Pakleds and Klingons and Riker Rapidly Losing His Mind, Oh My!

So once again, after many years (months? minutes? I dunno, folks, I'm bad at math), the much-heralded, much-longed-for return of the Nathan Israel Smolin/Captain Peabody Star Trek Oral(?) History Blog Post Series Extravaganza! 

Continuing where we left off, here are a few mini-reviews of episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation. As with my TOS reviews, the idea is to skip over the most famous ("Best Of") the series, and instead highlight a few episodes that are not on any big lists, but which showcase aspects of the series as a whole, its strengths and weaknesses and special qualities. So without further ado, let's begin with one of those Weaknesses I just mentioned.

Samaritan Snare

We will be kicking things off, to everyone's delight and amusement, with a bona fides awful early-TNG episode.  My selection is admittedly a little unusual as these things go. Samaritan Snare is not often selected as one of the worst episodes of TNG--nor is it usually considered much at all.  Code of Honor is more offensive; Angel One more eye-catchingly bad; Justice more outright weird; The Last Outpost more bizarre and stilted and laughable; et cetera.

Still, Samaritan Snare has a very special place in my heart.  It is the episode I turn to, most often, when I want to dip my toes in the vast and whirling sea of awful that is the first two seasons of the Next Generation. It is what I watch when I want to bask in some unintentional humor and schadenfreude, without the bad aftertaste of TNG's more offensive early offerings.  It is just bizarre and amusing enough to entertain me, without either boring me too much or driving me up the wall.

Still, it's pretty bad.

The plot of Samaritan Snare, such as it is, is pretty simple: Picard needs an operation, and Wesley Crusher needs to take a test, so they travel together to some starbase filled with distressingly incompetent medical professionals who wear red robes and shout a lot; meanwhile, the crew of the Enterprise are outsmarted and nearly defeated by a species of ugly, fat, stupid people.

I swear I'm not making any of this up. If you don't believe me, here are the episode's ostensible villains, the people setting up the titular "Samaritan Snare," the aforementioned specious of ugly, fat, stupid people:

These are the Pakleds, an entire species of people who look like this, dress like this, and speak only in locutions like "We are not strong" or "We need things to make us go." This is, by contemporary standards, offensive in at least three or four different ways--but for early TNG, it's really not too egregious. Lest we forget, early TNG managed to pull off both an episode involving a planet of stupid, backward black people, and an episode involving a planet of stupid, backward Irish people. By comparison, this is childsplay.

Even less intelligent than these beings, however, are the crew of the USS Enterprise, who behave throughout this confrontation with all the cunning and aplomb of middle-school guidance counselors faced with a difficult crop of college-bound 6th graders.

After our heroes come across the Pakleds seemingly in distress, their ship "broken" and in need of repairs to "make it go," they proceed to send Geordi, the Enterprise's Chief Engineer, unarmed and without backup over to the alien ship. When Worf voices his discomfort at the intelligence of this procedure, Riker immediately shuts him down. Later, Troi senses danger and malice from the Pakleds, insisting that Geordi needs to be brought back now--and Riker similarly ignores her.

Fun fact: the reason Riker never gets his own command on TNG, despite being repeatedly offered one, is actually because he's a massive douchebag who refuses to listen to the advice of people under his command and is repeatedly outsmarted by lumpy people in tracksuits.

Anyway, after our Tracksuit-wearing Troglodytes predictably kidnap Geordi and try to force him to "make them go" using his incredible engineering skills, and after our heroes repeatedly fail to do anything even remotely helpful to resolve this problem, Geordi abruptly realizes that he's being held captive by literally the species of stupid fat slobs and uses the most obvious, telegraphed lie in the history of television to foil all their evil plans and send them off, defeated, to go bully some third-graders instead.

While this riveting plotline is unfolding, and our viewer is slowly losing the will to live, Picard is being an unlikeable jerk and sadly failing to die.

