“It never happened.”
The Data/Tasha Yar sex scene remains a standout of not just Star Trek: The Next Generation but the entire Star Trek franchise, and possibly the whole history of shipping and slash fiction and cosplay and ooey-gooey SF sexual what-would-happen-ifs. That Data/Tasha comes in the middle of an episode that most folks consider poor shakes scarcely matters. I never personally disliked “The Naked Now;” I saw it in re-run at the end of the first season in ‘88, and had not seen “The Naked Time” yet when I saw it, so I had nothing to compare it against. Plus, the sexual tension is fierce, not just between Data and Tasha, but also Deanna and “Bill” (the first, and nearly last, weird time in the series where Troi calls Riker that), and Crusher and Picard. The carbon-string virus is reputed to make everyone act like they’re drunk, but that’s a thin veil. It makes everyone horny.
This was true of the crew of the Tsiolkovsky, too, as we can plainly see when Geordi enters the doomed ship’s crew quarters. It wasn’t particularly clear upon standard-definition broadcast, but on blu-ray we watch Geordi stumble into the middle of a full-on Starfleet orgy, with more shot-for-shot nudity than probably ever appeared on Deep Space Nine or any of the “darker” shows. The episode opens with the captain of the Tsiolkovsky veritably begging the entire crew of the Enterprise to come service her as quickly as possible, and once the virus gets aboard the Enterprise, those crowded lower decks turn into a makeout barrage. Horny, horny, horny. I wonder what exactly was going through Wesley’s head when he, too, succumbs to the virus? This episode is frequently cited as the first in a long, unyielding string of shows where 15-year-old Wesley Crusher gets the better of the adults and saves the ship; what seems to go unnoticed, though, is that Wesley also freely and unabashedly obliterates an Oberth-class starship to do so. Given his age and lack of experience, this might have been the only way for Wes to get his drunken teenage rocks off.
But back to Data and Tasha. It all occurs tastefully offscreen, of course (though blu-ray reveals far more of Denise Crosby’s underboob than we might previously have realized was visible) but based on Data’s post-coital delirium, we can presume it went well. (Spiner executes one of his single best pieces of physical comedy as Picard exits the bridge, when Data attempts to lean on nothing and falls over.) But what the hell was that like, anyway – poor, lonely Tasha straddling the machine? The dildo/vibrator jokes write themselves, but Data’s assertion of his skills in “a broad variety of pleasuring” makes one wonder if earnest android ambition and Tasha’s drunken need to get the hell fucked out of her met in the middle with the single best night of sex in Star Trek history. Data ain’t much of a liar, and if we are to take the earlier gag about his inability to boast as supportive of his claims about his sexual prowess, well, the writing’s on the proverbial bulkhead.
And Tasha – a character who, due to her early exit from the series, only had a handful of moments of definition – reveals a shitload about herself in a very short time in this episode: her childhood on a world ruled by rape gangs; her deeply buried sense of her own femininity; her tentative and highly coded sexual identity; and (perhaps unsurprisingly) a wall of shame that slams down the moment the antidote serum is flowing through her veins. For brief, incandescent moments, Tasha Yar was the most interesting woman in SF.
Update: I’m giving “The Naked Now” three Enterprises out of five.
My first presence on the internet was a Geocities site back in 1997, and having nothing better to do with it, I blogged about the new episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager that aired each week. Blogging The Next Generation is like that – for Star Trek: The Next Generation, every single episode, on blu-ray.