisible but immaterial, existing on a different “phase” of being and therefore able to pass through solid objects, including people and particle beams.

Now, I believe there's a special kind of significance in the fact that it's the Romulans in particular who developed this kind of technology (as Geordi says, the Klingons were working on the same idea but abandoned it after deciding it was untenable-The Romulans didn't) and it isn't because the Romulans are sneaky backstabbing bastards, but this isn't the time or place to properly go into my theory as to why. Instead I'll talk about the ramifications being phased like this has for Laren as a character. One of the things that strikes me as interesting about her when compared to her kinsfolk, whom we'll be meeting a great many of very shortly, is that she's basically an atheist Bajoran, or at least starts out as one. Granted the overwhelming majority of Bajoran culture and society has yet to be fleshed out by the time “The Next Phase” airs (though a lot of it was being feverishly worked on behind-the-scenes), but with foreknowledge this marks Laren as a dreadfully fascinating person as a result.

Like Reg Barclay in last year's “The Nth Degree”, “The Next Phase” is on one level about Laren undergoing a spiritual or shamanic experience and trying to make sense of it after the fact, but unlike Reg we also get in this episode a framework for what Laren's pre-existing spiritual beliefs, or rather lack thereof, happen to be. This is why she spends the first half of this episode trying to make peace with her past life, because, like a great many people who undergo similar experiences in the real world, Laren is filtering what she's seeing and experiencing through the lens of the belief systems she's been brought up with and trying to reconcile them with what she was taught growing up. So when she tells Geordi things like “Don't you get it? We're dead, Geordi. It's as simple as that” and “Why can't you just accept that we've died?”, she's really trying to convince herself as much as she is him. This comes back at the end during the denouement, where she essentially confesses to Geordi that she's now gone from being an atheist to an agnostic as a result of the experience, admitting that she now realises dismissing things outright without a second thought is somewhat arrogant.

You could argue that Laren is being portrayed as a bit misguided and ignorant here, especially given how right it turns out Geordi was about everything. And Geordi, understandably, reacts like a scientific rationalist first and foremost, even though he does start to tune in to how weird the whole thing is the longer he stays phased. But remember that's not actually made explicit for the majority of the episode: From a narrative structure standpoint, it's pretty up in the air for most of the time who's actually right, and it's entirely possible for a good amount of time that Geordi is simply in denial. Granted this only works if you take the episode solely within its own context: There were certainly no announcements that LeVar Burton and Michelle Forbes were leaving the show, so it is pretty clear even from the beginning something else is going on. And anyway, reading this as the show belittling Laren would also require you to disregard how strong of a team she and Geordi make here and how its both Geordi and Laren working together (with some help from Data) that brings them back, and...

Dammit no, not yet!

This is another strong example of how quietly powerful Star Trek: The Next Generation can be when its writing and directing are working in tandem, and David Carson's work behind the camera here deserves special note. It's not quite as striking as what Jonathan Frakes pulled in “Cause and Effect”, but it's revealing in its own subtle ways: I love all the little times when Geordi and Laren are blocked into the background with the rest of the cast out front, especially during the party in ten-forward. I also really like how Geordi anticipates what Data is going to say in the transporter room and the shuttlecraft, as if Data is subconsciously picking up on advice he's giving him from another plane; phantom messages from the ether. Then there's the truly wonderful scene where Laren tries to thank Captain Picard (who can't hear her) for “believing in [her] when no-one else would”...which is immediately followed by Geordi coming in to tell her that he wants to follow Data and Worf to the Romulan vessel and that if he's right about what's happened to them, he's going to need her help (no, stop). And then once they get to the Romulan ship, it's incredibly clever how Carson shoots the phased Romulan out front so that while he manages to blend in with his crewmates, the viewer still gets a niggling suspicion something's not quite right with him...and then he walks through the centre console.

Speaking of body and direction, I also want to get something off my chest here. Well, something else. It's not a fault of this episode, but throughout this season Laren has been portrayed as the problem child because she doesn't always follow orders. But Captain Picard told Data in “Redemption II” that Starfleet, or really him, isn't looking for officers who will “blindly follow orders” and praised Data for his actions in flushing out Commander Sela's fleet in disobedience of Picard's order to withdraw. But then you have him and Commander Riker constantly berating Laren for doing what essentially amounts to the exact same thing in episodes like this one and “Conundrum” (although to be fair to the Captain he did give Laren something of an echo of his speech to Data in her first episode). I mean first and foremost it's ethically the wrong thing to advocate (even Captain Picard said “The claim, 'I was only following orders' has been used to justify too many tragedies in our history), but it's also pretty bloody hypocritical and borderline sexist.

(I know Laren can be pretty sarcastic and standoffish, but that's no excuse. And come on, Worf, Geordi, Doctor Crusher and Doctor Pulaski aren't?)

Nicely, “The Next Phase” gives Riker a scene where the narrative seems to be calling him out on this by having him listen to Worf's concern about giving the Romulans access to a Federation computer core when he had earlier snapped at Laren for questioning the wisdom of beaming over to a Romulan ship unarmed. But I'm not satisfied with that either. Yeah, it plays into Will's character arc here, as you can tell he feels guilty that potentially the last exchange he had with Laren was hostile and that he's been thinking about what she truly meant to him, which is likely the reason why he wants to give her eulogy at the ceremony. But I don't want Star Trek: The Next Generation characters to be depicted as hypocrites-They're supposed to be better than that. Moore and his colleagues may not like the main cast very much, but I do.

Yeah OK that's good enough. Time to talk shipping.

So Geordi La Forge/Ro Laren is basically my Star Trek: The Next Generation OTP. I used to go to bat pretty eagerly for Worf/Deanna Troi too, but as I've been rewatching this season I'm discovering a disturbing amount of that ship hangs on Worf's questionably professional relationship with a person who is essentially his psychologist and therapist (and again, this is the fault of the writers, not the characters: no-one who wasn't this insular and sheltered would have thought that was a good way to introduce a romance). I had remembered it as a far more organic evolution of their shared interest in Alexander, but we've now just seen what I had considered the only two really good Alexander episodes go up in smoke, so this ship is kind of on shaky ground for me now. As of this writing the only pairing I will put in remotely the same league as my unwavering loyalty to Geordi/Laren is Will Riker/Lyrinda Halk, and that only happens in the comic book line.

