ST:TNG - First Contact

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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"To seek out new life and new civil-eye-zations."

First contact with an alien species is one of the thematic cornerstones of Science Fiction, growing out of the genre's precursors of mythical beasts and the mysterious lost kingdoms of Darkest Africa... and darkest Rocky Mountains... and darkest Alaska... and darkest South America... and darkest Polynesia... and darkest Antarctica and darkest India and darkest Atlantis and cave systems and the myriad crumbling castles of Ruritania and Uberwald and the hollow Earth and everything else cooked up by writers of Romantic Age (or just plain romantic) exploration stories as the boundaries of knowledge got pushed farther and farther until finally being pushed straight off the planet altogether and yes this would be one helluva run-on sentence even by the standards of Victorian florid prose but I can't seem to stop myself oh dear gods what is happening to me why isn't anyone helping me what is wrong with my brain is this a stroke is this what a stroke feels like am I dying where is E.T. and his messianic healing touch when you need him!

See, I bet you thought I couldn't bring that one home again. Mad Mad Libs skillz, yo.
Anyway, space aliens: important. Especially important for Star Trek which banked so heavily on its exploration theme. Though TNG deliberately expanded the Original Series' colorful episodic conflicts into a more consistent political milieu, encounters with novel alien races still outnumbered scripts dealing in Klingon / Romulan intrigue. Now, to me the most interesting scenarios deal with truly alien, incomprehensible star-beasts or other more abstract phenomena, the discernment of whose mere physical properties occupies the bulk of the plot. But, when it comes to first contact scenarios, most viewers expect an alien capable of a bit of light chit-chat, so for the purpose of this post I'll be sticking to a few first meetings with species of sentient, social individuals.

Let's start with a couple of negative examples from the frequently horrendous first and second seasons of the show.

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Seriesdate: 1.05
The Last Outpost

The 'Yankee traders' episode in which the Ferengi make their first appearance. Unfortunately they were obviously intended first and foremost to provide the Enterprise with recurring weekly villains and therefore designed to invoke instinctive, automatic disdain, disgust and hatred from the audience. So they're all male, as per the eternal "man bad, woman good" dogma. Also they're short and bald and hobble about hunched over and have crooked teeth and disrespect tha wiminfolks and quickly get into the habit of kidnapping human females to boot.

Beyond that we learn little to nothing about them. What should have been an exploration of a novel people and what makes them tick resolves to a half-hour farce trying to get the audience to yell at the screen, two minutes' hate style.

And yes, they're wearing skunk furs, for no particular reason than to further hammer their 'barbarian' threat level into the audience's subconscious. Sneaky, ugly, greedy, mean old space chimps armed with whips are coming to steal your women!

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Seriesdate: 2.15
Pen Pals

Oy, I'm chokin' on tha schmaltz already!

Data's been clandestinely messaging a little girl and now he's promising to take her away from all this. Eventually he drugs her unconscious and carries her off.
... I should probably contextualize the preceding statements before the lynch mob reaches Brent Spiner's house. The Enterprise has found a star cluster where the planets keep exploding. Cool. One of the planets happens to be inhabited by wrinkly forehead "alien" species #482, which they discover when Data picks up one of their adorable children's adorable distress call via his latest futuristic science project, a ham radio.

Most of the episode is plagued by a severe infection of Wesleyitis (though at least the brat doesn't get magic powers this time around.) The B-plot concerns the Enterprise breaking the Prime Directive (with some tediously slow-paced dialogues on the topic) to save an entire planet (using Wesley's brilliant solution) from getting its crystal sheets resonance-quaked by dilithium volcanoes... or something. However, we learn absolutely nothing about this culture. Their aesthetic tastes look like something a studio executive might order his personal assistant to collect. Their technology is supposed to be pre-space (for the Prime Directive to apply in its usual interpretation) but their doors materialize and dematerialize at a touch, suggesting even more advanced matter fabrication than the Enterprise. But, if the cleanliness of that kid's hair is any indication, their culture's mostly stuck at a Renaissance 'pockets full of posies' understanding of microbial life.

None of which we're supposed to care about, because we're meant to be too busy fawning over Wesley and swooning over the little girl's cuteness: her little quavering voice calling for help, her hugging and clinging to Data and begging not be separated from him, etceteree, etceterah. Cue the overemotional soft string music for the ending... in which nothing bad actually happens. The girl, wiped of her recent memories, gets returned safely to her now volcano-proofed homeworld.
Even the random technobabble makes more sense than this excuse for a plot. They entirely jumped the gun on Data's emotional development by focusing on his obsession with rescuing an adorable little girl. Remember, there would be no reason for him to be afflicted with human parental instincts fixated on mammalian neoteny. Also, after a couple of off-hand comments halfway through, the Enterprise makes no effort to discern the natives' technological level, and no-one states the slightest interest in studying them as per their voyage's continuing mission.

