“Laren, what’s going on?”
The penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation ties off the series’ last great recurring character, with a final visit for Ensign Ro, here promoted to Lieutenant. Since her introduction in Season Five, Ro transitioned quickly from thrilling new blood in the post-Wesley cast, to disappointing non-starter. Michelle Forbes was never promoted to the regular roster, and when plans were drawn to give her what would become the Kira Nerys role on Deep Space Nine, she balked; and so, Ro’s involvement in Next Gen was turned down over the first half of Season Six until she was quietly gone. This is the first time we’ve seen her in a year and a half.
“Preemptive Strike” is hampered by centering on the Maquis storyline, recently introduced on DS9 and about to transition full-time to Voyager where various Maquis characters would make up half the crew. I never found the Maquis engaging as a concept, though; and as with all of the Star Trek producers’ efforts to manufacture loopholes around Gene Roddenberry’s purported “no conflict!” maxim for the show, I find the whole idea fairly disingenuous to begin with. This isn’t what Star Trek is about, and I’m vaguely glad Next Gen got the hell off the stage before the kind of thinking that the Maquis represents really took root in the modern Star Trek franchise. Here, at the end, we see the final fading of Star Trek’s original mission. Strange new worlds and new civilizations simply seem to have passed beyond the ecliptic of what this franchise concerns itself with.
Further, by focusing on the Maquis, and a cliché-driven plot which sends Ro undercover into a Maquis cell, where she – surprise surprise! – develops sympathies for the people she is infiltrating, a great portion of the episode takes place away from the Enterprise, thus neutering the best aspect of the Ro we know and love: her abrasive relationship with the other crew members. This has all apparently been healed in the intravening years anyway; Ro went off to Advanced Tactical school at Starfleet or something, and by the time she comes back everybody’s totally fond of her, and Beverly gives her a kiss on the cheek, and she has a deeply skeevy personal intimacy with Captain Picard.
The episode therefore plays out as “Ro Has Daddy Issues,” on three fronts. To bolster the sense of personal betrayal when Ro inevitably leaves Starfleet to join the Maquis, the writers have retconned Ro’s relationship with Picard to be that of a very closely-connected mentor/pupil, which we’ve never really seen elsewhere. To drive her infiltration of the Maquis, we return to the fact that Ro watched her actual father get tortured to death by the Cardassians. And to give her yet another Daddy into whose thrall Ro can fall, there’s a kindly old grandpa Maquis for Ro to make friends with over Bajoran hasperat, which is about the only thing from the episode I find particularly appealing. Ro is the “strongest” female character on the Enterprise, and yet her final episode is basically about which father figure exerts the most psychological control over her.
It’s weird to realize that prostitution still exists in the 24th century, and even weirder to watch Picard and Ro play out a prostitute/john interaction as a means of cover. As usual, Next Gen has a hard time doing the “seedy underbelly” of its particular imagined universe very well, and has equal trouble putting together complex space battle sequences of the type that would shortly rule the roost on Deep Space Nine. And, ultimately, having Ro give up on Starfleet and go rogue just feels like a piss-poor apotheosis for the character, as though she had learned nothing and grown nowhere in the three years since she stepped petulantly off the transporter pad at the beginning of Season Five. And as for her ultimate fate as a member of the doomed band of freedom fighters? I guess we’ll never know.
Two Enterprises out of five.
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.