But Geordi/Laren is canon to the TV series. I'm going to go that far, yes. But more importantly it *works*. Prophets does it ever work. The first reason I'm into this couple so much is of course because it's a reimagining and reincarnation of Geordi's ill-fated romance with Tasha Yar from way back in the first season that we hadn't heard anything about since “Yesterday's Enterprise”. The rest of the third season after that episode kind of screwed Geordi over in terms of romance and the show understandably hasn't wanted to go near that since. But “The Next Phase” is a sort of return to form to the way Geordi used to (and should) be: He still does his usual tech mystery solving stuff that we've come to expect from him too, but his emotions and personality are able to be centre stage here in a way the show hasn't been letting them be in a long time. And so it's only fitting that his partner here be Laren, a reconceptualization of the Tasha Yar concept who fills the narrative role that's been glaringly empty since “Symbiosis”.

But Geordi's relationship with Laren isn't merely a reboot of the relationship he had with Tasha. For one, the circumstances are a lot different: Geordi admired Tasha for her confidence and beauty and looked to her for strength because of that, but he treats Laren as far more of an equal and a valued teammate. This in itself is telling, because it shows how, perhaps paradoxically considering what I just said in the above paragraph, Geordi is actually a much stronger character now then he was in the early first season. So while on the one hand I would have liked to see a little bit of that old tenderness back here, I can't deny this type of characterization plays far more to LeVar Burton's strengths. In fact, the way Geordi works with Laren is a stark contrast with the way he works with Data-The person everyone but me seems to prefer to ship Geordi with.

My issue with the Data/Geordi ship is that it jars horrifically with the way I read Geordi's narrative role. Geordi is basically the LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow translated into a Star Trek: The Next Generation context, which means he's a very specific kind of children's educator. Data, meanwhile, is Star Trek: The Next Generation's child analog, the show having long ago figured out that his exploration into the value of emotions and human experience is a far better allegory for that kind of growth than sticking Wesley Crusher on the bridge. So the relationship Geordi has with Data is the same one that LeVar has with the kids he reads to on Reading Rainbow: He's a fun adult friend who can take Data on adventures and help open his mind to new things. This manifests in the way Geordi interacts with Data in this episode, constantly goading him on to apply what he's learned and figure things out on his own. He even explicitly tells Data at one point to “stop being so rational” and “Try using your imagination once in awhile”. So with all that in mind, shipping Data and Geordi romantically feels...Very wrong to me.

But Laren on the other hand is something else to Geordi entirely. She's an equal, but with a whole different positionality and operating from a completely different situated knowledge-space (albeit one that has strong parallels with his). She can open his eyes to new ideas and new ways of thinking just as much as he can open hers. Geordi wasn't even thinking in terms of spirituality until Laren mentioned it to him, and even though he technically turned out to be right in the end he still wound up granting it as a possibility (“Look, if you're right, then we're dead and none of this matters”, and also slowing down for a bit to to listen to what their friends thought of them and enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime experience of being a guest at your own funeral). She's the first character who isn't a fellow scientist-engineer or actually the Enterprise who can keep up with Geordi and work alongside him.

And because of this, they make an incredible team. Just like in “Power Play”, Laren is immediately on Geordi's wavelength when it comes to engineering wizardry. She may not know everything about interphase devices, but she knows enough to converse intelligently with him, and it's only through them working together that they're able to get Data and Captain Picard's attention at the end (and indeed, the idea to set the phased disruptor on overload, which is what ultimately does the trick, was hers). But that alone isn't enough. Geordi has a similar relationship with Doctor Crusher, of course, so in order for Laren to be his true love interest she needs to be more than just a scientific partner for him, which she is: Throughout the course of “The Next Phase” Geordi and Laren don't just work competently and effectively together, they bond with each other at a very deep and intimate level. Remarkably, it's almost entirely due to LeVar Burton and Michelle Forbes themselves, who together have possibly the most incredible chemistry of any two actors on this series before or since.

Although Ron Moore's script does give them both a good deal of material to work with, it also still more or less tries to reinforce the pre-existing Data/Geordi and Will/Laren relationships, the latter being noticeable with Will volunteering to give Laren's eulogy, her freaking out about what he was going to say and the final scene where he sort of kisses her neck when she comes back. But the actors don't seem to give those scenes the weight Moore maybe had intended, particularly LeVar Burton and Michelle Forbes. I've already talked about how the way LeVar plays Geordi asks us to read his relationship with Data a certain way, and Michelle Forbes plays Laren more irritated and indignant at what Will might say about her than desperate and pining.

But it's the way Burton and Forbes act around each other that makes this episode truly sing, and their body language all throughout is some of the most heartbreakingly adorable physical acting I have ever seen. The performances they give bring to life two characters who deeply, profoundly and passionately care for one another: They're genuinely happy and excited to be in each other's presence, and perhaps just a little nervous too. My heart skips a beat whenever Geordi and Laren glance and smile at each other, and it practically melts whenever they embrace. The tenderness when they touch in engineering and the mixture of indescribable joy and awkward trepidation on their faces when they grasp each other's arms in ten-forward...I just...ugh. There's a danger of getting spoiled with how unbelievably talented this cast is, but an episode like this made up of these sorts of exchanges still manages to leave me utterly speechless.

I can see Geordi and Laren being comfortable enough together to actually confide in one another, and neither character has really had that kind of relationship with another person before. Geordi tried to confide in Tasha, but she was always baffled and confused and didn't know how to react to his openness. Data confides in Geordi, but not the other way around. Maybe Laren could confide in Will in some parallel universe somewhere, but certainly not in this one. Laren's too intimidated by Captain Picard to talk to him, and everyone confides in Guinan. But Geordi and Laren are both confidant and outgoing, yet also vulnerable at the same time, and after this episode they've shared something together nobody else on the crew will ever be able to truly understand. Their personalities are as complimentary as Will and Lyrinda's are, and each one is able to support the other with what he or she needs because they both need the same things. They're poised to be as perfect a couple as it's possible to get on Star Trek: The Next Generation, so naturally their relationship is promptly forgotten about and never mentioned again.

(Well actually, there is one more story that picks up this plot thread. It's a minor subplot that's part of a larger story arc, but it's sold with enough respect and conviction that it evokes the actors' real-life chemistry in this episode. And yes of course it's a Michael Jan Friedman comic book, why would you ever think otherwise?)

