Where No One Has Gone Before (TNG)

 In case I haven’t made this clear already, I don’t hate Wesley Crusher. When I was first introduced to him, I actually really liked him – I think he’s definitely the wish-fulfillment character for young Trekkies who are too eager to be grown-ups, and I definitely found myself in that category while TNG was still airing. This time around, I found him annoying in “The Naked Now”, but tolerable the rest of the time, and in “Where No One Has Gone Before” I once again find myself rooting for the guy.

Wesley doesn’t actually save the ship in this episode. He tries to, but Commander Riker does the sensible thing and doesn’t listen to him. Wesley, in Main Engineering working on a school project, is an outsider in the world of Important People like engineering genius Kosinski, and as such no one notices him. But this allows him to notice Kosinski’s mild-mannered assistant, who, like Wesley, is more than he appears.

And that’s at the heart of this episode. The scenes where we see the crew’s fantasies and fears becoming reality are fun and exciting and give the special effects team a chance to show off, but this is ground TOS has tread many times, and TNG doesn’t make more than a token effort to retread it. Instead, it focuses on the enigmatic alien who brought them out so far, and his relationship with the overlooked and misunderstood Wesley.

Just your run-of-the-mill translucent goat man.

We don’t learn much about the Traveler, in this episode or the other two in which he appears. But he is not Q. He can’t snap his fingers and reset everything, and he can’t travel the universe without a ship to take him. He also doesn’t care about Important People – while Kosinski insists on speaking only to the Captain, being offended by being put in Riker and Troi’s hands, the Traveler happily converses with Wesley. And later he tells Captain Picard that Wesley has the potential to be the next phase of human evolution, essentially, and needs to be nurtured in this.

I am sure the Wesley detractors hate this scene, especially given the not-so-secret fact that Wesley is Gene Rodenberry’s author insert character. But Picard’s decision to make Wesley Acting Ensign really only makes sense in light of that conversation But Picard’s decision to make Wesley Acting Ensign really only makes sense in light of that conversation.

Wait, a minute - this isn't waste extraction!

The rest of the episode’s plot, especially the second act, is lackluster, but not cringe-inducing. Picard’s admonishing the crew to control their thoughts is amusing, but there’s no payoff – everything from that point on goes a little too perfectly. The climax fails to build much tension, and not enough time is spent establishing the danger of people’s thoughts running wild – other episodes do this concept much better.             

Most of the character moments in this episode are light-hearted and happen as a result of the thoughts-become-reality premise – a notable exception being Tasha’s poorly-executed flashback to the rape planet. The opening scene of Riker being (it turns out justifiably) nervous about Kazinski toying with the engines helps set up the Picard/ Riker dynamic in a nice way.        

I didn’t hate this episode. But I didn’t like it all that much either. The Wesley/ Traveler plot worked a lot better than anything else that was going on, and the early scenes with Kazinki give us a nice sense of Riker as a character, but the writer’s at this point really have a lot to learn about pacing, action, and structuring a plot to give emotional tension.

Stray Observations:

Kazinski (Stanley Kamel) does an excellent job as the arrogant genius who gets cut down to size, though I would have loved to see a bit more of his downfall.

It’s weird that he doesn’t wear a combadge.

Troi is especially useless in this episode. She basically tells Riker that Kazinski is a dick, which everyone already knows.

Worf remembering his pet Targ totally contradicts the Worf backstory we get later.

Tasha/Geordi shiptease? That didn’t go anywhere.

Scale calculations are all over the place. At one point someone says we’ve only charted 11% of the Galaxy, as opposed to roughly half by the time Voyager comes around. Also Data says it would only take 300 years at Warp Nine to get home from another galaxy – I don’t think that jives with Voyager’s 75 year figure, but I could be wrong.

Geordi is still not Chief Engineer – now it’s someone called “Mr. Argyle” (a sly TOS reference?) but he’s introduced as “one of our chief Engineers.”

The scenes with the minor crewmen ballet dancing and playing in a string quartet are precious.

The remastered visuals are actually quite stunning.

The Phage (VOY)

            Voyager is an adventure show. It toys with the more cerebral preoccupations of TNG, but ultimately, it’s about swashbuckling and having a good time, and not caring if your villains come off a bit cheesy. In this way, I think it’s telling that they chose the fourth episode to introduce the Vidians, a villain whose major preoccupation is stealing people’s internal organs.

            Note that Spock’s Brain is often considered the worst episode of the Original Star Trek, so internal-organ-snatching shenanigans are not something with proven popularity. But “The Phage” manages to be quite an enjoyable hour of television, balancing character development and tension, even if at times some of the plot details come across a bit contrived.

Neelix learns the hard way why you don't split the party.

            We open with the Voyager experiencing the first of many resource shortages – in this case, dilithium reserves are extremely low. With Neelix’s help, though, the crew has found an asteroid rich in the mineral. Determined to prove his usefulness to the Captain, the Talaxian Jack-of-All-Trades beams down with the survey team, and is promptly shot when he wonders off on his own.