Picard, it seems, needs a routine heart operation, but despite having Dr. Pulaski, a fully qualified surgeon onboard (who admittedly is a fairly unlikeable person herself), he absolutely refuses to let her operate on him-- ostensibly because he doesn't want to look weak in front of his crew, but also clearly because he just doesn't like Dr. Pulaski.

(An important side note: Gene Roddenberry's absolutely unbreakable dictum through his tenure as the crazy decadent dictator perpetuus of the first two seasons of The Next Generation, the rule that broke the wills of and sent packing literally dozens of writers throughout TNG's first two seasons, was that all of the members of the Enterprise crew were utopian specimens of a perfect humanity and could have no petty personal conflict amongst themselves; despite this, or perhaps because it, a shocking number of plotlines and inter-crew relationships in the first two seasons revolve around our heroes being generally unpleasant to one another and constantly acting like people barely managing to repress profound feelings of tension, anger, and mutual loathing)

Anyway, instead of letting this surgeon whom he clearly hates but doesn't want to admit it operate on him, our bold hero of utopian progressive values instead decides to take a six-hour shuttle ride with Wesley Crusher to a random Starbase to be operated on by these extremely competent individuals (the aforementioned "distressingly incompetent medical professionals who wear red robes and shout a lot"):

Unfortunately, The Good Drs Competent here somehow cause what is repeatedly referred to as a simple and routine medical procedure to go horribly, disastrously wrong, in one of my absolute favorite scenes in all of TNG, a tour de force of bad actors playing characters we don't know and will never see again, wearing fuzzy red snuggies with matching lil' red hats and gloves, doing things we don't understand with various plastic props, and shouting histrionically to one another about things we couldn't possibly fathom even if they weren't entirely made up, interspersed with dire dramatic closeups like this one:

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and soon enough, once the other plotline has resolved itself, Captain Picard recovers from his operation to discover that the incompetence of the Red Riders of Snug has forced the Enterprise to fly in to the rescue, and the person who performed the operation and saved his life was, in fact, the hated Dr. Pulaski--thus (if you're keeping score) making this entire dramatic plotline entirely pointless and stupid and also 100% the result of Captain Picard being an inflexible, insufferable jerk full of barely suppressed hatred for his own subordinates.

At this point, riveted, our long-suffering viewer finally reaches his tipping point, and pours himself a stiff whiskey.

Of course, before we get to the denouement, we are treated to touching scenes of a visibly-uncomfortable Picard (who, lest we forget, in early TNG speaks frequently about how he hates all children and Wesley Crusher in particular) engage in painfully awkward conversation with Wesley about his wild college years, when he stupidly got into a fight with a Nausicaan at a bar and got stabbed in the heart, thus leading to him (a) having no heart (see what I did there?), (b) getting his heart replaced with a defective mechanical heart which now has to be replaced, thus setting our "plot" in motion, and (c) being a stiff, boring, insufferable loser for the rest of his days.

In all fairness, this is something close to the best character work involving both Picard and Wesley Crusher in the first two scenes of TNG--but, also in all fairness, that's not a particularly high bar.

Anyway, after both of our plotlines have wrapped up, and Picard awakes to find that his and everyone else's least favorite Chief Medical Officer was the one who saved his life, we at least get to see Picard humiliated and made moderately uncomfortable--which is, frankly, the only real pleasure to be had in the first two seasons of Star Trek the Next Generation.

Sins of the Father

Moving on from the rare, refined pleasures of early TNG (accessible only to the spiritually advanced and/or the profoundly perverse), we take a step forward to a truly great episode, and one that shows well the qualities that made TNG Season Three such a major watershed not just for The Next Generation but for television in general.

