“Wesley, I hope you never do.”
“Symbiosis” is inevitably a poignant episode of the series for reasons having nothing to do with its content; this is the last Star Trek appearance by Merritt Butrick, who played David in Star Trek II and III, before dying of AIDS in 1989. He’s quite good here, too; as has been the case throughout the season, the blu-ray upgrade of Star Trek: The Next Generation has popped a lot of subtleties onto the screen in the performances. Butrick commits to some tricky dialogue and a physically demanding role. Too bad it’s all in service of this episode.
“Symbiosis” is the Nancy Reagan episode of Star Trek, the “say no to drugs” piece. It’s an episode of oldschool moralizing, of the type at which Star Trek once excelled. To be fair, I am not convinced that, say, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (on the Original Series) was any subtler a piece of storytelling than “Symbiosis” – or, for that matter, that “Symbiosis” is any better or worse than any contemporary episode of drama in 1988, whether it was L.A. Law or Beauty and the Beast. But “Symbiosis” reads weak, regardless, in its tissue-thin allegory for the drug trade.
The episode has very little to say about addiction, which might in fact be marked as a kind of prescience; “Symbiosis” is far more concerned with the unhealthy strain of capitalism, and the morality therein, which created the drug industry. Unfortunately, everything is turned up to nine to make sure that none of the points are missed, and it all just runs past the edge of credibility. In the episode’s hurry to emphasize the evils of drugs, the crew of the freighter Sanction – members of an entirely-drug-addicted species of people – is presented as being so addle-brained and perma-high that they wouldn’t be able to turn on a television to watch an episode of Star Trek, let alone pilot a starship in one. There is way to believe that the Ornarans would ever be functional as a society – let alone so functional that they serve, essentially, as the entire industrial base for a whole other planet, who are, of course, supplying them with the drugs.
And while its reading on the Prime Directive is correct – not just a set of rules, but a philosophy, as Picard instructs Beverly – there’s no way to come away from the end of the episode without feeling that the crew of the Enterprise failed to take any heroic action. They solve the intellectual riddle of the Ornaran/Brekkan crisis, but the solution is to do nothing and walk away, and for whatever that has to say about the principle of non-interference, it hardly reads as adventure storytelling set on an exciting starship in outer space.
The moment from the episode that rings the warmest – if trite – is Tasha’s speech. It’s nice to see her playing cool older sister to Wesley, telling him that, yeah, drugs feel good, but at a price. If I’m not mistaken, “Symbiosis” was Denise Crosby’s last episode filmed, and while the drug scene is hardly compensation for a season’s worth of underutilization, it’s a fitting cap on her short, winsome Star Trek career.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek – now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.