ST: TNG - Blessed from the Past

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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Seriesdate: 2.11

Contagion

 

The Enterprise rushes to help its sister ship the Yamato, just before the latter takes an anti-massively explosive dump all over the big viewscreen. Turns out its captain had been delving the mysteries of a ancient empire which died out about the time Homo habilised. Snatching the relay, Picard commands the Enterprise into a race and stand-off against a Romulan warbird by justification of "archaeology's totes coolsauce, bro" and is eventually proven right by the discovery of weaponizable stargates (amusingly, one of the few times the game-breaking superweapon potential of teleportation was ever acknowledged on Star Trek.)

 

Too bad whatever blew up the first ship also infected our heroes' ride, causing ship system after system to malfunction.

 

Earl Grey, hot, hold the mycorrhizae

It's a computer virus. Or rather a virulent operating system incompatibility.

That might sound a bit trite these days, but remember in 1989 the wider public had just bought its first word processor and was reading about "the matrix" in Neuromancer. To most of us, computer viruses were about as relevant as the space shuttle. It wasn't until the mid-'90s, as TNG ended, that Internet usage exploded - just in time for "Kirk vs. Picard" arguments to fuel the first major forum flame wars. Which is to say a computer program rewriting code sounded futuristic enough, and also explains why the entire plot's resolved by the (now) clichéd tech support expedient of "reboot it, dumbass."

Objectively, the virus filled much the same directing necessity as godlike aliens with superpowers: a genius loci warping our heroes' environment via informed omnipotence which can conveniently be portrayed through reaction shots and flickering lights. Not to say the episode skimped on props or sets, but the effects budget obviously sank into building the alien command center and stargates. So you get scenes of Burton bouncing off the walls of the turbolift or Stewart marvelling at his synthesizer's theobromalfunction... and weirdly enough, it works. The ancient program's haunting of familiar surroundings, played low-key without any singular villain to focus the audience's enmity, allows for a sort of creeping magical realism opening the heroes to harm.

 

Momentarily anyway, because in season 2 TNG was still presumed an episodic affair with no need for internal consistency or continuity, and so finishes with an uncharacteristically nonchalant, even callous quip from Picard "same old routine I suppose" conveniently forgetting (as the audience surely has) that over a thousand humans including Picard's old friend died at the start of this adventure.

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Seriesdate: 4.13

Devil's Due

A devil from the past performs magic tricks. Worf believes her, but Picard doesn't.

But first, watch these suckers run around in panic.

Maaan, Marduk's gonna be pissed at you guys...

Funny huh?

Turns out a thousand years ago their ancestors signed a pact with the devil Ardra, and now they're afraid she'll turn up to collect. Which she does, with claims to human and klingon Satanism to boot. Despite her teleportation and shapeshifting "magic" Picard sees through her (sadly, quite reasonable in Star Trek) argument that the universe being utterly riddled with godlike beings of unimaginable power, the literal Devil's not much of a stretch. After half an hour of "nuh-uh!/yuh-huh!" back and forth, we finally get to the crux of the matter: 24th-century technology is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic and a confidence artist can effortlessly build a cult around tractor beams, teleportation and holograms.

After all, if you find yourself in a post-scarcity society, whizzing around at multiple light speeds while snacking from a food replicator which only occasionally misconstrues a cuppa tea as a potted plant, wouldn't you get bored? Might as well hoke some jokes on the local yokels or have yourself crowned god-empress of Third Podunk from the Sun. Though the actress portraying Ardra leaned into the inherently hammy role as well as she could, she could hardly mask the relative dearth of plot. We devote ten minutes watching her flirt with Picard and the last fifteen to tedious courtroom drama, leaving a scant couple of expository scenes to lend the whole anecdote coherence.

 

While threadbare as a TNG script, it's yet remarkable for its portrayal of the confidence game. At this point James Randi's second career was in full swing and Picard's explanation tracks Randi's most oft-repeated point: if a miracle can be replicated by a stage magician, it's no miracle. If the supernatural can be created naturally, we are unjustified in any presumption of the superlative. And, as a stage magician well knows, con artists let victims do the work of convincing themselves - hence the 'confidence' part.

 

Devil's Due's critical plot point is portrayed by those panicked pedestrians. To a true believer, every pattern of burn marks on a tortilla is a holy visitation, every alluminum pie pan on a string is a flying saucer, every blurry hiker's a sasquatch, every pond frog's the Loch Ness monster. Once the gullible space-hicks of Ventax II convinced themselves they're due for a devil, they were going to get it, one way or another.

 

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Seriesdate: 5.09

A Matter of Time

A historian from the future performs magic tricks. Picard believes him but Worf doesn't.

 

Ziggy Stardust's pimpmobile

 

First, let's save a planet from asteroid-induced glaciation... ooops, we blew it up... but it's okay, we can suck the blow. Geordi mashes buttons prostyle.

But enough of the far more interesting B-plot.

 

Instead we're going to focus on a smarmy observer who appears via time anomaly in an unscannable tinfoil shuttle and starts bugging the ship's crew about their daily lives, interfering with every proceeding. Things come to a head when he refuses to use his knowledge of future events to guide Picard in saving the aforementioned planet's millions of inhabitants, on pretext of noninterference.