As detailed in my larger TNG summary post, the Season Three writing staff, led by Michael Piller and featuring such luminaries of future Trek as Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, and Hans Beimler, spent their year of dramatic turnaround and never-before-seen success in a state of total panic, desperately behind on everything and barely managing to string together enough stories and scripts to meet their weekly deadlines. However, with the use of some unfailingly solid writing, focused around many small touches of characterization and genuine emotion, they managed to ensure that even in weeks where the story idea might be mediocre, the plotting a bit on the confusing side, and perhaps the acting and production less than stellar, TNG would always, always be worth watching. Season Three isn't a great season of television because all of the stories are good, high-concept science fiction concepts for the ages; it's a great season of television because no matter the basic storyline, there is always more than there has to be going on, always well-written and well-constructed moments of genuine drama and emotion that tell us a little more about our characters and their lives and the world in which they live. It is this, above all else, which maintains our interest and rewards our loyalty, keeps us coming back week after week after week.

From time to time, though, we do have an episode whose smaller moments of characterization are matched by equally epic events in the plot as a whole. Indeed, this boldness in defining and shaking up events is also one of Season Three's more positive aspects--a freshness and fearlessness about exploring the Galaxy and the larger world patently lacking in the utopian slog of the first two seasons, and even at times a bit absent in TNG's later years as well.

All of this, though, is somewhat besides the point. The heart of "Sins of the Father" is neither a high-concept science fiction plot, nor the defining of a larger Galactic society, but Worf: the Klingon officer created by Bob Justman over Gene Roddenberry's fervent objections and for much of the first season confined to occasional guest spots, now come into his own and finally given a chance to unleash just a little of the potential inherent in his character. For what Worf provides, by the very nature of his character, is precisely a bridge--a point of contact between the somewhat staid world of Starfleet and the Enterprise and a radically different, alien world whose rules and players we, the viewers, know nothing about. As a gruff, junior officer on the Enterprise, getting ordered around by Picard and co, this potential is very much hidden, to say the least--at his worst, Worf is just a funny gruff guy with a big head who constantly wants to shoot things, as I've put it elsewhere, the Mr. T of the TNG ensemble. What Sins of the Father does, wisely, is to take this Worf we've come to know: the gruff, obedient Starfleet Officer, always just a bit too staid and angry, a bit too fervent in doing his duty, a bit too distant in relating to his crewmates, just a bit out of place, and contrasts this with a Worf who is thrust back into a radically different context, where the character's odder qualities suddenly take on new and deeper meanings, and can be defined by very different challenges.

This is, again, introduction; but the plot of the show is admittedly, more than a little complex and Machiavellian, TNG at its most DS9-like. Indeed, the writer behind this hour, Ronald D. Moore, would go on to become one of the most influential voices on Deep Space Nine, continuing in very much the same vein (character, high-pitched emotional drama, and complex political maneuvering) he creates here.

The real strength of the writing here, though, shows through clearest in how very much sheer content is packed into the mere one hour runtime of the show. It's a basic, but very effective rule of thumb, that if you watch an hour of television and feel rushed or constrained, like not much has happened, or there wasn't enough time to really cover things, you're seeing bad writing; but if you feel like you've watched something much longer than an hour, that more than you expected or remembered had happened, you're watching excellent episodic television writing. What makes this so skillful is not so much the big picture as the little one: the fact that every scene, every character, every element, no matter how trivial in terms of the plot, is just a little more vivid and real, contains more content, than is strictly necessary or seems possible. Art becomes, to an extent, like life; there is always more going on than can be seen or perceived or processed at one time, all at once. Everything is made much of--and so we are left at once overwhelmed, satisfied, and wanting more.