The image that I remember most vividly from “The Next Phase” is the final one, with Geordi and Laren alone in ten-forward with the lights down after the party's over. I remember it playing out differently than it does; I remember them having more of a heart-to-heart dialog, whereas in the episode itself Laren does most of the talking while Geordi eats everything in front of him. Geordi even ends things with a flippant comment about Laren finally learning humility, but the warmth with which LeVar Burton delivers it takes off any and all of the edge that line could have had. Once again my memory distorts meaning and once again the writing of a scene isn't quite as good as I remember. But in this moment, right now, none of that matters anymore.

“Measure of a Non-Human”: I, Borg

The Borg are somewhat unique in the pantheon of Star Trek species. While not the first to be portrayed as villainous or antagonistic, they are the first to be designed explicitly to fill that role from the beginning, and nothing else (or at least the first successful attempt at this, given the Ferengi are in some ways a rough draft of the Borg). In spite of the kind of stereotypical “planet of hats” jokes, every other alien culture in Star Trek, even the Original Series Klingons, was created to have more than one facet about them. Not the Borg though: They were very clearly designed to be an enemy the crew couldn't debate or reason with intellectually, only fight with old-fashioned weapons and pray they could run away from relatively unscathed.

You can read this as beneficial or harmful depending on your perspective. One way you might defend this is to argue that, as such fitting metaphors for the engines of capitalism, it's good that the Borg are a faceless evil who exist just to get blown apart by phaser blasts. After all, you'd want no quarter for the oppressing hegemony: It's irresponsible to borderline collaborator levels to portray the kind of captailism the Borg represent as anything other than utterly irredeemable. However there's also the small fact that these are sentient beings, not monsters you can take pot-shots at in low-rent action sci-fi, and it's no less reactionary when Star Trek turns the Borg into their version of cannon fodder to satiate the bloodlust of a certain subset of its fanbase who really just wants brainless military science fiction where they can run through corridors shooting things. This is, for example, pretty much the default mode of depicting the Borg from about 1996 onwards, and it's a hard sell to claim that did Star Trek any real favours.

So in that sense “I, Borg” is an important and necessary story to do. By putting a face to the faceless enemy it humanizes them (literally, in Hugh's case) and points out the insularity and shortsightedness bound up in all forms of hate. Michael Piller is quit right to extol the virtues of this episode on that count, and to say this is a very Star Trek message to deliver. But as much as this episode might get praised for those reasons, it's not quite as simple as some might want it to be and we can't, in my opinion, go patting ourselves on the back for a job well done just yet. “I, Borg” for me is something of an inverse of “Cost of Living” and “Imaginary Friend”, and kind of an outlier in my history with Star Trek: The Next Generation on the whole. While those were episodes I always remembered strongly that turned out to be nowhere near as good as I though they were, this is a story that's always been pretty iconic for me and that I can fully understand why it gets the praise it does...But I just can't bring myself to like it and have never been able to.

Obviously Guinan and Captain Picard are off in right wing hawk fantasy land here, quite casually contemplating open genocide, and that's kind of a big deal. Michael Piller was of course in love with this idea, saying “I think it's just a great premise which forces both Guinan and Picard to confront their own prejudices. And you would think these are two characters who have none, but when it comes to the Borg the old issue is 'know your enemy'”. Dramatically, of course, it makes sense for them to harbour at least some bigotry towards the Borg: Picard is supposed to be of a transitional generation while Guinan is ageless, and both bear scars from what they did to their respective lives, wiping out Guinan's people and forcing the survivors into refugee camps and assimilating Picard and forcing him to give him their knowledge of Earth's defense systems in order to launch the attack at Wolf 359. I'm still not sure even circumstances this traumatic would lead someone to advocate exterminating an entire species, but maybe I have too much faith in the human condition. Maybe it's my own personal biases, but I simply cannot see these characters ever coming up with a plan like this.

This is also another decent, though not exceptional, Geordi and Beverly story as they're the first ones to realise Hugh's value as an individual and turn against the plan to make him a carrier for the anti-Borg virus. A plan which, I should point out, never should have gotten as far as it did, but I going to set that aside for now and come back to it a little later. It makes sense that they would feel this way, given their status and positionalities as scientists and teachers. I'm a bit upset (well, comparatively speaking), that Geordi wasn't the first one to bond with Hugh and needed to be swayed by Beverly, but it more or less works as written I suppose. The larger issue is, of course, that apparently everyone else on the Enterprise is 100% OK with mass genocide, and I have a pretty hard time accepting that.

This is no utopian story about conflict resolution and moving beyond bigotry like “The Wounded” was as the stakes are so horrifically, cartoonishly high there's no real room for that kind of nuance. And I know nobody remembers it, but didn't Captain Picard call out Kevin Uxbridge for grief-induced genocide way the hell back in “The Survivors”? And no, he isn't allowed to be hypocritical because it's the Borg this time and OMG look at the wonderful conflict-If you're opposed to genocide, you pretty much have to be opposed to it on principle. You don't get to debate it. There's no conditional genocide clause, in spite of what United States foreign policy might have you believe.

In spite of the heinousness of the topic, the issues I have with “I, Borg” are really just an extension of the issues I had with “Cost of Living” and “Imaginary Friend”. My big problem, as you've probably been able to surmise, is that this is happening to the Enterprise crew. Had Picard's role here been filled by any nameless Starfleet bureaucrat that would have been one thing: That's the kind of order Starfleet Command would give, but it's also the kind of order the Enterprise crew should be questioning and standing against. This is a constant problem this creative team in its myriad incarnations has had since the third season and has become endemic this season: Treating the main cast as if they're the establishment instead of a progressive force.

It's episodes not just like this one and “Cost of Living”, but also episodes like “The Offspring” and just about everything to do with Ro Laren (and looking ahead to next season, “Relics”) as well, that really get under my skin. Yes I know you can read Captain Picard's attitudes here as an extension of “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” and “Family”. Yes I know that makes good drama. But I don't care because I don't like it. This is not what I watch Star Trek: The Next Generation to see. That's not what I personally feel this show is about, and really, what it's even very good at. I get that these characters were never very popular with writers for a great many reasons, but you know what? That isn't the charcters' fault. That's the fault of uncreative, imagination-starved jobbers and fanboys who never wanted to give Star Trek: The Next Generation the chance to be itself. You can talk my ear off about dramatic fiction writing 101 until you're blue in the face, but that will never change my opinion that absolutely none of that ever applied to Star Trek: The Next Generation in the first place.

