“Who she is changes when the next man comes into the room. And I find myself hoping the next man won’t come in.”
Space whore! The Next Generation! The oldest profession comes to Star Trek c/o a deeply skeevy premise wherein an alien empath naturally, willingly turns herself into the perfect woman for whatever male she happens to be in front of. And she happens to be in front of Captain Picard.
The empath, Kamala, is played by Famke Janssen, which makes this episode Professor X vs. Jean Grey, round one. She’s given the original Trill makeup job, before Michael Westmore decided to swap out the leopard spots for the rubber forehead when introducing the Trill to Deep Space Nine. (Janssen was offered the role of Jadzia Dax, but turned it down.) She’s also given a scandalous outfit, a dress whose train is sheer enough that we can see Janssen’s ass cheeks perfectly whenever her back is to camera. And then she wanders around the ship, “becoming” what each of the male characters would find most attractive in a woman. She gets salty with a pack of miners. She plants a big wet one on Riker and then promises that the next one will be even better. And, she growls at Worf.
OK. Obviously, this is a monumentally stupid idea for an episode. It seems like a holdover from the original series, where an arranged marriage / Eastern European slave bride might still have been retro enough to work. And, in the Solaris sense of the idea, there might even be a version of this story where it could be saying something about how we project our desires onto our romantic partners, inventing appealing personalities for them that don’t necessarily jibe with what’s going on underneath. Or something clever about how and why johns use prostitutes. Or even a prototype for the empowered courtesans of the Firefly universe.
But nope. “The Perfect Mate” is basically “the perfect male sexual fantasy,” in 44 minutes. Kamala is stunningly beautiful, sexually adept, telepathically capable of precisely adjusting her personality to fit her partner’s needs, and – of course – completely into it. She’s been raised from birth to want nothing more in the universe than to undergo this process and become the titular perfect mate to whatever male she permanently imprints herself upon. Don’t worry, boys: she doesn’t even want a personality of her own.
As a concession to common sense, the episode features Beverly railing at Picard for going along with the whole scheme. Picard never gets the message. When he (and earlier, Riker) resist their pheromone-charged urges to get with Kamala, they aren’t doing it because she’s a space whore; they’re doing it because she’s someone else’s space whore. Oh captain.
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.