            It turns out whoever shot him beamed his lungs out of his body. To make matters worse, the asteroid has no dilithium at all, it was all a ruse by the organ snatchers, who escape on their own ship with Voyager in hot pursuit. The Doctor manages to rig up some holographic lungs for Neelix, but the means he can’t leave sickbay or move from his bed at all.

            The rest of the episode is split between a kind of silly sci-fi chase where Voyager follows the ship into a giant asteroid filled with fun-house mirrors (not the most effective tension—building device) and scenes in sickbay, where both Neelix and the Doctor try to adapt to their new situations. Neelix has to confront the possibility of never leaving the biobed, and the Doctor has to confront the reality that he is not just a short term replacement anymore, and Kes is trying to help both of them come to terms with these facts. These scenes are well-written and show a lot of promise for the characters.

They get so much creepier once they start stealing faces.

            Janeways plot stays pretty cheesy and silly until she finally captures the two aliens, called Vidians, and tries to get Neelix’s lungs back. Unfortunately, the lungs were urgently needed and have already been implanted in one of the aliens. It turns out the Vidian race has struggled for thousands of years with an untreatable illness called The Phage, which causes systematic organ failure. To survive, they take organs from other species.

            Ultimately, the Vidians agree to use their superior biotech to give Neelix one of Kes’s lungs, since they’re used to modifying organs for safer transplant. Janeway warns them that if any of their people try to take organs from Voyager again, there will be hell to pay, but oddly enough lets them go on their way. As she points out, though, she hardly has a choice –  there are no authorities to turn them over to, and they can’t sit in Voyager’s brig indefinitely, so it’s ether kill them or let them go, and she’s not about to go around executing people. But this is a dilemma that isn’t going to go away.

Random Observations:

Kes is the first member of the crew to see the Doctor as a person with needs, and that includes the Doctor. Kes’s naiveté is a flaw, but it also seems to lead to her seeing things everyone else overlooks. And through her patronage, the Doc is starting to question his own identity.

There is a Neelix/Paris/Kes love triangle, and as these things go I think it’s kind of fun.

Voyager being much smaller than the Enterprise opens up new opportunities for action sequences, as the asteroid chase demonstrates.

This is the first we see of Neelix’s culinary obsession (though we hear about it before.)

The Vidian make-up is wonderfully ugly. Visually, it does a lot towards making their rather stretched premise believable.

On that note, wouldn’t a culture as advanced as the Vidians have figured out how to grow replacement organs by now? We’re almost there now.

I find it a little hard to swallow that this early in the series Janeway is already risking the whole ship for Neelix. He’s just joined their crew, and hasn’t even proven himself particularly useful yet. Tuvok might have something to say about the needs of the many…

The Vidian facility is obviously the same corridor as the Power Plant in “Time and Again”. It’s too distinctive to keep reusing.

Vidian: According to my readings, you are not here.

Doctor: Believe me, I wish I weren’t.

Minor Character Watch: Seska is now in Engineering Yellow, as she will be from now on.

Shuttles lost: 0

Fatalities: 0

Babel (DS9)

After a solid pilot and a few great character episode, "Babel" is an ensemble show truly in the mode of The Next Generation. The crew getting infected with a disease is a trope that show used far too many times, including in their second episode.

But "Babel" does the disease story better. And it's not TNG's fault. Really good disease stories follow the mode of classic movies like The Andromeda Strain, where the disease threatened to spread and wipe out all life on Earth. The highest stakes TNG could manage were that everyone on the ship would die.

But Deep Space Nine, this episode reminds us, is a port. There are civilians and unaffiliated ships docked, and a disease threatens everyone. And if an infected ship leaves port, the disease could threaten the whole quadrant.

"Babel" features a disease with slightly silly symptoms but deadly serious import. It affects characters we really care about, and gets dangerously close to taking them all out before a handful of immune characters manage to save the day. The stakes rise appropriately to create a drama-filled hour: not bad for episode 4.

The "day in the life of OBrien" motif that starts the episode is delightful, but also drives home some of the themes of the pilot - how, while other crews have been in harmony with their ships, the DS9 crew is constantly wrestling with Deep Space Nine - and O'Brien is their champion in that fight.

When O'Brien falls ill, the spotlight shifts to Bashir, as we get to see him do what he does best: researching under pressure, researching frantically to cure a deadly disease. When Bashir succumbs, the focus shifts again to Kira, and we get to see what she does best: playing outside the rules and circumventing Bajoran politics.

While the merry-go-round of expertise is doing it's thing, the show is showing its hand by pairing up odd-couple Odo and Quark, though not for the last time. The producers are already discovering the level of delight that can come from Armin Shimmerman and Rene Auberjonois sharing a plotline, as they first play a cat and mouse game over Quark's illicit replicator use, and then are forced to team up as Odo runs out of unaffected potential deputees. We start to see that Quark is, or can be, one of our heroes, when push comes to shove - an important, if perilous, direction for the show to move in.

