“I don’t want to be a warrior!”
And now that we’ve concluded things with Wesley Crusher, we move along to Alexander Rozhenko, Son of Worf, Nephew of Kurn, problematic “puppy” addition to a long-running series, who has all but disappeared since the middle of the sixth season. And what a dispiriting conclusion he gets: Future Alexander travels back in time to beat his younger self into shape, because otherwise Alexander will grow up to be – oh no! – a wuss.
I’m not particularly comfortable with the question of manliness/Klingonness/wussiness/Alexanderness at play here – it genuinely leaves me at cross purposes. On the one hand, everything Worf tells Alexander at the end of the episode holds to my own values (and, arguably, Star Trek’s); on the other hand, it stands completely at odds with what used to be the great strengths of Worf as a character and the Klingons as a concept. Frick, the speech even ends with a father-son hug and a choked-sob “I love you!” whispered by Future Alexander. Even in his final episode, Alexander remains a crux upon which Next Gen’s treatment of Worf, and Klingons in general, seemed to pivot. Once Alexander was in the mix, Worf’s dark, alien nature was quelled by highly human values around parenting, and Klingons became the sort of folks who throw Fun Fairs on their colony planets so that Worf and Alexander could visit for a bit of cultural immersion. We even get to hear Worf sing, as he jumps into a street pageant. Worf?!
In addition to all the other things about Alexander that never quite congealed in his time on the series, his age remains baffling: here, he’s nearing the Age of Ascension (13 years old), having been conceived exactly five years ago in “The Emissary.” Brian Bonsall, who faithfully if unenthusiastically portrayed Alexander since he joined the Enterprise in Season Five, is nearing ball-dropping age now, so I guess the writers had no choice but to pretend his life on the Enterprise has been ongoing for nearly a dozen years. But it’s a mess nonetheless. And it continues: as I recall, when Alexander churns back up again on Deep Space Nine a couple years later, he’s in his twenties.
The Future Alexander premise is nice enough (and telegraphed only by the Worf-brand forehead ridges on guest star James Sloyan’s head), but as with all such travellers from the future, his climax lacks weight because the show will never commit to such things long-term. Star Trek has always played fast and loose with Future Fates Foretold; basically, anything can happen “in the future” and have no bearing on the series going forward, because the show always hides comfortably behind the Many Worlds Hypothesis. Even with the series about to end, the content feels insubstantial. None of the stuff Future Alexander describes in “Firstborn” is going to come to pass, just like Troi is never going to be the first team member killed as described in “All Good Things.” It’s a way to manufacture tension for the episode at hand, but that tension is manufactured, and plays as such.
I’d forgotten that Lursa and B’Etor – and Quark! – turn up in this episode for cameos; and Lursa’s pregnant, so maybe it’s just as well there was never an eighth season of the show, because surely her kid would have been fifty the next time we saw him.
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.