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Seriesdate: 3.15
Yesterday's Enterprise
Tasha's back, y'all!
And she's wrangled herself a cheesy episodick love interest. You go, girl!
Actually, while there yet stood such dark abodes as book-stores, I remember seeing two characters in this same pose on half the idiotic romance novel covers in history... with the roles reversed.
Anyway, there's a time vortex-y thingy... of some sort... who cares... and the previous Enterprise blasts in from the past. Suddenly, we're at war with the Klingons, Worf's nowhere to be seen and Tasha Yar is back at her old station, never having died at the
It's a rare case of a TV script retaining coherence both in and out of universe. Once you start with the precept of bringing Tasha back you hit the problem of Worf having ascended to her old station. So you need a reason why a Klingon would <NOT> be aboard a Federation vessel. From there, the plot branches rather seamlessly... which makes it a surprise that the script reached this point working backwards from the idea of the two ships meeting, through three or four major rewrites.
In execution, it falters a bit through overextended dramatic / romantic scenes (the romance angle especially was utterly irrelevant) but makes up for it by stepping up the intensity of the remaining action scenes. The best moment comes when Yar and her toy-boy are sharing a deep, meaningful gaze as an attack strikes. Instantly, they leap over their seats to take their stations while their captain struts purposefully, masterfully to her own chair. In two seconds we go from first-season cheese to watching trained professionals handle a crisis. Quite the statement on the show's growth, intended or not.
But mostly, the whole thing revolves around Guinan's conversation with Tasha, in which the former reveals the latter's untimely demise: "I do know it was an empty death. A death without purpose." One wonders why, if they've known each other for years in this timeline, it took little miss headgear this long to realize something's wrong, especially given her centuries-long lifespan. Maybe she had to bask in the breeze of the chrono-sphincter to get a whiff of the truth? Either way, Tasha joins the other ship to lend her inevitable death some much-needed meaning, and we wrap up a snappily edited finale with the E-D getting slowly murdered but managing to restore the timeline in which everyone (except Tasha) survives.
The End.
(NOT!)
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Seriesdate: 4.06
Legacy
The Enterprise tracks an escape pod to Tasha Yar's home planet. They're met by a Kurt Russel impersonator and the younger of the Yar sisters, a development which is greeted with a great deal more surprise than it warrants. Yes, of course Tasha had family in the place where she was born. Most people do.
Turkana 4 is a lawless urban wilderness... where everyone wears impeccable make-up and over-fluffed '80s rocker hairstyles. Two factions vie for control and the Enterprise almost gets embroiled in their civil war in the attempt to free the captive Federation citizens. By the end, Ishara Yar demonstrates her loyalty lies with her own faction and she'd be more than willing to sacrifice her new space-friends to serve her ignoble cause. The whole affair ends with a cheesy after-school special dialogue about the power of fee-fees.
It could of course have been handled better if the show could afford to challenge its audience's presumptions and reverse the comparison, to compare not only the younger to the older sister but also vice-versa. Maybe Tasha's devotion to the Enterprise was just as primitive and potentially destructive as her sibling's tribalism. But that would've gone against the grain. The excuse of a plot mainly served as a reminder to viewers of the dead Yar's virtues, constantly reiterating her bravery, hardships and dedication every five minutes, setting the stage for the role her name would play in later episodes.
Cheese and ham.
Next!
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Seriesdate: 4.24
The Mind's Eye
Romuloids hacked our engineer!
Boy ain't that always the way? You finally get yourself some vacation time only to be telegrabbed by invisible space pirates who use your cybernetic implants to reprogram you into an undetectable assassin against an empire of space samurai. Happens to all of us.
But, amusingly, by Star Trek standards this is one of the saner plots. They even went to some lengths to explain how it's LaForge's visor implants which allow a hardwired connection to his brain, and the reprogramming is done by providing sensory input, not by any mystical telepathic voodoo. Also, the villains follow a self-interested powermongering scheme and aren't just in it for the sake of being villains. Good stuff, all in all. The Klingons act Klingon, the dramatic reveals aren't belabored, the unstable political triangle between the three major factions is more clearly explained, and the constant fake-outs of priming the audience to expect Geordi to snap (dramatic music, killing O'Brien, etc.) provide just enough red herrings to presage the true, climactic assassination attempt.