This is still DS9 trying to be TNG, but it's a notable episode because it's DS9 trying to be TNG and, in many ways, doing better at it. The frontier situation, the intercast conflicts, the consequences of being parked, all come into play in positive ways to raise the stakes of this outbreak story. DS9 has proved it can leverage it's strengths to tell an old story with some oomph.

Observation

- Odo's reason for catching Quark at his replicator shenanigan's - that Rom "couldn't fix a straw if it was bent" - is totally wrong, it turns out. Odo prides himself on being observant, so I'll leave you to ponder whether he truly misread Rom, or whether he was playing a larger game with Quark.

The Last Outpost (TNG)

            I’m trying to watch this show as if I were just discovering this world and these characters, and have no idea how things will grow or develop. Sometimes this is harder than others. In the 20 seasons of Trek that follow this one, the Ferengi quickly became the punch lines of the Alpha Quadrant. But here, in their first ever appearance, we are asked to take them quite seriously. And I find that very difficult.

            As the episode opens, the Enterprise is chasing a Ferengi Marauder which stole an expensive piece of equipment from a Federation outpost. Data compares the alien culture to “Yankee Traders” in their insatiable lust for profit. That continues to be true throughout the various series’, but Deep Space Nine’s Ferengi would never resort to this kind of blatant looting. This is not to say the Ferengi are more principled later on. It’s just that later on, they’re portrayed as absolute cowards, who would never even conceivably risk a conflict with a Galaxy class starship. Here they seem to have at least a bit of a spine.

           

            But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Enterprise finds itself trapped in a forcefield which is slowly draining its power. Assuming the Ferengi are the source of this attack, the open hailing frequencies saying they are “prepared to discuss surrender”. The Ferengi, caught in the same trap and thinking the Enterprise to be the source of it, assume they are being asked to surrender, and promptly do so. This turns everyone’s attention to the planet.

            The planet, it turns out was once an outpost of a huge interstellar empire, called the TKon Empire, which died off when their sun went Nova, never mind that no one seems to understand that “interstellar” sort of intrinsically implies… well, never mind, it’s not important.

LASER WHIPS.

            Riker, Yar, Data, Worf, and Geordi all beam down to the planet, but the transporter scatters everyone so it takes them a while to reunite, then an away team of Ferengi ambushes them with LASER WHIPS. Fortunately, Yar is not with them, and is able to rescue them and bring the whole thing to a standoff. In the midst of this, a weird, robed alien materializes. It is the Portal to the TKon Empire, and asks the “barbarians” to petition for entry.

            Now the Ferengi become more like the Ferengi we will come to know, groveling, scheming, and trying to gain advantage with the powerful aliens. Unfortunately for them, the Portal can read minds, and seeing through their deception, asks one to come forward and be tested. Worf tries to volunteer, assuming the test will be martial, but Riker stops him, quoting Sun Tzu. “He will triumph who knows when to fight, and when not to.”

            Honestly, I didn’t really get the ending. It’s not an awful episode, but its one that seems to lack any sort of thematic center – while it has obvious parallels to the TOS classics “Day of the Dove” and “Errand of Mercy”, it doesn’t seem to bring up their antiwar message, and the the Ferengi are never threatening enough to effectively build much tension.

The gems of this episode are all in little character interaction and the way in which the cast seems to be building chemistry. But the art of telling a fully contained story with themes and ideas running through it is an area where TNG’s writers have yet to catch up even to TOS.

Random Observations:

The Data/ Geordi dynamic continues to grow, but as Jonah points out its reminiscent of Chekov and Sulu’s peanut gallery discussions of TOS days.

Speaking of Geordi, he’s acting like the chief engineer now, but he’s still wearing red. Also, despite LeVar Burton’s easy-going charisma, he’s still coming off extremely bland.

Wesley Crusher does not appear in this episode.

There’s a really out of place Crusher/ Picard shipping scene while the away team is down on the planet and they contemplate the possibility that they are about to die. One assumes these conversations happen less as the show goes on because the characters realize that they are kind of constantly about to die.

I think part of the reason Yar is on her way out is that she and Worf are too much like each other. And Worf is the more interesting character.

Betazoids can’t read Ferengi. This is consistently maintained throughout the show, and is super convenient as the Ferengi become the galaxy’s con men.

Armin Shimmerman plays the Ferengi first officer. He plays it very different than Quark, but with an unrestrained, nervous physicality. It’s silly, but he makes it work.

The misogyny of the Ferengi is presented through the lens of “cultural values”, which I find irksome. The Ferengi are disgusted that the Federation clothes their women and lets them serve on starships (despite the fact that most cultures they’ve encountered presumably have clothed women.)

I get that its a metaphor, but Data should be able to break out of a Chinese finger trap without "figuring it out." He's like ten times as strong as a human.

This is an ensemble piece, but I’m calling it a Riker episode because it feels like one? Riker is the one who is tested, and it’s Riker we learn something about.