I think what it comes down to is that I just really don't like the Picard/Borg story arc. I think by now it's become the biggest, highest profile violation of this show's ethical and philosophical core that exists. If you want my opinion on a better way this story could have been handled, and I'm going to presume since you're here you at least wouldn't mind reading it, here's how I think you could have done the Picard/Borg arc without compromising Star Trek: The Next Generation's utopianism. Recall that Michael Piller's original idea for “The Best of Both Worlds” was to respond to received fan wisdom at the time that Captain Picard was too aloof and stoic and not human enough (meaning he wasn't a clone of Captain Kirk). So the whole idea of having him assimilated by the Borg was proof by absence: Show what Picard would look like if he was really stripped of his humanity.

After you bring him back though, the best way to drive this theme home was to have him act even more “human”. Here I don't mean “human” in the sense the writing team probably does (meaning a deeply flawed, yet lovable and badass asshole), but a *utopian* vision of humanity: Picard should be the one to show the Borg mercy. He should forgive them. As the final proof of the return of his humanity, Picard should extend a hand to the Borg to try and help them reclaim their “humanity” too (and to hedge against any errant anthropocentrism, you can substitute that placeholder phrase for whatever descriptors you personally think evoke empathy and emotional maturity). Picard should be the first one onboard with what Geordi and Beverly try to do here, and the rest of the crew ought to be right there with him. In those circumstances, Hugh's story becomes about how the Enterprise crew helps him break free of the shackles of capitalism to discover his own identity, in much the same way they've helped so many visitors before him. That's how you do a story about utopian conflict resolution.

And yet I'll still grant you all the mileage you want that this episode as aired is a functional piece of drama. I've always been aware of “I, Borg”'s stature within the fandom, and I can see why. Like I said, it's always been an iconic story for me even though I don't particularly enjoy it. There was a Hugh action figure made by Playmates I was always aware of (I think I even made up a story involving him where he joined the Enterprise crew, probably as a subconscious reaction against this episode), and there were a lot of publicity stills from this shoot that showed up in the various magazines and reference books I had. And this episode sets up a lot from a continuity perspective too: It leads directly into the “Descent” two parter, which as of this writing I still remember as one of my favourite stories, and it also lays the groundwork for one subplot in Michael Jan Friedman's “War and Madness” summer event miniseries. Although that might be damning with faint praise, as “War and Madness” is probably my least favourite of the DC line's summer event miniseries.

Look, I'll be perfectly straightforward with you all. When it comes to material like this, the best, most sophisticated critique I can muster is “I don't like it”. I don't like watching this kind of story. I don't like seeing these characters behaving this way. This is not the way I imagine these people to be. And I don't care how many overtures you can make to the textual quality of “I, Borg”: The fact remains this is not something I'm going to willingly sit down to watch to pass an evening's time.

“I am not worth this coil that's made for me”: Cost of Living, Imaginary Friend

The episodes I look at for this project pretty unfailingly come in one of three forms. Bad episodes I know are bad but which I may or may not be fuzzy on the details of precisely why, good episodes I know are good because of longstanding vivid memories I have of them and episodes I have next to no recollection of whatsoever. “Cost of Living” and “Imaginary Friend” mark something an interesting milestone in this respect because they're none of those things: Sadly, this is probably the first time (or at least one of the rare instances in which) a story that brought me a lot of joy in the past turned out to be nowhere remotely near as good as I remembered.

This essay is, I should mention, something of a strange one for me. Normally when I do these multiple episode recap-type posts I know in advance which episodes I'm going to be lumping together and what central shared theme I'm going to hang them on. This gives me time to schedule my watching and writing so I'm not down to the wire trying to fit everything in at the last minute. That, uh, didn't happen the week I was writing this: I had initially planned to give each of these episodes their own posts as I had fond memories of both I wanted to reflect on. As it turned out...They both suck. And they both suck for dully pedestrian and identikit reasons. So I'll freely admit this is a rough sort of cut-and-paste job, but I guess this means you now have the opportunity to see how my writing style adapts to contingencies.

I'll run down the gamut of both episodes and the things I was expecting to talk about each of them. What I always remembered about “Cost of Living” is Lwaxana Troi's interactions with Alexander. I remember her coming in, finding him out of sorts and immediately bonding with him and showing him the multitude of life's little joys and wonders through the medium of mud baths. A great many mud baths. This was traditionally my favourite Lwaxana Troi story, after “Haven” and “Dark Page”: I always thought this episode was a terrific showcase for the more whimsical, breezy and inspirational sides to her character and I thought she made a delightful comparison to Alexander, someone who's trying to find out what it means to be a kid in a family dynamic that doesn't have any idea either. And all of those things are indeed there-The episode simply sings whenever Lwaxana and Alexander are onscreen together, and the first mud bath scene in particular, where Lwaxana tells Alexander about the “hundreds of little people” who live inside all of us “waiting for just the right moment to come out and save us from ourselves” is flat-out one of the greatest single lines of dialog in the show to date, at least from her. The problem is that everything about “Cost of Living” that doesn't have to do with Lwaxana and Alexander bonding is absolutely atrocious.

This is without question the most cringe-inducingly unwatchable this show has been since the second season, maybe even since the halcyon days of “Justice” and “Angel One”. It's so godawful I found myself leaving the TV on mute whenever Worf and Deanna were talking, or whenever Lwaxana was onscreen with her fiance (I don't know his name because I had the TV on mute whenever he was on, so I'll just call him Baron Tightass, Lord of the Manor of Buzzkill). Let's talk about Worf and Deanna first. The nice thing is that, like “Ethics” and “The Outcast”, this furthers the thread of their blossoming relationship. The not nice thing is that, like “Ethics” and “The Outcast”, it is accomplished in the most embarrassingly, shittastically stereotypical manner imaginable. They don't even behave like human beings (or, half-Betazoid hybrids and Klingons or whatever...Shut up, you know damn well what I mean): Their scenes play out more like someone watched a 1990s sitcom depiction of gender roles and child rearing and then tried to copy that really badly, as if this was some terribly, tragically socially stunted writer whose first and only exposure to the outside world was terrible, awful made-to-order populist entertainment.

And now I'm going to stop because I've just now realised my attempt at satirical caricature and rhetorical exaggeration might well actually be way more realistic and accurate than I intended it to be.

