“Who needs rational when your toes curl up?”
Hump Trek: The Next Degradation! I recall there being quite a flurry of indignation when “The Price” first aired, because it was (supposedly) quite graphic for Star Trek; whatever vanilla era we lived in that could produce such a judgment is long past. Aside from a very long dialogue scene where Troi and her lover, Devinoni Ral, converse in bed about their lives in general while rubbing massage oil on each other, there ain’t much intimate contact at all – although, rightly so, the brief aerobics scene where Deanna and Beverly swap advice on the viability of highly passionate sexual flings is a fan fave.
So the basic thrust (get it?) of the episode is that Troi falls in love with a fucking asshole. It was 1989, and since women had been a regular part of the executive workforce for a decade or more, it was time to address the notion of a career woman who was letting her job get to her and was sorely in need of a good orgasm (or twelve). Patriarchy, reassert thyself! No stress exists that can’t be solved with a penis! Troi, who starts the episode seeking chocolate, finds Ral instead, and succumbs to his dubious charms so quickly that we might wonder what the 24th century equivalent of Rohypnol would be. Matt McCoy bugs me in pretty much everything he’s ever done, but his turn as Ral is especially excruciating to watch, all smug smiles and creepy sexual manipulation. When he and Troi have their inevitable blow-up, Ral even slinks down to Ten Forward to make himself feel better by taunting Riker about how he’s going to “take” