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Seriesdate: 4.12
The Wounded
Wrinkly forehead alien species #212 has made peace with the Federation. Huzzah! And we never even knew they were at war. Huzza-zah!
When we last saw the Cardassians... was never, because this is their first episode. But, after the Klingons, the Ferengi, the Romulans, the Borg, etc. TNG's creators were fine-tuning their skill at introducing a recurring alien race in medias res, and the Hardassians benefit from the smoothest insertion into the Enterprise's backstory. Partly this was accomplished by not repeating the mistake made with the Borg of escalating too quickly. Instead, the central theme, more in keeping with Star Trek Utopianism, is de-escalation of a potential conflict and wrapping things up in an ambiguous enough fashion to leave room for diverse future plots. Also, instead of expositing at the audience, the various characters allow us to observe Cardassians interacting with filthy hu-mons. All in all they come out much less one-dimensional in their first showing. Klingons roared at the ceiling, Romulans schemed, Ferengi sneered and capered.
Overtly, this is an episode about war stories and post-traumatic stress. O'Brien's slightly over-drawn dialogues as a war veteran eat up most of the air time, but ultimately they get the job done. We're given ample opportunities to see the new aliens being both imperious and conniving, belligerent and apprehensive. The Cardassian underlings act appropriately like fish out of water, restrained, tentative in their interactions. Their leader struts in, outraged at a rogue Federation captain gunning down his fellows, then softens gradually as he sees Picard go from skeptical to convinced of his peer's guilt, watching the lunatic descend from genocidal mania to defeated exhaustion.
And, beautifully, by the end the assumptions of right and wrong are reversed twice more in a single scene. Picard admits his fellow Starfleet captain's suspicions about their former enemy's re-armament are almost certainly correct... but having built up trust with his Cardassian counterpart he tasks him instead with de-escalating in turn.
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Seriesdate: 4.15
First Contact
(The one with the kinky nurse.)
Wrinkly forehead "alien" species #579 is about to achieve warp travel. The Enterprise has been monitoring them and getting ready to make first contact. (Topic to be discussed at some later date.) Riker gets wounded and hospitalized while undercover and almost escapes by prostituting himself to a nurse who just happens to have a space-alien fetish... which is obviously a hilarious topic!
"Oh it's not so much to ask" quoth the nurse, and I agree. It is not too much to ask to fuck a physically healthy member of the opposite sex (no matter how wrinkly his forehead) and the scene's humor's just about tripled by her breathy enthusiasm at going where no woman of her species has gone before.
Riker: "There are differences in the way that my people make love."
Lanel: "I can't wait to learn..."
Except it's a bit galling to see the "me want snu-snu" bit played out in a show that routinely treated the idea of a woman having to touch a man who hasn't jumped through her various hoops and pledged eternal servitude to her as a cosmic injustice which had to be prevented at all costs and overcompensated by his utter humiliation. Would this scene have been written and played out as playful and adorable had Troi or Crusher been held captive and told to spread and let her crotch do the talking? Oh, it's not so much to ask...
But the real meat of the episode isn't the space nookie in space, or even the other inverted contact-first angles. It's the interplay of faction rivalries among the Malcorians: the skeptics, the fetishists, the cautious progressive collaborators, the panicked ignorants, and most importantly the Security Minister.
Krola: "Perhaps, like many conquerors, you believe your goals to be benevolent. I cannot, for however you would describe your intentions, you still represent the end to my way of life. I cannot permit that to occur. Eventually, Durken would choose to welcome your people, with arms open and eyes closed. I must force him down another path. When they find us I will be dead, killed by your weapon. The lines will be drawn. A peaceful accord will no longer be an option. For my people!"
Back when I was ten, I remember my jaw dropping at this moment. In most other shows it would've been a cut and dried scene: the villain tries to shoot the hero, gets the gun knocked out of his hand at the last second then falls off a conveniently placed cliff to keep the hero's hands clean of blood. Seeing the would-be martyr instead turn the gun on himself gave the conflict more depth in a second than an hour's worth of exposition. To most viewers, it would flip him from evil to pitiable. To me, he remains villainous - "most people would rather die than think" as Bertrand Russell said; as far as I'm concerned, thought being synonymous with existence, obfuscation is plenty villainous in itself. Assuming much of the Malcorian populace would emulate him, the whole affair does convey an infuriating but believable impossibility of taking the correct course of action.
At least the one superior mind who was building the warp drive, the scientist whom it would be criminal to condemn to life among her idiotic species, is given a place aboard the Enterprise.
Oh, if only... if only...
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Seriesdate: 4.21
The Drumhead
Holy shit... this is one of the series' best episodes and I didn't remember a single frame of it!