Apart from being “Final Mission” levels of immeasurably awful stock, the other thing that's bad about Worf and Deanna here is that they're more or less the antagonists. They are depicted just as stodgy and obsessed with rules, protocol and demeanour as Baron Tightass, deliberately so, and are portrayed to be so lacking in imagination that they've forgotten everything wondrous and joyful that make life worth living. And so Lwaxana, in a complete reversal of Majel Barrett's star-making turn in “Half a Life” last year, is being wheeled in to inject colour into a cast of characters the writers clearly think live a beige and grey existence (she even gets to point out, however rightly, that “contracts are for people who don't trust one another”). It's a version of Lwaxana we haven't seen since “Haven”, and with good reason, since at least back then Star Trek: The Next Generation was three episodes in and coming off of “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor” and definitely needed to be legitimized by the presence of someone from the Old Generation in the eyes of the public.

And at least “Haven” gave Will and Deanna a meaty subplot and had lively characters like Data and Tasha Yar to show off: “Cost of Living” is on the level of “Ménage à Troi” in terms of tone and humour and feels like it was written by an actual robot. And while you could argue Lwaxana makes a mistake in being “too flighty” and impulsive in agreeing to marry Baron Tightass as quickly as she does (by the way I do love that they met on the 24th century equivalent of an online dating site), I don't buy that because she gives Alexander that big weepy monologue about fearing being alone at her age. It's not a flaw if we're supposed to feel sorry for her and come around to her side anyway. If I didn't know better, I'd accuse Peter Allan Fields (who even wrote the teleplay for “Half a Life”) of writing Lwaxana as a Mary Sue. Here's the point where it should be irrefutable that there's a serious problem in this writers' room: We've crossed a line in moving beyond giving the guest stars the ethical dilemma and weight of the story to actually explicitly saying the guest stars are preferable to and better people than the regulars.

I'm getting the distinct, sinking feeling I'm the first person ever to write for or about Star Trek: The Next Generation who cares about this show and these characters on their own merits and not as an extension of or methadone for the Original Series.

Then there's the jaw-droppingly dreadful B-plot, which couldn't be more obviously a cynical, contemptuous sneer at science fiction as a genre: “Oh, the nerds aren't going to be happy unless we throw them some technobabble mumbo-jumbo that doesn't have anything to do with anything. Metal eating parasites? Sure why not. These proles don't care as long as it sounds futuristic”.

And “Imaginary Friend”, another episode I had been really looking forward to seeing again, is just as bad. At least it doesn't throw the Enterprise crew under the bus again, but it's every bit as tone-deaf and alien feeling. Just like with “Cost of Living”, I specifically remembered Alexander's scenes here, particularly his interaction with Clara. I remembered him reaching out to her as someone who also felt a bit disconnected and isolated to show her she would always have friends here; in a sense serving as a child manifestation of the Enterprise's consciousness. Instead, I got a tortuously prolonged showcase of dumb, stilted dialog with a theme so incredibly off-base I can't even begin to tease out what the freelancers were thinking: So, imaginary friends are perfectly good and natural for kids to have except when they're not? What parent in the history of parenting has ever responded to their kid's imaginary friend the way Clara's dad does? Then there's that excruciating false tension storytelling thing again I absolutely detest where Alien!Isabella gets Clara into trouble and the adults don't believe her. I absolutely fucking despise that sort of hollow drama: This, this is why I can't watch scripted fiction apart from Dirty Pair and Miami Vice anymore.

(I'll give them the Tarkassian Razorbeast though. Guinan always makes everything better.)

Then you've got teleplay writer Brannon Braga saying how the original draft was “more like Puff the Magic Dragon” in that the alien was just curious and that this was bad because of some reasons, so they needed more “conflict” and by “conflict” they of course mean “turn the imaginary friend evil, have her try to hurt the kid and destroy the ship”. Because that's not horrifying or traumatic in any way. I am really starting to reach my limit in calling out television's propensity to normalize violence and trauma and the frightening eagerness with which some jobbing writers will fall back on that to the point it becomes part of the hack playbook. It's especially maddening when you have Rick Berman saying things like

“Where else but in science fiction could you do an idea about an imaginary friend who turns out not to be imaginary? It's a story about an alien who takes the form of a little girl's imaginary friend and begins to perceive our world through the eyes of a child.”

That's a brilliant idea! Why didn't you just do that? But no, the script's idea of “the world through the eyes of a child” is “grownups are mean and scary and make rules I don't understand to hurt me”. Which is actually a legitimate grievance for a child to hold given how chillingly rampant different forms of psychological child abuse can be, but neither this episode nor, actually, “Cost of Living” do anything to acknowledge this, preferring to sweep it all aside as an innocent, childlike misunderstanding. Always trust grownups kids, because they will always have your best interests at heart! Where have we heard sentiments like that before?

Oh yeah, from fascists and colonizers.

There are so many ways you could do a speculative fiction story about the perspective of children and childlike wonder. This is something Hayao Miyazaki understands intuitively, having once said

“I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy.”

You can debate amongst yourselves to what extent, if any, you think Miyazaki speaks truth. I'm more inclined than not to believe he speaks some facets of it. Either way, it's a direction I think is worth at least keeping in sight when telling stories about children's perspectives. But it's clear the writers of these two episodes aren't thinking anywhere along those lines, simply believing that children, being “undeveloped adults”, are easier to write for because it's easier to come up with conflict to saddle them. And that's almost as youth-hating as any of the anti-countercultural messages in the Original Series.

It might also worth remembering something else Hayao Miyazaki said:

“Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.”

“Love the one you're with”: The Perfect Mate

It's fuck-awful. It's “Elaan of Troyius” again. Famke Janssen, who would appear alongside Patrick Stewart again in the X-Men movies, was also Rick Berman and Michael Piller's first choice to play Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but she turned them down fearing she'd grow complacent as an actor despite the opportunity. Even so, Janssen is herself responsible for redefining the Trill as we will soon know them, as it's the spots on Kamala's neck that will go on to be Jadzia's signature look once the production team realised giving Terry Farrell Odan's headpiece from “The Host” would be a crime against humanity (much like the rest of “The Host”) and Rick Berman told Michael Westmore “just give her spots like we gave Famke”. Speaking of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Max Grodénchik plays a Ferengi in this episode, and he too will get cast on that show next year as Rom.

I have now exhausted literally all of the erudition it is possible to glean from “The Perfect Mate”.

