“’Captain Picard Day?’”
One of the few great episodes of Season Seven, “The Pegasus” is a tight morality play which also bears the distinction of being my introduction to the wonderful Terry O’Quinn, who plays the antagonist-of-the-week, Admiral Eric Pressman. It’s the sort of Starfleet-against-itself storyline that certainly wouldn’t have flown in Roddenberry’s lifetime, but makes for enjoyable drama here, and presages some of the work that screenwriter Ron Moore would later undertake on Deep Space Nine – when the question of Federation morality would be further clouded by war.
“The Pegasus” is strongly enhanced by its central visual, which must be one of the most memorable of the season if not the series: the “phased cloak” starship Pegasus, an experiment gone wrong, which floated through an asteroid field in a ghostly state before rematerializing deep inside the largest asteroid… and half inside, half outside a layer of solid rock. When Will and Pressman beam into the ship’s engineering section, the cave wall grotesquely bisects the room, which is littered with the corpses of the crew they left behind twelve years ago. It’s strong stuff.
Plus, the Enterprise gets to pilot through a cave fissure, and a cover-up in which Riker engaged a decade prior gets aired out in front of his very displeased captain. The hook doesn’t really hold water: even as the writers tried to add veins of disreputable characters to the nominally-airtight Starfleet ensemble, via Section 31 and the like, they only (in my estimation) further demonstrated how poorly 20th century stock plots cohere to the larger concept of Star Trek. In other words, Star Trek just works better when it’s firing on the core Roddenberry ideal: a human race evolved. As soon as any of the humans involved begin acting like they’re on an average episode of JAG, the resulting reverberations have an uncanny influence on the scope of the thing itself: Star Trek seems less like a brilliant, limitless future, and more like a rinky-dink TV show written by overworked writers.
Which, of course, it was. There was an ongoing, critical dialogue in the larger Star Trek landscape throughout this time period as I was growing up, beginning with movies like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – which was excellent, but involved a Starfleet conspiracy and was disavowed by Roddenberry – and continuing through the Berman/Piller Trek series, both of which were based on the premise that Gene Roddenberry’s idea was wonderful and all that, but that the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation had reportedly gone nuts trying to write a show where the principal characters couldn’t get into fights with one another (thus leading to Deep Space Nine and Voyager’s principal casts of malcontents mixed up with more traditional Star Trek heroes).
I don’t question this assertion, so much as the idea behind it: writers trying to locate their episodes in interpersonal conflict between the crewmembers were simply digging in the wrong part of the oil field. Star Trek, at its best, was always about coming into conflict with what was out there, not in here. The ship would go to a planet, and that planet would have people on it who behaved like gangsters, or were nudists protected by a space god, or something; and adventures would ensue, because that’s what Star Trek was: an adventure series, with an oft-used allegorical spine. Whenever Berman or Piller or anyone else got it into their heads that Star Trek was a workplace drama, they were getting it wrong, and tipping off the landslide of core change to the concept, which has lead us to where we are today.
Blogging The Next Generation is winding down to the end, as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray.The final season is in stores now.