“Includeling the kiddeleys, I’ve told 662 jokes.”
The notorious Tasha Yar Racism Episode is at least half mis-described; it’s not much of a Tasha Yar episode. For Tasha screentime it might still unfortunately be her highest notch in the run of the series (possibly eclipsed by “Yesterday’s Enterprise”), but that only makes it more of a shame that Tasha is basically a story prop in “Code of Honor.” Fair’s fair though – everyone’s a story prop in “Code of Honor.” Picard pontificates, the whacko tribal Africans do whacko tribal African stuff, and there’s a fight at the tail end that belongs in a 1970s women-on-the-run movie. Yar vs. Yarina: The Battle of Ligon City. They coulda trashied it up even more, I guess; that the episode is unintentionally trashy marks it as a low point for televised racial politics. The only thing “Code of Honor” has going for it is a somewhat nostalgic hint of the berserk design aesthetic of oldschool Star Trek. Only on the original series could you get away with an “Arabian Nights” approach to alien design, and “the tribal other” as sufficiently alien to our white, norm, hetero Starfleet heroes.
When I see material this transparently unevolved, I wonder what it’s like to be an African-American actor working on television in 1987, getting cast in an episode of the new version of a series that is rightly or wrongly ascribed with setting a pretty high bar for racial equality – and then showing up for your costume fitting to find out that you’ll be wearing the worst possible visual caricature of “Dark Continent” stereotypes. (Only this time, for some reason, the robes are made out of tin foil.) Then you’re sitting in the makeup chair and they’re applying prosthetic scarification to your face and body, which lies uneasily unexplained in the text of the show (an odd bit of restraint from Next Gen, which always seemed to dutifully explain every single thing into which even a moment’s production logistics were sunk). And then you’re acting out scenes about a warlord betting against his wife’s ability to win a streetfight, for the advancement of his own financial holdings. Your legacy: the Star Trek episode about the gigantic black dude who kidnaps the waify white girl and then makes his women fight each other to the death. Achievement: achieved.
Something had to give on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and “Code of Honor” takes place juuuuuust before the series noticed how interesting Worf could be. Tasha becomes all-business from here out: good at going on away missions; less good at having even momentary character beats or dramatic scenes. Trivia point: Tasha was inspired by Vasquez in Aliens and was originally named “Macha.” And like James Dean, she died early enough to allow an angelic nostalgia and retconned sweetness to descend on her like so much snow. From a character the series could not write halfway properly while alive, after death Tasha Yar became the powerful black hole orbiting The Next Generation until its very last episode.
Update: I’m giving “Code of Honor” one and a half 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.