Anyway, a member of wrinkly forehead "alien" species #15 is stealing Federation technology for wrinkly forehead "alien" species #34. Which is to say a Klingon exchange officer is spying for the Romulans, as part of the ongoing Season 4 meta-plot about Sela's incitement of civil war among the Klingons. We begin as near to a cold open as TNG was wont to indulge in, with Riker and Troi interrogating the spy about a possible act of warp core sabotage. The spy insults Worf and gets gut-punched, an admiral warps in to investigate, Worf presents physical evidence of the espionage, the prisoner is interrogated a second time and proclaims innocence to the sabotage if not the espionage, the admiral suggests a conspiracy aboard the Enterprise, an offhand call-back to season 1, a further reiteration of the season 4 meta-plot... whew!
And we're only 10 minutes into the show, opening credits included.
Even the technobabble makes a lot more sense than usual:
Worf : "He can extract digital information from a computer, encode it in the form of amino-acid sequences and transfer those sequences into a fluid in the syringe. Then he injects someone, perhaps even without their knowledge."
(If you think that sounds more far-fetched than warp cores, protein-based data reading/storage has in fact been toyed with occasionally since at least the mid-2000s)
This whole script's a triumph of television screenwriting for its manifold allusions, and the directing keeps an appropriately snappy pace - kudos to Frakes who's credited for it. Each scene manages to both advance the plot and tie into character development, ongoing galactic events, the state of mind of the crew and the impact of subjective interpretation in an investigation. It culminates in a couple of dramatic trial scenes during which the admiral slips gradually from the role of an investigator to that of a witch-hunter. Shockingly for a television show (which normally encourage the populace to be as overemotional and anti-intellectual as possible) we see Picard countering the others' growing paranoia and scapegoating fervor by calm, cold-blooded reason and equanimity.
Picard : "You're asking me to restrict Mr. Tarsi's movements solely on the basis of Sabin's feeling."
Count how often you see the word "feeling" put in a negative connotation in a television show, I dare you. Picard himself is ultimately put on trial for guilt by association and provokes the inquisitor into an emotional outburst revealing her self-righteous fanaticism.
And, as a stroke of genius, it winds down into a low-key denouement. Her motivations exposed, defeated, the witch-hunter is gradually abandoned by everyone she herself had convened to the courtroom, even her former allies of convenience to whom she no longer serves as a social prop. I can't help but want to recommend this episode to every modern-day activist on youtube and reddit and fox news and msnbc, from the Bible-thumpers and nationalists to the pronoun police and the racial figureheads and the feminists flinging rape accusations on automatic fire, and the "for the children" chorus behind every attempt to censor, censure and sabotage free thought.
Yet Picard himself looks defeated in his pyrrhic victory. To find the system has rotted far enough to allow for such witch-hunting weighs a great deal more heavily than defeating one solitary fanatic.
Picard : "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then, before you can blink an eye, suddenly it threatens to start all over again. [...] Mr. Worf, villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged."
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Both The Wounded and The Drumhead are credited fully or in part to one Jeri Taylor. Her work seems to have varied wildly in quality among the many episodes in which she collaborated, but for the purposes of this post she's certainly associated with the increased complexity to TNG's plotlines in Season 4. All three of these episodes stand out by their deliberate ambiguity, refocusing the viewer's attention on the topic of choice and not merely outcome.
The Cardassian caught accessing the Enterprise's computers in The Wounded may or may not have been guilty of espionage, but the true task was judging him in a calm and fair manner which maintained both sides' confidence in their framework for cooperation. Conversely despite being correct in his accusations the rogue Federation captain was causing more harm than good.
The Security Minister in First Contact acts to prevent scientific progress which would immeasurably improve the lives of everyone on his planet... yet in illustrating the pervasive backwardness of his kind he prevents what could be a horrendous failure of their first exposure to space. They can't be helped if they're too stupid to learn.
The act of sabotage in The Drumhead turns out to be pure accident. The Klingon spy believes himself a patriot. The young medic who consorted with him may or may not have been guilty of giving aid to the enemy... but the methodology used to convict him formed a greater crime.
Pulp science fiction is prone to ludicrous generalizations and tokenism: species defined by the planet they live on, composed of a single climate with a single culture defined by a single trait. For my own part, my favorite TNG episodes centered on outlandish discoveries, seeing the crew solve futuristic scientific puzzles. Still, the show's other strong point was gradually moving far beyond the original series' "planet of hats" motifs and developing the galactic politics angle through multifaceted alien cultures. Here at last are pro-Federation Klingons and pro-Romulan Klingons, sneaky Cardassians and reasonable ones, primitive aliens who both embrace progress and fear it, internal politics oscillating between egalitarianism and unexpected Spanish Inquisitions. Not only do they present attempts to take correct actions in ambiguous circumstances, but the second most important intellectual leap: from tribal motivations to personal ones.
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