The solid precept here is marred by a single consistent flaw: every step of production, from the script to the directing to the guest star's acting, over-played the character's intrusive, grinning abrasiveness in order to prime the audience to dislike him in preparation for the revelation that he's a 22nd century charlatan who hijacked a 26th century shuttle. To the point an overextended scene of him hitting on Crusher is played for inept creepiness in contrast to Ardra's femme fatale seduction attempt of Picard, where she's shown to have orchestrated a masterful control of his environment. We default, as previously noted, to the usual man-bad/woman-good contraposition:

female sexuality = radiant fertility goddess

male sexuality = stumbling schlub

 

Moreover, playing up his buffonery saps the central message about unmasking a confidence artist, leaving the impression that if he'd just been a smoother operator he would've gotten away with it, meddling kids notwithstanding. Instead of, as in Devil's Due, focusing on the ship's crew as competent, rational minds who's can't be glitzed into gullibility, they must instead be provided with an inept antagonist the better to flatter the audience's lack of perspicacity at distrusting him.

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Seriesdate: 6.23

Rightful Heir

The second coming of Klingon Jesus fails to perform magic tricks.

Worf believes him, then he doesn't, then he does, then he doesn't.

Picard would rather get back to business.

 

We open with Worf late for duty, only to be discovered enacting a surprisingly creepy seance in his quarters. Everything from Riker and his cronies' martial traipse along the corridors to Data's shift report to the careful decoration of Worf's room immediately establish a more professional tone than TNG had often demonstrated. They even made his forehead prosthetic sweat. Now that's attention to detail!

 

The plot on the other hand was poorly conceived and has aged even worse, wasting a damn fine performance from Dorn. Worf is having a crisis of faith, and goes to a religious retreat to seek visions of the unifying Klingon prophet Kahless, dead for 1500 years. Details of Klingon society thus revealed are better discussed in their own context some other time. Long story short, Kahless himself appears, in flesh and blood, and before long has everyone chanting We. Are. Klingon! - Yes. We. Noticed! (The. Forehead. Ridges. Were. A. Strong. Indication!)

But, after noting the great prophet's memories of his own previous life are a bit sketchy and his martial abilities nowhere near supernatural, Worf threatens the high priest who orchestrated the whole spiel to come clean: "Kahless" was cloned from the original's tissue samples and implanted with false memories to believe himself the real deal.

Yeah... I know, it makes a lot less sense than innertialess acceleration or force fields.

Despite the fraud, in a cynical bit of realpolitik, they set the clone up as a puppet emperor, a hopefully unifying symbol of the empire, on the assumption people will ignore facts and flock to a flimsy supernatural pretext and pretense of recaptured glories. We end in a heavy-handed analogy to the second coming of Jesus.

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Seriesdate: 6.04

Relics

The one with Scotty.

 

Proof that engineers should never moonlight as nurses.

Basically, if you hold a soft spot for the original series, this is greatness; if not, half an hour of fanboy masturbation crippling fifteen minutes of wasted mega-engineering potential.

Our valiant vessel tracks a distress call to the surface of a Dyson sphere, where a 75-year-old wreck holds the transporter pattern of one Montgomery "ah'm givin' 'er awl shae's gawt!" Scott(y) who immediately sets to making a nuisance of himself spouting outdated technobabble and long-winded grandpa tales of the good ole' days. Weirdly enough, both the A and B plots are good! The Dyson sphere and the solar wind prompting its abandonment fill the star trekkin' quota, while Scotty's mournful toast to a hologram re-enactment of the original series' beeping, technicolor bridge has no doubt brought a tear to many a fan's eyes over the years. There are times when Scotty's dialogue sounds less like Star Trek and more like meta-commentary on actors' lives pulled straight out of Limelight.

 

Unfortunately, those halves never truly mesh. It could've been any distress call leading our heroes to the sphere, and Scotty's transporter pattern could've been discovered in any foundered freighter. Moreover, the classic precept of a grizzled old veteran passing the torch to a bright young hotshot was overplayed for initial conflict between the two to the point Geordi spends the first half sounding like a petulant, insecure teenager who's dropped an IQ bracket to facilitate dramatic tension.

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Seriesdate: 6.20

The Chase

"the past is a very insistent voice inside me"

 

The gang's all h - wait, no Vulcans? I demand Vulcans!

 

Four billion years ago, an alien species seeded numerous worlds' protoplasm with DNA code to guide evolution toward the humanoid form. That's the climax. Granted most of the plot is about the build-up. Picard welcomes his old mentor, an archaeologist, hints at the transformative power of memetic infection via a matrioshka, then picks up the dead mentor's mission to find a message encoded piece by piece in the DNA of species scattered all over the quadrant, dodging and racing against backstabbing Cardassians, bloviating Klingons and as it turns out, lurking Romulans along the way. While it's far from ideally orchestrated due to some blatant filler with the old professor and the klingon captain challenging Data to arm-wrestle, I would still rank this one of the most memorable episodes, albeit sadly under-appreciated by fans.