Anyway, finally, the plot (spoiler warning, obviously): a Klingon officer comes aboard the Enterprise to participate in an exchange program. At first, this looks like an episode of dramatic comedy highlighting cross-cultural situations; the Enterprise crew all react to him in different, character-appropriate ways, and he to them. In particular, Kurn acts with unusual hostility towards Worf--and Worf responds appropriately, with a mixture of his usual perfect-officer training and a clear desire to prove himself to a fellow Klingon. Finally, though, when Kurn has succeeded in getting Worf angry, forcing him to prove that he is, after all, a Klingon warrior, not a Starfleet officer, we get a very unexpected revelation: Kurn is Worf's long-lost brother, a brother Worf believed dead in the attack that killed their parents and left Worf to be raised by Starfleet officers. Kurn, however, had lived in secret under an alias in another family; and he has come to find Worf now because the Klingon High Council (the governing body of the Klingon Empire) has launched an investigation into the massacre that killed their parents, and their father, Mogh, has been implicated as the traitor responsible for the attack. Kurn, therefore, wants Worf to return to the Klingon Empire to defend their father's honor before the Council; and when Worf agrees, Picard, in a show of loyalty to his officer, takes the Enterprise to the Klingon homeworld and involves himself directly in the trial and surrounding investigation. There, Worf confronts the High Council in dramatic fashion, only to be threatened by the scheming Duras, an old family enemy and leader of a powerful Klingon faction, and admonished by the Head of the Council, K'mpec, who urges him to withdraw his complaint, since if he loses, he will be put to death. Finally, after much skullduggery and good characterization, it is revealed that it was actually Duras' father that was the real traitor; the Council had planned to pin the blame on Worf's father to cover over the real crime, assuming that he had no real family left to defend him. At the urging of K'mpec, who tells him that if the truth were to come out, the Klingon Empire, divided between Duras' faction and others, could easily fall into civil war, Worf agrees to withdraw his charge and accept discommendation, the complete disgracing and erasure of his person from Klingon society. Although Klingon society and its government is corrupt and rife with deception and self-interest rather than honor, Worf will sacrifice his own interests and honor for the good of the Empire. But one day, he will return and restore what has been taken from him...

If you didn't understand a word of that, don't worry; that's quite understandable. The remarkable thing, though, is that in the actual course of the episode, all of this is absolutely clear, all of it is dramatic and riveting, all of it unfolds naturally, and on top of that every single scene is full of unexpected gems of characterization and interest: even though the core of the episode, in the abstract, consists of scenes of actors in bumpy forehead prosthetics standing around foggy sets wearing heavy robes and discussing entirely fictional politics.

Altogether, though, the episode is an embarassment of riches, which in a single hour of television defines Worf's character as it had never been defined before, gives him a long-lost brother and a much deeper backstory and family history, gives us our first glimpse of the Klingon homeworld in the entire history of Star Trek, gives us for the firs time the basic structure of the Klingon Empire (divided into feudal houses and ruled by a High Council) as well as the measure of its 24th century politics (full of scheming for power and coverups on the highest level), gives us multiple well-drawn and memorable Klingon characters that together give us the clearest view of Klingon society and culture we have ever had (the loyal soldier Kurn, the scheming politician Duras, the old, world-weary, cynical, but very human K'mpec, the colorful, loyal family nurse, and so on), and also for a bonus gives us some excellent moments of characterization for Captain Picard, who stands by his officer with fatherly concern and perfect gravitas and an unflinching sense of justice in the face of the entire Klingon Empire; and even some fun moments with our other regulars. All of this, again, in exactly forty-four minutes of television.

At the heart of the episode, though, is Worf--Worf the Klingon, Worf the Starfleet officer, whose character, all too often reduced to a gruff caricature or the dumb "muscle" of the crew, suddenly comes into view as a fully realized person, defined by his status as at once a member and an outcast in two, very different worlds. Aboard the Enterprise, he is somewhat distant and alien, but loyal, obedient to his duty in every respect, and with a reserve of real affection towards his shipmates; with his brother, he takes on a new air of authority, as the "elder brother" who is to be obeyed first and foremost, even if leavened with an air of affection; with the High Council, and with Duras, he is the stern, unbending man of honor, distressed but never tempted by the deceits around him. By the end of the episode, Worf has earned the respect of his brother, who initially feared he was more human than Klingon, as well as that of the Head of the entire Klingon Empire, K'mpec, who admires his self-sacrificing honor even as he is entirely unable to imitate it. He has, deservedly, earned our respect as well; and so have the Ronald D. Moore and the writers of The Next Generation.

