“It is a time to celebrate! For tomorrow, we all may die.”
As of the start of its fifth season, Star Trek: The Next Generation was officially past its heyday. The fifth and sixth seasons still contained some of the series’ best overall episodes, but the intermediate adventures in between those high points began to show signs of staleness; and of course, the seventh season is pretty much a wall-to-wall disaster (except for that series finale). Tellingly enough, then, the Season Five premiere, “Redemption II,” is a real stinker – in spite of how warmly I welcomed it at the time. I was fifteen when it first aired, and still quite besotted with Tasha Yar; and one cannot accuse “Redemption II” of failing to move the Tasha/Sela arc as promised. But looking at the show again now, I’m astonished that anyone took this episode as a credible conclusion to the Season Four cliffhanger… in that it pretty much doesn’t conclude anything.
So. “The woman you knew as Tasha Yar was my mother,” Sela says to a startled Captain Picard, and really, the whole episode is window-dressing around that scene, where Picard asks Commander Sela aboard the Enterprise to suss out the hows and whys of her existence. There’s really weird pretzel-logic at work in the prior scene, where Guinan assigns responsibility for the entire Klingon/Romulan crisis upon Picard for his having sent Tasha aboard the Enterprise-C in the alternate timeline in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” – in fact, there’s weird pretzel-logic in my just writing that sentence out. (For starters: Tasha requested the transfer. Second: the existence of Commander Sela does not have any direct correlation to the Klingon Civil War itself; she’s just involved in the Romulan side of things. And third and finally, of course: as completely daffy as it was, in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” to have Guinan wandering around with a sixth sense about how the “proper” timeline was meant to have unfolded, it’s doubly whacky to have her revisit the same sixth sense here – with some kind of awareness of the events of an alternate version of history that never happened.)
Wait, since we’re conducting thought experiments, let’s go one further: let’s think about the life and death of the alternate Tasha Yar, who survived the destruction of the Enterprise-C only to be captured by the Romulans and sell herself, willingly or unwillingly, into sexual bondage to a Romulan general, to whom she bears a child. Tasha, who comes from a planet where “rape gangs” are a thing, ends her life being raped nightly by a villain on an alien world. She finally attempts to escape and is summarily executed by her captors, which pleases the holy shit out of her now-adult, half-Romulan daughter.
Like, that’s awful. If, in part, the creative project at work in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” was to give Tasha Yar a more valiant send-off than her perfunctory death in “Skin of Evil,” the way that “Redemption II” guts her sacrifice is pretty repellent. And if, in part, the creative project at work in “Redemption II” is to create a compelling new villain character linked to one of our heroes, the episode instead sets Sela up as being so unfathomably awful that she actually enthuses at the death of her own mother, our aforementioned hero. Seriously, Ron Moore: what the fuck?
This poisonous little core is otherwise adrift in a dull episode in which the Enterprise attempts to thwart the Romulan incursion into the Klingon war by way of a tachyon grid, and Data is given his first command – which, of course, doesn’t go over well with his human first officer, nicely played by the amazingly evil Timothy Carhart. It’s a dull story, and it wholly fails to pay off any of the dramatic arcs of “Redemption,” its predecessor. Worf’s relationship to his culture is peripherally explored, but the operatic Klingon political saga is left to hang. In fact, the whole Klingon mytharc pretty much never foregrounds again after this point, or at least not until Ron Moore is a couple of seasons into writing for Deep Space Nine. As a two-parter, “Redemption” turns out to be two largely unrelated stories, arbitrarily fused together.
Season Five kicks off with a measly two Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.