Because I have an essay's worth of space to fill, however, I need to think of something to talk about. One solution might be to talk about Jadzia Dax, given how many links to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and her character in particular there are this week. There is an earnest danger in doing that, however: At the very least ever since I spent the bulk of “Ensign Ro” talking about the world-building that episode puts in place instead of the episode itself, which I now consider to be a catastrophic mistake on my part, I've sensed a overwhelming, and perhaps inevitable, desire to move on to the fourth Star Trek as quickly as possible. This is a bit heartbreaking for me though, because as much as I adore the show we're about to see in less than a year's time, it's Star Trek: The Next Generation that's my first and debatably still my greatest love, and I don't want its legacy on Vaka Rangi to be entirely one of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential.

I grant there's a great deal of that, however. A whole bunch more than I remember, in fact. This season in particular is unbelievably more rocky than my memory affords it (though not as much as the fourth season). Ironically, it's the much-maligned first season that's still standing out as the strongest and most consistently solid and on-target, even though this one has had a higher percentage of my favourite episodes and season six is looking pretty damn excellent from where I sit now. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be the soundest and most put-together show with the strongest sense of identity, ethics and storytelling technique this blog has looked at, but I'd definitely say it's the third (since you're going to ask, or at least wonder, the first two for my money are Original Dirty Pair and Miami Vice, respectively). And like I've tried to stress, Star Trek: The Next Generation is a tough, tough gig: Leaving aside the greenhorns and staff fanboys for the moment, this show has a history of tripping up even the most talented and hardened writing vets. When scribes of the stock and calibre of Michael Piller, Maurice Hurley, Melinda Snodgrass and Jeri Taylor struggle to wrap their heads around what precisely this show necessitates, that does say something. And what it says is that Star Trek: The Next Generation is a one-in-a-million kind of series.

So with all that off my chest, what am I going to do? Talk about Jadzia Dax a bit. I know. Life is full of contradictions. My Star Trek: Deep Space Nine coverage is going to be a a little unorthodox, or at least the things I'll be focusing on are not what people maybe expect me to focus on. One of the things I'm going to be focusing on in particular is that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine should not be seen as a sequel or correction to Star Trek: The Next Generation (which is the way a lot of people, including, I think, the creative team, have traditionally viewed it), but rather as a sister show that *compliments* it. So because I've got a specific, and somewhat lateral, direction I want to go with Jadzia in particular, I thought it would be a good idea to talk a bit here about what what her basic narrative role is. Because while the writing staff will overwhelmingly say they prefer writing for the Deep Space Nine characters than the Next Generation ones for reasons that can be more or less boiled down to “ZOMG teh conflict”, nobody ever really gets a solid handle on Jadzia, or rather they seem to deliberately ignore some underdeveloped, though plainly evident, aspects of her character that were present in her from the beginning. And that makes her interesting to me.

(OK, one person pegged her from the very beginning. And yes, it's the person some of you particularly perceptive longterm readers might have guessed it is.)

So the, admittedly strangled, reason I can justify bringing this up now is because Kamala is in some ways the rough draft of Jadzia. I mean...strip away the blatant repugnant sexism (fuck's sake here's a culture that literally gives women away as trophies) and you can at least sort of see it, can't you? I mean Kamala after she imprints on Captain Picard, not the fact she imprints like a fucking gosling in the first place. The important thing is that Kamala becomes a cultured diplomat, poet and explorer who doesn't necessarily look or act the way you might expect someone like that to. She's a philosophical interlocutor (a bad one, mind, she's certainly not Guinan, but cut me some slack here). She's a lot like Captain Picard, just not as stodgy and dull as some more unsympathetic readings of his character would label him. She's also a very serene, content character, but that doesn't mean she doesn't still enjoy life and all it has to offer-A compelling argument that someone allegedly so “perfect” and “flawless” (really just code for “not a cartoonish emotional wreck of a human being because that's apparently all people like to watch stories about”) need not be boring or untenable as a character.

This, uh, isn't working, is it?

Alright, well consider the counterfactual. What might Star Trek: Deep Space Nine have looked like had Famke Janssen accepted Berman and Piller's offer to play Jadzia Dax instead of Terry Farrell? I mean as weird as it is for me to think of my favourite Star Trek character (honestly it really is down to her or Geordi) played by anyone other than Farrell, that possibility was certainly there. I want to say Famke would have played up Jadzia's elegance and poise a bit more than Terry Farrell did: Farrell's Jadzia ended up in a very bawdy, rough-and-tumble place that's as much to do with the writers not quite knowing how to balance the myriad facets to her personality as it did to the fact Terry Farrell is a very brash and dominating personality. Then again, Famke Janssen could certainly be that way too, and you wouldn't accuse Jean Grey of being wistful and resigning. What it comes down to, I think, is that the characterization later creative teams eventually settle on for Jadzia is “basically Curzon but a girl”, and that's not really how I see her. It's possible Famke could have driven a bit more nuance out of the character than that-Not to diss Farrell, of course, who I obviously adore, but simply for the fact her presence might have teased different material out of the writers. Of course the danger in this situation would be in making Jadzia a carbon copy of Kamala, given the fact she would have been played by the same actor in essentially the same makeup.

But regardless, the fact remains that in an alternate universe, Jadzia Dax met Captain Picard. I'm going to go think some more about that universe instead of the one where “The Perfect Mate” exists, if you don't mind.

“Policy of Truth”: The First Duty

Shout-out to Ray Walston, My Favorite Non-Terran Humanoid Solid.

In the mid-1980s there was a cartoon show called The Get-Along Gang. It was about a group of happy preteen anthropomorphic animals living in a storybook world called Green Meadows and, as you could probably tell from the title, was about the various and sundry ways teamwork and friendship will solve all of life's problems. Each character had some egregious and crippling flaw that would be unflappably counteracted by working together with their friends.

If you were willing to be unkind to The Get-Along Gang, you might say it typified the concept that “The Complainer Is Always Wrong” in children's media. That did certainly seem to be the worrying underlying implication of a lot of the show's morals, and you could probably trace an entire counter-revolutionary movement in children's television after the fact solely dedicated to moving as far away from The Get-Along Gang as was possible to get. It also probably didn't help matters that the show was the product of a greeting card company. Not that anyone had anything much to worry about anyway, as Disney kicked off the Renaissance Age not two years later. But my point is that The Get-Along Gang was a very specific kind of children's television: First and foremost it was prescriptive: That is, it existed more or less just to talk down to kids and tell them how to act, how to behave and how to think.