Frame of Mind

Finally, I will close with an episode that's not on any Best-Of lists that I know of, but nonetheless illustrates well the strengths and pitfalls of TNG's Season 6 renaissance/transformation, a renaissance that would be continued, and nearly fall to pieces, during the 7th season.

TNG Season 6 is a really excellent season of television; it is also rather different in many respects from what came before. This is largely due, in my humble opinion, to two factors behind-the-scenes. One of them was the withdrawal of Michael Piller from his position as Executive Producer and unquestioned Captain of the TNG ship for the purpose of planning, creating, and then running Star Trek Deep Space Nine (which we will be discussing next), and his replacement as lead writer by Jeri Taylor; the other was the entrance and gradual rise to prominence of writer Brannon Braga, who began as a mere intern in season five, but by season 6 became one of the most influential voices on the writing staff. Brannon Braga, in the long term, would end up being one of the most powerful figures in '90s and '2000s Star Trek; he would go on to write two of the feature films with his sometime partner Ronald D. Moore, run Voyager in its later years, and create and run Enterprise throughout its entire four year run along with Rick Berman.

Frame of Mind is a great springboard to discuss Brannon Braga because it is, perhaps, the very peak of his contribution as a solo writer to TNG--though his offerings in conjunction with his writing-partner/evil twin Ronald D. Moore, it has to be said, are rather different, as we shall see. Ronald D. Moore, for his part, got onboard a little earlier, and was generally much more in line with Michael Piller's vision of character-based drama, albeit with significantly rougher edges. Brannon Braga, however, is much more of a science fiction writer in the older sense; obsessed with the strange and bizarre, fixated on high-concept plots that seize the imagination and stultify the senses, and consequently quite a bit less interested in character drama and development and the complex unfolding of Galactic politics.

In a sense, Braga's presence helps bring TNG back full-circle to its roots; it's no accident that Seasons 6 and 7 feel, at times, more reminescent of Seasons 1 and 2, with their focus on high-concept sci-fi plots and bizarre, often jarring elements. In Season 7's lowest moments, the more unfortunate side of this recollection becomes fairly inescapable, and Braga's tendencies would, I think, create some difficulties in his later years on Voyager and Enterprise--but on TNG it is almost entirely for the good, even if it does help to shift the show quite significantly away from Michael Piller's central, family-based vision. Still, with Ronald D. Moore and Jeri Taylor balancing it out with stories of different types, there is certainly room in the TNG formula for some good, old-fashioned bizarreness. And Braga, unlike the oppressed writers of TNG's early days, tyrannized by Gene Roddenberry's abusive-father-figure act, is a true master of the form, very much in control of his genre and its toolbox.

"Frame of Mind," then, is high-concept science fiction at its very best, comparing very favorably with modern equivalents such as Black Mirror in the cleverness of its writing and the startling surrealism of its imagery.

There doesn't seem to be much point in describing the plot--and also I don't want to give away the various twists and turns that really should be experienced on their own terms at least once. Suffice it to say that the episode consists of our redoubtable hero William T. Riker rapidly losing his mind, jumping back and forth between life on the Enterprise, where he is acting in a play about mental asylums and the psychiatric abuse and is about to go on a mission to an alien world, and a life where he is a prisoner himself in a mental hospital on said world, subject to frequent delusions of being a Starfleet officer on the Enterprise, and accused of murdering someone. That's about all I'm willing to share; suffice it to say that the plot is constructed with utterly masterful skill, and the paranoia and surrealism is some of the most effective I've seen (even as a bit of an afficionado of such things). The episode succeeds very well at throwing off your sense of reality, using familiar tropes and characters in conjunction with unfamiliar settings and people to constantly throw the viewer off balance and keep them there.

