“It will cost you twenty to make that determination, sir.”
As a huge Tasha fan, “Legacy” was candy to me when it aired in 1990. It brings us to Turkana IV, Tasha’s home colony, mentioned infrequently throughout the first season as a lost colony overrun by rape gangs. It gives us Tasha’s younger sister, Ishara, and sketches in some Tasha backstory that the series never properly provided before. (Picard’s first encounter with Tasha was seeing the security officer making her way across a mine field to rescue a wounded colonist; Tasha and Ishara’s parents were killed when they were both young, leaving Tasha to raise her sister.) It puts Ishara in scenes that reverberate nicely against the crew’s history with Tasha – Riker rescuing her from a bad away mission to make up for having lead the mission that killed Tasha; Worf grimly asserting that Ishara’s decision to join Starfleet would be a great fortune for the organization – and pairs Ishara (inevitably, perhaps) with Data to further explore the android’s (non-)feelings for his deceased lover.
In viewing the episode again, though, it’s just nowhere near as good as I recalled. There’s one easy and obvious reason for all that: I remember, quite completely, the shockwave of fanboy lust that reverberated through my entire circle of male friends when “Legacy” first aired, the general consensus being that Beth Toussaint, who played Ishara, was quite possibly the hottest woman alive. She looks more like Linda Hamilton than Denise Crosby, which suited us fine; knows how to handle a phaser, which suited us even better; and after spending the first half of the episode in a thin white tank top that made no secret of the location of her nipples, she then gets retrofitted for the episode’s back half into a blue catsuit which believes more firmly in Toussaint’s ass than I believe in the healing power of peanut butter. No wonder we all deemed “Legacy” the best thing ever.
Except, it’s not. The episode never really figures out what it’s about. It’s ostensibly a story about Ishara using the crew’s fondness for their late comrade as a smokescreen to allow her to con them into removing her proximity sensor, so she can attack her rival gang without being detected. But the episode is played, as usual, from the crew’s point of view – so there isn’t any fun to be had in watching Ishara work the system; just the dull thud of her inevitable betrayal. By the time she’s planting an extremely soft, extremely wet kiss on Data’s cheek to seal her sudden fondness for him, the jig’s pretty much up.
The set design for the underground colony is terrific, and there’s something neat about the notion of two warring gangs with proximity alarms inserted under their skin which prevents them from ever getting close enough to one another to do any real harm – ensuring that their cold war would go on, effectively, forever. The episode does nothing with these ideas, though, settling instead for a fairly standard run-and-jump, with a particularly acute family connection. It ain’t bad, but it’s not the highlight I remember.
Three Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Four is in stores now.