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Seriesdate: 3.04
Who Watches the Watchers

The one with the Bronze Age "proto-Vulcans" a.k.a. Mintakans being observed by the Federation in secret. There's a subtext to the notion of non-interference. It encompasses not only avoiding conflict or the effacement of nascent cultures by more powerful ones, but simply acknowledging the existence of others outside of one's own viewpoint. If setting a bar on "sentience" is to have any meaning, then on both a personal and cultural level it is necessary to acknowledge other sentients as independent actors, capable and responsible for their actions within their own sphere.

In many ways the plot acts as the antithesis of PenPals. The Prime Directive is treated as a noble set of guiding principles and not like an arbitrarily oppressive law making little girls cry. The imminent danger comes from societal dysfunction (a.k.a. a relapse of faithosis among a people who've been sane for centuries) instead of conveniently impersonal volcanoes. As would happen several times throughout the show, a single representative of a pre-space society is given a chance to act overawed in dialogue with the mighty space-men. Note particularly how much more meaningfully the grand reveal of showing a primitive mind its home planet from orbit plays out here than it did for Pen Pals' forcibly adorable little poppet. That an innocent child would be impressed means nothing. The Mintakan leader on the other hand, despite her primitive culture, possesses both the intelligence and frame of reference to grasp the implications of such a view, not only for herself but for her species, spaceflight implicit in intellectual advancement, rightfully earning herself a couple of moments of sheer admiration from Picard.

Nuria:  "You have taught us there is nothing beyond our reach."
Picard: "Not even the stars."

Unlike in the previous examples, the other culture takes center stage. Instead of reducing the nominal 'aliens' to either boogeymen or to a clingy, whiny little girl begging for the mighty spaceship to fix her planet, Nuria and her people look forward to advancing their own society to a future they now know to be possible.

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Seriesdate: 4.15
First Contact

As previously discussed, a season later, the show's writers were ready to go one better. Aside from treating the alien culture as an independent entity responsible for self-determination, they squeezed multiple alien factions into a single episode, treating us to the viewpoints of individuals contending a contentious issue. More importantly, they stopped treating the Prime Directive as an absolute. Although in the final tally the Malcorians are deemed unready for inter-species contact, the Enterprise accepts rescuing at least one superior mind, the scientist responsible for designing their first warp drive, from her people's stupidity.

Also, contact is not delayed indefinitely. The planet's leader is left to promote an educational system capable of elevating the next generation's thinking until they can mentally handle the wonders of the universe. Human thinking is categorical, and fiction follows suit. Characters and worlds are classified and re-classified; everything *is* or *is not* a friend or an enemy, worthy or despicable. Rarely does a piece of popular entertainment take transience, pluralism and mutability into consideration.

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Seriesdate: 1.18
Home Soil

Despite its overall low quality, the first season also contained a surprisingly bearable episode about a terraforming station suffering a spate of haunted machinery. Upon investigating, the Enterprise discovers a mineral sentience living in shallow clay deposits under the planet's crust. Never mind how they learned Federation programming languages to take over mining lasers. By the end Picard apologizes for humans' unwitting invasion and the Federation abides by its Prime Directive, respecting the clay demons' demand to GTFO their planet and leave them alone.

Instead of shoving all-too-human emotional cues down the audience's throat (lovable little girls or hate-able old men) the plot focuses on the aliens' alien nature and the difficulties of interspecies communication. The clay/crystal piezoelectric micro-brain trapped aboard the Enterprise even proves to be a bit of a jerk, calling humans "ugly bags of mostly water" and declaring war on them... but is nonetheless held as objectively in the right in retaliating against a human invasion terraforming its species to death. Imagine that. Likeability does not necessarily correlate with the right to existence.

The whole thing exemplifies Star Trek's best and most central theme: meeting inhuman cultures and achieving coexistence (if not necessarily collaboration) by opening lines of communication and learning about them.


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Seriesdate: 6.05
Schisms

In contrast, this is not a line of communication:

Seriously, Wizards of the Coast called; they want their cliches back. By season 6, the show began gradually running out of steam. So, once again, crew members are succumbing to inexplicable amnesia, only now it takes the form of "missing time" and unexplained disappearances, as well as vague dreams about being someplace else. It turns out that extra-dimensional invaders have been abducting our heroes (notably Riker) while they sleep and performing gruesome medical experiments on them.

Now, I have to tip my hat to the notion of orchestrating an alien abduction scenario aboard an interstellar spaceship. In itself it's a solid concept, but the undue lengths to which the writing and directing went to equate these experiences to the delusions of self-styled abductees in the real world left too little room for an actual plot. No attempt is made to explain the aliens' behavior, or to communicate with them or investigate them in any way. No explanation is given as to why the aliens would be sawing off human arms and reattaching them when they already know enough human anatomy to sedate their subjects and wipe their memories with near-perfect accuracy.... and they're apparently already monitoring the entire Enterprise 24/7 since they know when you are sleeping and know when you're awake. The whole thing makes as little sense as supposed abductees' probing fantasies. To quote Paul: "Am I harvesting farts? How much can I learn from an ass?!?"

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Seriesdate: 7.13
Homeward

By season 7 they were spinning their wheels quite a bit.

The Federation has been monitoring yet another primitive society (these guys look vaguely tail-end neolithic) whose planet is being destroyed by volcanoes thunderstorms, this time. Ignoring all lessons previously learned, once again we're treated to booming re-statements of the Prime Directive's absolute importance. Once again, said directive is interpreted myopically as the absolute letter of the law, to the point Picard is willing to let an entire species die. Luckily, Worf's human step-brother is willing to break the law in order to save one tribe by teleporting them into a holodeck re-enactment of their native planet's caves without their knowledge. They're shipped to a new planet and left to develop "naturally" while their young historian, who had blundered his way out of the holodeck, commits ritual suicide rather than live his whole life unable to tell his people what a lie they're living. It's not a terrible episode (Worf is portrayed as competent, for once!) but it is a rather forgettable one, largely due to the writers' self-imposed amnesia as to the Prime Directive's interpretation.

Not interfering with a society's natural development is one thing (don't give phasers to chimps) but you'd think exceptions can be made when their entire species is about to get wiped out by a natural disaster. At that point, further development being moot, saving the individuals about to die should become a priority, not to mention salvaging some small remnant of their culture. Or do individuals not warrant consideration in the glorious post-scarcity future of the Federated Order of Planets... oh, right... planets, not people. While some sanity is regained by the episode's end, it doesn't explain why the whole issue had to be re-hashed from an absolute "thou shalt not" dictum, ignoring ten or so previous episodes which did exactly the same thing.

What's the good of an exploration vessel if you're willing to let new civilizations die right in front of your eyes, denying the possibility of exploring them?

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Seriesdate: 5.02
Darmok

The situation is of course somewhat different when individuals make an informed choice to take a personal risk to further the cause of communication.

Picard:  "Uzani's army, with fists... open!"
Dathon: "Sulkath, his eyes uncovered!"

(I believe they're saying "come at me, bro")

The Enterprise meets up with wrinkly forehead "alien" species #355, a.k.a. the Tamarians, who though not aggressive have never been able to communicate. Though the words they speak are translated flawlessly by the Federation's universal translator, their phraseology is incomprehensible, consisting almost in its entirety of names, places and situations disjointed from (current) context. Frustrated at their continued impasse, the Tamarian captain has himself and Picard teleported down to the nearest planet to knife-fight a nondescript electrical-invisible monster together. (Think of it as an extreme team-building exercise.) After much tribulation, Picard finally realizes the Tamarians communicate via metaphor, likening everything around them to historical or mythological object lessons.

Now... I'll admit there is a lot wrong here.
For one, the phlebotinum of the "universal translator" was best left unanalyzed. Does everyone have one? Does everyone have the same model? Why do we never see it? Is it implanted in their skulls? If the Federation has it, they should be able to understand everyone else, but why does everyone else understand them? What about all the times they start swearing in Klingon? Does the universal translator come with a profanity filter? These are questions you really should not have tempted your audience to ask...
More to the point here, the idea of communicating entirely in metaphor is a non-starter. How do they even educate their children? How do you teach said history and myth in the first place? Conversely, given said metaphors already contain basic words, shouldn't it have been fairly easy to cobble together some starter phrases like "use knife on monster" or "hero knifes monster" or "Darmok/Dathon, his knife in the beast"?
Also, once Dathon is lying there mortally wounded hearing Picard telling stories that actually make sense, why not have them both teleported back immediately, the impasse being passé.
Also, Picard should really know enough military history to immediately spot a fundamental pincer maneuver when it's being set up for him.

Despite all that, it holds together surprisingly well once it gets rolling, especially the central scene in which Picard learns the phrase "Temba, his arms wide" (translation: generosity / gimme more) and starts pumping Dathon for information. Having Picard re-tell the Tamarian myth about two strangers meeting to fight a monster as the myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu fighting the bull of heaven was a stroke of genius. Aside from the universality of human(-oid alien) myth, it also sets up Dathon's demise and the immortalizing of the two captains' diplomatic adventure in Tamarian vocabulary. It creates one of the show's most memorable moments, at once wistful, tragic yet hopeful in its dogged pursuit of knowledge.

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Seriesdate: 5.25
The Inner Light

The Enterprise encounters a fairly primitive space probe, which shines a flashlight onto the bridge, immediately zeroes in on the best actor it can find and knocks Patrick Stewart's ass out cold. The rest of the crew discover the link can't be broken without killing their captain, while Picard finds himself transposed into a peaceful industrial society, told his name is now Kamin, and subjected to the eternal torment of trying to learn to play the flute.

Not that I'm bitter about my high school recorder lessons or anything...

While 25 minutes of real time pass, Picard experiences 40 years' worth of Kamin's life, learning to love his new wife, fathering two children and raising them until they run off to college, dedicating himself to ecological research and struggling in his role as a minor representative in the planet's political struggle to discern why their ecosystem's gradually failing. Long story short, their sun's about to go nova. With one last concerted effort as a society, they launch a probe into space to imprint the memories of one of their finest onto whomsoever it should encounter. Belatedly, Picard realizes it's himself the probe will find, a millennium into the future a.k.a. present, and Kamin's wife and descendants declare their motivation:

"The rest of us have been gone a thousand years. If you remember what we were... and how we lived... then we'll have found life again."

Once again, logical inconsistencies are not hard to spot. The script presents us with a civilization which struggles with irrigation and can barely launch basic rockets but has mastered some kind of brain imprinting technology fully and automatically adaptable to unknown alien physiology, condensing a lifetime into 25 minutes without fusing its receiver's synapses, plus some method of transmission that not even the Federation' finest vessel can crack a thousand years afterwards. And then it goes offline, yielding no more information whatsoever, as though no objective data was worth transmitting and only one alien was worthy of experiencing the life of one of their own. So they find life, only to die again once Picard dies? What was the freakin' point?

And yet, once again, I find myself caring very little because the overall effect is both intriguing, poignant in its struggle against existential despair and touching in the impact the whole experience leaves on Picard, shown in the last scene mournfully playing his penny whistle which had been packed onto the probe... instead of, y'know, for the same mass, two dozen thumb drives containing every book their species ever wrote, including their version of Darmok / Gilgamesh.

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The theme of first extraterrestrial contact is so central to Science Fiction that you have to wonder at how often it's handled poorly, even in series like Star Trek which pin their central concept on it. Appealing to the public's stupidity, we get plot after plot where aliens are to be avoided or defeated and not investigated. Everyone conveniently forgets that while The War of the Worlds was ostensibly about an invasion, H. G. Wells also provided quite a bit of unprecedented speculation about the aliens' incompatibility with human technology (never discovered the wheel) as well as their unfortunately (for them) high compatibility with Terran biology.

Plots like The Last Outpost or Pen Pals fail to provide the science to their fiction by employing aliens merely as recognizable set pieces: chittering, cowled boogeymen embodying fear of the unknown, lovable females in distress and hate-able barbarian males. However, when the propagation or search for knowledge is given the primacy it deserves the results are much more memorable... or at least memorable in a positive sense. Darmok and The Inner Light are not only high points of ST:TNG in the eyes of both critics and fans but have left their mark upon popular culture as a whole. If you've played Pillars of Eternity think back to how the Chanter class functions and try to tell me its writers, who like me grew up watching TNG, weren't inspired by Tamarian phraseology. Or think back to all the snowglobe encounters in Role-Playing Games of the past decades, where your character gets drawn into experiencing a long-lost culture first-hand; they may as well be scored by Patrick Stewart tootling on his little tin flute. TNG may not have originated such concepts, but it did them justice enough to make them stick in our communal consciousness.

Gilgamesh, and Enkidu, at Uruk.

On the downside, the show's interpretation of its Prime Directive failed to live up to this ideal. As late as the last season, writers kept falling back on it as an absolute dictum to artificially insert legal conflict into inter-species encounters. Logically, if the Prime Directive is meant to prevent homogenization or destruction of other cultures, then it would serve that function by also deliberately interfering when a culture's destruction is imminent. Duh. Whatever increases the sum of rational thought in the universe should guide the implementation of any such law. If a culture's about to die out, then by all means save at least a thousand of them and integrate them into the Federation as 24th century citizens, or if they're incapable of outgrowing their primitive superstitions then relocate them. If a species is incapable of utilizing its foremost intellects for its overall advancement, then by all means save those superior minds and give them a place in your own society, let their experiences and mindset ripple out through the web of galactic knowledge.