It's all about the grand reveal.

The technobabble is... pretty terrible. Suffice to say DNA does not work that way, evolution does not work that way, fossils do not work that way and I'm pretty sure neither do computation or holograms.

But, the whole thing revolves around having the balls to try explaining one of the great unspoken, popularly ridiculed "mysteries" of Star Trek, the innumerable wrinkly forehead alien species littering the galaxy and lightening the props, costumes and special effects budget.

 

While I can understand many fans would rather have left the matter hand-waved and suspended their disbelief, and even though I paradoxically despise midichlorians, I can't but applaud this bit of attempted rationalization. For my money, for its time, the episode just barely pulled off a refuge in audacity effect in tackling one of the franchise's major bugaboos.

 

It carries the same existential poignancy ("a monument not to our greatness but to our existence") the same hope in communicating ideas ("perhaps... one day") as other classics like Darmok and The Inner Light.

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Star Trek was a title with history. Both the shame and the mystique of the past weighed heavily on TNG's development. The past poisoned early seasons with Roddenberry's outdated ideas and at the same time kept the show afloat by the original series' cultural significance. See Whoopi Goldberg requesting a bit part even if all she did was sweep floors. Recalling the Utopianism that gave people hope in the '60s and '70s did much the same for the nihilism of the '90s. But how fitting a plot device might the past serve in a show about the future?

 

To a large extent, Picard's established archaeology hobby simply made a nice segue. Priceless and unique artifacts having a physical presence and being by definition undefined until acquired, provided a justification for the Enterprise to jet off in search of mystery every week. Contagion and The Chase in this respect mirror each other. The first feeds us a standard Dungeons and Dragons scenario of unveiling a superweapon while the second (four years later after the show matured and was beginning to decline and recycle plots) toys with the notion, with only the Klingons characteristically jumping to that unjustified assumption. Nevertheless, it did get a bit repetitive seeing one after another of Picard's archaeology colleagues, archaeology professors and archaeology acquaintances drop by to dangle plot hooks.

 

The precept of technological one-upmanship also lent Crusher and LaForge's roles more weight, as evaluating these finds, be they from the past, from the future or from the confidence game, fell to their respective fields of expertise. In contrast, Data and Riker were more or less replaceable / interchangeable and Troi just had a few lines about lying. Worf's an interesting case, as the primal warrior angle lent itself to mysticism or gullibility which puffed up those hinted past glories but would've seemed utterly incongruous from the post-religious humans.

 

More importantly, the aforementioned mystique of antiquity had to be reconsidered from a 24th-century point of view. While we currently live in a society willing to buy any amount of bullshit about ancient wisdom (remember that time the world ended?) and ancient Chinese secrets and searching for Atlantis, and Timbuktu building starships and Babylon descending from starships and perfect matriarchal pre-historic feminist utopias and fucking paleo-diet fads... can you really see that shit flying in a truly functional society? Aside from the more simple-minded early iteration in Contagion, every one of these episodes holds to a recurring theme that the power and wisdom of the past (while far from irrelevant) is either inapplicable (Relics) or symbolic (The Chase) or a tool of social control (Devil's Due, Rightful Heir.) A Matter of Time stands out for attempting to flip this around, with the conman gaining our protagonists' support by flattering them, casting them in that mystical role of historic heroes whose deeds must be immortalized in the finest minutiae.

The psychological need to feel a part of some grand continuity is only too rarely addressed in fiction (or for that matter, non-fiction) for its destructive potential, and TNG distinguished itself by its awareness of a trope contemporary shows only utilized in an automatic fashion. Scotty's tearful recreation of the old Enterprise's bridge is a familiar enough scene for any TV audience... less so his conscious decision to quit wallowing, step out of the simulation and cease living in the past.

 

In a wider sense, continuity was also a necessary growing pain of TNG's. The original series had lived and died in episodic, inchoate isolation, and the first season of TNG largely followed suit. As a fictional universe grows, however, it requires more and more framework to sustain it, both spatial and temporal. Tolkien's success for instance depended in no small part on the map and timeline of Middle-Earth, a lesson no modern Fantasy / SciFi writer can naively ignore as demonstrated by the endless maps and timelines produced in service of such works.

And so, while shipboard life gained more continuity by detailing the characters' life histories, the Federation and the galaxy at large also began to be fleshed out during TNG. Saying the words "24th century" sounds immediately impressive to a viewer in 1988, but pretty soon you start wondering how meaningless that century might sound to... Klingons, for example. Or to The Crystalline Entity. Episodes like these established a necessary feeling for the flow of life in the Alpha Quadrant. Darmok and Contagion both entail decyphering communication from its related or descendant language group, driving home the idea that these civilizations are not static, but rise and fall and flow into each other as naturally as tribal migrations. Several races are introduced not only by a core characteristic (e.g. Klingon warrior culture) but as being in a transitional stage (e.g. Cardassian military dictatorship, or to a lesser extent the Mintakans dragging themselves out of the Bronze Age.)

Antiquity is relevant to the future so long as it's illustrative, not constraining.