“What about the rights of the ones who will stay behind?”
In which we once again spin the age-old science fiction trope of the eugenics society. The Enterprise comes upon a colony under threat by a passing stellar fragment – the crises-of-the-week in Season Five seem to lean on planetary annihilation more often than not – and learn that it is a sealed, genetically engineered social experiment that wants no contact with the human race, because they’ve been carefully breeding perfect humans for two hundred years. There are the expectable elements: Geordi and his VISOR as representative of the value of human “imperfection;” the unadvisable genetic mixing of the colony leader and Counselor Troi; and eventually the schism of the colony as some of the citizens decide they don’t want to live in a bubble any more. It’s all quite paint by numbers.
The lead guest stars, John Snyder, Ron Canada and Dey Young, are compelling, and on a plot level, the episode accomplishes what it’s trying to do. It’s just such fundamentally uninvolving stuff. Part of the problem is that it doesn’t land on an Enterprise character to focus on, splitting matters instead between Troi (and her astonishingly sexless romance with colony leader Aaron Conor), Geordi (and his partnership with the colony’s lead scientist, which is also of course astonishingly sexless, because it’s Geordi… but one wishes, for once, it weren’t), and Picard (who must ultimately arbitrate on the matter of the colonists requesting asylum).
The resulting potpourri of plot elements and character moments moves along at a good clip without ever seeming to land on any real beats or scenes. Perhaps if the love story were better developed, the episode might hang on an emotional quandary for Deanna or for Aaron; but because the romance is so thin and arbitrary, it’s difficult to put much credibility behind such matters as Conor threatening to leave his people behind to run off with our curly-haired Counselor.
There’s a dramatic fulcrum missing here. The last line – “In the end, we may have proved just as dangerous to that colony as any core fragment could ever have been!” – illustrates the problem: who the fuck cares?
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.