More than any other, this episode serves to tie together the major plot threads which had been slowly developing for the past two seasons. We're teased with a possible resolution to Worf's discommendation and a meeesteeeerious shadowy female Romulan makes her first appearance, to be expanded upon later. But to me, it's elevated to first-tier status by the very last scene, in which a bewildered Geordi is being de-programmed by Troi, again not by telepathic nose-twitching but by discussion, by rational re-assessment of the previous weeks' events. This story's all about continuity, both for events and characters. Much like Picard's lingering post-Borg-mindrape trauma that kicked off the season, the last scene reaffirms that these people's lives continue off-camera. It doesn't sound like much, but TV in 1990 was ruled by no-causality, no-continuity, stock-character sitcoms with episodic resets every half hour.
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Seriesdate: 4.26-5.01
Redemption
Already discussed last time. The Klingon civil war is revealed to be stoked by the half-Romulan daughter of a time-traveling Tasha Yar, sent back to the past by the alternate-timeline Picard. (Say that three times fast.) She was the one to order LaForge's brainwashing and now she's smuggling weapons to the Klingon rebels.
Having rebelled against her mother's loyalties, Sela now fanatically serves Romulan interests in dividing the Federation and Klingons by any means necessary. For peak dramatic effect, she coldly recalls betraying her own mother to her death as a child, which would've shocked viewers to no small amount after they were primed to adore the elder Yar, hearing Tasha's praises constantly sung in Yesterday's Enterprise and Legacy. But, though a cheap trick, one can't deny it worked to great dramatic effect, as Sela immediately appears all the more villainous in contrast (and direct enmity) to her sainted mother.
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Seriesdate: 5.07-5.08
Unification
Spock. Is. Awesome!
And I don't mean that Quinto schmuck they're pushing these days. That's Original Recipe Nimoy right there, pure and uncu.... uuh, scratch that last part.
The episode as a whole deserves to be discussed at length some other time. Once again Sela is at the root of a convoluted scheme to stage a sneak-attack, this time against Vulcan. It's almost too bad she didn't re-appear more often on the show, as Crosby made a better hard-nosed sneering Romulan than she ever did a human action girl. Still, as her... average... acting ability wasn't quite up to the task of fleshing out a truly memorable villain, it's probably for the best. (And squaring her off against Nimoy pretty much guaranteed an unflattering comparison of their performances. Now that's just mean.) Her three appearances as Sela did however fit (and helped define) the Machiavellian mold in which the Romulans were cast: proud yet underhanded, training an assassin, smuggling weapons, attacking under a false white flag after baiting a foreign diplomat (Spock) into a vulnerable position.
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I stand by my assessment that Tasha Yar was a misconceived character from the very start, a first-season false start like Q or Wesley or the insectoid body-snatchers which were eventually re-tooled into the more thematically appropriate Borg. She mostly revolved around dropping the phrase "rape gangs" into random conversations and slapping around token males to display female superiority in all things. The petty manner in which she was removed from the show nonetheless lives on as an object lesson in bad writing. I was certainly glad, both as a tween and now, to see her get her well-deserved heroic farewell in Yesterday's Enterprise.
Interestingly, though the character was ill-fitted to the setting, the acting so-so and the plots involving her gratuitous morality plays or worse, the memory of Yar served the show much better. As a symbol of both loyalty and bereavement, she could prop up a villainess in contrast to her posthumously agreed-upon qualities or serve to define the growth of better protagonists like Worf or Data. Whether intentionally or not, Sela in her fanatical Romulan scheming did indeed emulate her mother's supposed perfect bravery as a Starfleet officer. It's a realization which has slowly made its way into roleplaying games as well since the days of TNG: that the stalwart, unbendable paladin may be lawful in adherence to a creed or cause or duty, but is by no means inherently good.
It makes an interesting study in how much a series can achieve by killing off a bad character early on, allowing itself both a powerful symbol within-continuity, and a way of growing by revisiting said symbol from different angles.
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