What makes the episode particularly brilliant and effective, though, is its focus specifically on William T. Riker, who of all the members of the Enterprise main cast is perhaps the most natively sympathetic and the most generic. Riker is, at his best, simply everyman; he is exactly whom he appears to be, a man who enjoys life and his job and has friends and plays poker and trombone, a person with whom we can all sympathize and identify ourselves with. He's not a magical robot, or a blind guy obsessed with technical manuals, or an alien orphan trapped between two worlds; he's just this guy in this place with this job and these hobbies, with some issues, sure, but generally enjoying his life.

All of this straightforwardness, however, this comfortable, easy sense of reality, can be very easily stripped away, called into question, reflected and refracted with mirrors, to reveal what is at its root a profound void of identity. Who, or what, is Riker, apart from all these surface-level qualities, all these too-familiar settings and scenarios? Riker's identity can be called into question more than most of the other characters in the cast because that identity is, to an extent, much less personal, much less unique, much less tied to the deeper qualities of the world of Star Trek, than any of the others. You can put Riker in an asylum and question his identity in a way you simply never could with Worf, or Troi, or even Picard--because all of these people have strong and unmistakeable identities, strong and unshakeable senses of self, that tie them to their lives and their environment and the specificities of their identity. Riker does not; and that is the weakness that this story brilliantly, if cruelly, probes.

Of course, this will all, in the end, be resolved one way or the other; and naturally, we all know that Riker will appear on next week's show. But here, the shallow proverb is actually true; it's not about the destination, but the journey: and what that reveals about character and show alike.

For what Brannon Braga's take on The Next Generation, at its best, reveals, is a void not just in Riker's character, but in the entire setting of the show, with its level-headed sense of reality, its easy comfortableness, its unshakable sense of the status quo and the natural order of things, and its cast of characters who are, in the end, inextricable with that setting and that status quo and that sense of reality. We can, if we are Michael Piller or Ronald D. Moore, buy into this setting and these characters, dig under the surface, reveal hidden depths and hidden details, make them ever more real and solid and taken seriously and affirmed and loved--or we can do what Braga delights to do, and relentlessly undermine this shallow pasteboard world of cliches, reveal that beneath the surface of that staid comfortable world, behind those cardboard masks, is, at all times, a profound unreality, a void of meaning, that can be every bit as transfixing, and is all the more entrancing for its contrast with the brightly-lit world of Star Trek's "reality."

What Frame of Mind reveals, then, is something that Star Trek at its best has always had; an awareness of the unreality, the fictionality, of the world of Star Trek itself, a sense of the roots of science fiction as a genre, in the exploration of the unknown, unbounded possibilities (and horrors) unleashed on the world of the 20th century by modern industrialized science, the science that put millions into poorly kept asylums and sterilized tens of thousands of others.

Still, if this sense of unreality and of possibility is an important element, it does still need, at least for the world of Star Trek, to be bounded and defined by the deeper, character-based world of the Next Generation. For without those boundaries, without that deeper sense of reality to ground and contrast it, such high-concept stories can easily become meaningless, without significance, even routine--as they so often did later on in Voyager and Enterprise, where subspace phenomena and time travel can be just as mundane as a trip to the grocery store. Ultimately, the two sides of TNG complimented each other well; the deep sense of the reality of the world and all its myriad details and characters, and the deep sense of the unboundedness and unreality of Star Trek as fiction and science fiction. This is one of the reasons, I think, why the collaborations of Brannon Braga with Ronald D. Moore were so effective, particularly in their absolute peaks of All Good Things, the TNG finale and one of the most successful television finales of all time, and First Contact, the best of the TNG films.

In any event, in the meantime, even without Braga's partner in crime to balance the scales and keep things reined in, it is certainly entertaining (and frightening) to watch from time to time one of our dearly beloved characters rapidly loses his mind.

Preview of Coming Attraction

There you have it, citizens! Next up will be my Big Ol' DS9 Summary, which may be quite a while in coming. DS9 is my favorite of all the Trek series, and I adore it more than words can say--and also consequently have quite a lot to say about it. It would be nice to get it into 2018, the 25th anniversary of DS9's debut; but grad school and current events may not permit it. In any event, until next time, live long and prosper, and please try to stay sane.