In the past, you might have noticed I have a specific opinion of how I think teaching should work. My conception of how the teacher-student relationship should operate is derived from Paulo Freire's famous (some would say infamous) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he argues that students and teachers are both equal participants in the creation of knowledge, and that teachers should be willing to learn as much from their students as their students learn from them. The kind of teaching that The Get-Along Gang tried to do is the kind that Freire calls “the banking model”, because it treats students as “empty receptacles into which knowledge is deposited”, much as one might do with a piggybank. This “banking model” is the exact model of education Freire is positing his pedagogy in opposition to, because the banking model's attitude to students is the exact same one that colonizers take to the colonized.

So the thing about “The First Duty” is that, like The Get-Along Gang before it, it's adopting a hierarchical banking model approach to moralizing. It's clearly a story about the importance of always telling the truth and is obviously aimed at the sorts of young people who were expected to project onto and identify with Wesley Crusher (whether or not they actually did is beside the point and a question I think we've more than settled by this point). Michael Piller, then a parent of teenagers himself, has explicitly said he thought this episode was important as it teaches a lesson he'd want his own kids to learn, and even swayed a (perhaps understandably) sceptical Rick Berman by saying kids who were involved with drugs or crime might find its message meaningful. Seems like this is the new model for Wesley episodes as his last guest spot in “The Game” similarly smacked of after-school specials.

The problem with this approach, apart from the fact it's insulting and patronizing, is that this is also the exact opposite conceptualization of how to talk to children and what children's television should be from that of something like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood or Reading Rainbow. And *that* means its precisely the wrong kind of children's television for Star Trek: The Next Generation to be emulating. But that, I actually think, is fairly self-evident and self-explanatory. Obvious, almost. “The First Duty” is clearly an insult to the intelligence and yet another in a long line of bungled stories about Wesley Crusher (though I guess you could make the case it shows how Wesley can't get away with everything anymore and that his actions have consequences now, which I suppose is valid). But that's not interesting or important to me anymore. What is interesting to me, and where I think the real story this week lies, is in the path this script took from pitch to screen.

There were several different drafts of this story penned, and just as many differing opinions on which one was the better story to tell. To the point, actually, that this story caused a sizable row in the writers' room. In Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, Naren Shankar talks about his original inspiration for “The First Duty”:

“My first credit was 'The First Duty', which Ron [Moore] and I wrote together. Ron had been in ROTC in college and we were both into military history. We wanted to do a show set at Starfleet Academy and pick up where Wesley was with his life. Our focus was the notion of choosing between your friends and your duty. And the script caused a fair amount of tension between us and Michael Piller.”

Moore elabourates by saying

“Naren and I took the position that Wesley shouldn't be ratting out his friends. He should go down with them. And Michael took this parental position: 'As the father of teenagers, I can tell you that it's just wrong, and telling the truth is more important than anything else.' But we felt that your word to your friends is more important on some levels than your obligation to the rules. Naren and I weren't that far removed from being that age in college, and being in those kinds of circumstances. Wesley had given his word to hold the secret about what they had done and what led to this kid's death. He had to stand by that with his buddies. But Michael felt that sent a bad message, and that telling the truth is what Star Trek is about.”

Piller responds with his side of the story in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion.

“I thought he should choose the truth, and Ron thought he couldn't go back on his friends. Ultimately I gave the order to go with the truth – that's what I'd want my kids to do – but I think it shows how much we can get into these characters when we find ourselves debating the points they're arguing.”

In a later chat on AOL, Moore clarifies his position and tries to show how the story he and Shankar wanted to tell wasn't as ethically reprehensible as perhaps Piller thought it was, and their perspectives weren't in truth irreconcilable. Finally, he posits that in his and Shankar's version, Wesley would still end up with the moral high ground:

“In the aired version of events, Wesley steps forward even though the court of inquiry is about to let them all off the hook. In so doing, Wes commits an act of moral courage by standing up for the truth and being punished when to remain silent would've allowed him to go scot free. Now, let's assume the circumstances had been constructed so that the Nova Squadron was going to be kicked out of the Academy by the court if they kept silent about what really happened. Say that the team had made a decision not to finger the one among them who came up with the idea on the 'we all hang together' philosophy. In that scenario, Wesley coming forward to tell the truth is suddenly an act of moral cowardice because it appears that he's only trying to save his own skin at the expense of one of his teammates. 

If that had been the story (which is more or less what Naren and I were advocating) then Picard's impassioned speech to Wesley about the morality of coming forward to tell the truth is suddenly a scene where the Captain tries to convince a young man not to throw away his own career in order to protect one of his friends. In the end, Locarno (the true culprit) comes forward on his own in order to save the rest of the team. As you can see, it's a very different kind of tale even though the essential 'plot' is relatively unchanged. 

...Both stories are valid and interesting, but I prefered the story about a young man willing to stand with his friends rather than a morality tale about telling the truth. Don't get me wrong – I like 'The First Duty,' and I think it works pretty well just as it is, I just wanted to tell a different story.”

Meanwhile, Rick Berman was still pretty sour on the whole thing, especially on an earlier draft where Nova Squadron's crime was apparently even more reprehensible:

“I found that unacceptable. Wesley is Wesley. He is one of our characters and heroes and he's capable of lapses in judgement, capable of making decisions on an emotional basis as opposed to thinking them out, but not capable of some of the more severe things that were suggested. And not capable of overt cover-up, lying to Starfleet Academy officials. So we basically tempered it down, still keeping it believable and the crime that was serious and would result in a punishment.”

I'm kind of with Berman here, to be honest.

But that aside, the real story of “The First Duty” and its true moral centre lies in what the story of “The First Duty”should really have been. That's the big philosophical question this week: What do you think would have been the better story? More to the point, what do you think would have been the more appropriate and fitting story? Which of these drafts, if any, truly embodies what Star Trek: The Next Generation should be about?

Maybe it all depends on your perspective.

“The sensation you are doing something you have done before”: Cause and Effect

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It's almost the hardest to write about the stories that are my very favourites. Doubly so when they're so consummately made. How many ways can I say “Cause and Effect” is a work of genius without sounding like I'm just pointlessly gushing? How much can I go into my personal connection with stories like this without regressing to the point of being an utterly, hopelessly, self-indulgent bore? And yet this is a turning point: Whenever Star Trek: The Next Generation is mentioned in passing or I'm casually reminded of it in my day-to-day existence, this is one of the stories I think about. This, and the kinds of stories “Cause and Effect” sets the stage for.

