“If you can find those things in the man we know as Will Riker, accept them. Accept the love.”
Not only is “The Host” a fairly kickass Dr. Crusher episode and one of my favourite love stories on the show as a whole, and a really intriguing science fiction premise to boot (which would go on to become one of the key pieces of Star Trek worldbuilding undertaken in its decade, with the introduction of the Trill), but give Gates McFadden a standing ovation, folks: she did the whole thing seven months pregnant. And whatever love scene gymnastics were required on set to accomplish this, McFadden’s condition does nothing but enhance the story: our nominally gorgeous doctor is literally glowing throughout – a fact which Deanna remarks upon in-story, when she runs into a giddily lovestruck Beverly getting a covert facial in the Enterprise’s beauty parlour. (And thus coincidentally answering the question of how the women of Star Trek keep looking like the women of Star Trek.)
The episode is as lush and overdone as a hothouse tomato, but it all works gangbusters because the table stakes are so high. Beverly falls in love with a Trill ambassador, at a point in Federation history where apparently no one is aware that the Trill are a conjoined species, with a symbiont slug living in a host’s belly (the symbiont being where their consciousness, personality, and soul truly resides). Odan, Beverly’s lover, has his host body is injured on a mission, and so the symbiont is removed and temporarily implanted… in Will Riker! It’s the sort of love story that only science fiction can envision in the first place, and if the plot description marginally calls up a mental image of a lurid pulp paperback cover from the 1950s, the actual piece itself is solid enough all around that it becomes one of Star Trek’s all-time great romantic tragedies. Ah, the angsty feels! The episode drips with them – “The Host” would be a Tumblr gifset paradise, if Tumblr existed twenty years ago. Even Captain Picard, who is usually above these things, is so moved by Beverly’s grief that he gives her a fuckin’ hug.
When I was a nervous adolescent and painfully in-puppy-love with all manner of unattainable ladies, this episode whalloped me one. There’s real pathos in the scenes where Beverly, having implanted Odan in Will’s body, has to decide whether the romance can, or even should, continue – and in a nice touch, the sweetest sequence in this whole story is between Beverly and Deanna, in which Deanna tacitly gives her best friend permission to make painfully romantic boom-chicka-wow-wow with the body of Troi’s lover. It’s a stunning scene from its start (where Beverly describes her first adolescent crush, on a soccer player three years older than her, and all of its consequent romantic fantasies about a person who did not, in truth, exist) to its finish (where Deanna gives a jaw-droppingly tender monologue about her own first love – her late father). And the scene in question ends with an across-a-crowded-room look between Beverly and Will that sets the high water mark for unbridled lust, perhaps, in the whole history of Star Trek.
Jay Chattaway contributes a huge musical score as tensions on Peliar Zel detiorate in direct correlation to Riker’s body, and Beverly’s resolve slowly washes away against the opportunity to spend one last night in her lover’s arms. I feel ya, Bev. The Trill, as a concept, are quite rudimentary here compared to their Deep Space Nine fruition (and have yet to land on their alluring pattern of alien spots, in lieu of the feline forehead prosthetic presented in this episode), but it’s still like seeing Athena burst from the forehead of Zeus, in terms of how complex and complete the concept is upon its emergence. And the whole Trill premise is used in a marvelous way, to wrangle the notion of what makes love love – the body, the heart, the mind, the soul? Some unfathomable, alchemical combination of the lot? How many elements can be reduced out before it’s not the same thing?
Of course, the episode is also a legendary event in the history of Star Trek’s relationship with LGBT issues, in that it walks right up to the line of one of the most obvious extensions of its own questions about love – by having Odan ultimately end up in a female host at the episode’s end, and wanting to continue his/her relationship with Beverly – and then backs off. This was a pretty big deal at the time, and earned some ire from the gay community around Star Trek’s unwillingness to address the issue. In watching the episode again, though (and particularly in light of Deep Space Nine’s brilliant episode a few years later, “Rejoined,” which walked straight over that line), “The Host” doesn’t feel like the cop-out it did at the time. Regardless of how much more evolved human treatment of sexuality might be in the 24th century, Beverly isn’t, and never has identified as, bisexual. That’s a perfectly valid choice, even if it doesn’t allow “The Host” to be representative of a sector of its audience that was sorely in need of some Star Trek representation. (And still is, unfortunately. Can anyone believe that it’s 2013 and we still have yet to see an openly gay character featured in this 50-year-old franchise?)
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, and here comes Season Five.