Is it “iconic”, either in the fandom or television history more generally? Not exactly, or at least not the the extent of something like “The Best of Both Worlds”, “Unification” or “Unification II” (although many fans do consider “Cause and Effect” to be a classic too). Is it sweepingly moving, emotional and dramatic? No, not really. It's not “Transfigurations”, “Darmok” or “The Inner Light”. Indeed, like “Power Play” before it, you might, at first glace, even get the impression “Cause and Effect” is a little too “clever” for its own good: A little too fixated on its science fiction concept to do much of anything else. This is certainly the criticism that's often laid at the feet of Brannon Braga, a writer known for increasingly clever and complex science fiction inspired stories. But also like “Power Play”, this is not your typical masturbatory Hard SF story that doesn't care about narrative technique, and there's way more going on here then this reading would afford.

Although it was certainly a concern in the writers' room. Even though Braga himself is rightly keen on this episode, he talks about how much of a gamble an episode this experimental and unorthodox was at the time (and would gently like to remind us that “Cause and Effect” was made *before* Groundhog Day, which famously also dealt with a causal time loop). Producer Herb Wright pointed out how a viewer's first “temptation” upon witnessing something like this might be to “jam the button on the remote”. Rick Berman was even afraid audiences might think there was something wrong with their TV set or the broadcast feed, or worse, think this episode was a clip show. So he instructed the director to make sure every iteration of the loop looked and played out ever-so-slightly differently to assure them it wasn't and to keep them guessing. That director happened to be Jonathan Frakes, who, upon first getting Braga's script, initially thought the writers were trying to pull one over on him.

Naturally they weren't, and Frakes immediately rose to the challenge and then some. I'd actually go so far as to cite “Cause and Effect” as Frakes' defining moment as a director, because what he pulls off here is nothing short of a technical masterpiece. We don't talk about directors anywhere near enough in television discourse, and it's episodes like this that demonstrate the unique artistry they can bring to the medium, and on such short notice. While the loop repeats itself several times and the sequence of events plays out ever-so-slightly differently each time, a lot of the major scenes (the captain's log entry, parts of the poker game and the final disaster most notably) have identical lines of dialog with the actors delivering identical intonations. And while some of the scenes were re-recorded, some of them weren't. So what Frakes does is do one set of takes, but films every shot from five separate angles at once. It's something the average viewer isn't necessarily going to notice unless they're actively looking for it, but this means each and every loop just *feels* a little different each time.

(This is a trick the VFX department picks up on in a very cheeky and clever way too: You might have noticed each time the Enterprise blows up, it looks a little different. That's because there were actually four different kitbash models built for each time the explosion was going to happen, and again, each one is shot from a different angle. And notice how in the final sequence, the one where the crew break themselves out of the loop, the captain's log entry is delivered over a different flyby of the four-foot model from all the previous loops, foreshadowing to us that the crew is going to succeed this time.)

It helps of course that Jonathan Frakes and the VFX team both have such a stellar script to work from. Brannon Braga's scripts are not known for their heavy-handed introspection because that's not what he's good at, but he doesn't need to be. “Cause and Effect” shines for different reasons. It's firstoff an absolutely killer techno-thriller mystery, opening with and ending every act on what Braga has correctly called the “ultimate teaser and cliffhanger”. Even if you know going in that the crew is stuck in a causal time loop, that doesn't diminish at all the profound surrealist joy you get of watching the same series of events repeat themselves and following along as each successive iteration of the crew tries to think themselves out of their predicament, slowly learning more and more each time. There's also the extremely subtle, yet undeniable, hints even in the first loop we get to see play out that something feels a bit off to the crew: Gates McFadden and Jonathan Frakes in particular deserve special praise for so expertly delivering them through visual and body language cues so naturalistic you'd miss them if you blinked wrong. It's as strong a testament to how otherwordly talented this acting troupe is.

Along those lines, I also love how the perspective viewpoint character changes slightly at certain points between the acts, roughly from Beverly (and how appropriate is it that she be the one who drives so much of the plot here and pieces together so much of the mystery herself?) to Jean-Luc to Data to Geordi (who can, naturally, literally see the counterfactual). There are a number of scenes with compliments during which we see what one character was doing during a point in time we've just spent with another, like how in one act we see Beverly calling Jean-Luc in the middle of the night to talk about her insomnia, but in the next act we see Jean-Luc reading in his room before being paged by Beverly. Or how in the climax we don't get to see the final time Beverly's glass breaks, but we can hear it over Geordi's comm badge.

And yet it's crucial to point out how, as fascinating and captivating as the mystery might be, that's not all “Cause and Effect” is about. In fact apart from that, and discounting for the moment the fact the Enterprise blows up four times, this is a story of quiet and cozy intimacy the likes of which gives “Data's Day” a run for its money. Actually, I daresay it handily beats it on those grounds: As of this writing I'm having a hard time remembering another story that's this low-stakes and gets us this close to the daily lives of our heroes, apart from perhaps “Timescape” (another episode I consider an unmitigated masterpiece and that, not coincidentally, bears a striking number of similarities with “Cause and Effect”). The poker game has always been one of my favourite motifs in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and this episode is practically all about it. Jean-Luc reading his book alone or talking about insomnia and late-night thoughts with Beverly over tea is unforgettable. I could complain about wishing to see more of Laren apart from her broken record moments on the bridge or how it might have been nice to see Miles and Keiko O'Brien have a scene or two to themselves, but the episode is so jam-packed with perfectly wonderful fluff in amongst its ambitious sci-fi trappings it could well have been just too much to squeeze in.

This is the episode where Brannon Braga truly arrives in full as a creative force and is the archetypal example of the signature style that will define so much of the rest of his career and Star Trek: The Next Generation in general. “Cause and Effect” isn't just a sci-fi thriller mystery or a slice of life tale-It's both at the same time and it weaves its two halves together flawlessly. More than anything else, this is what I remember Star Trek: The Next Generation feeling and acting like, and this is the point where it finally becomes the show's standard operating procedure. In fact, not only does “Cause and Effect” bring this all into focus, I daresay I might even go so far as to call it the show's definitive story.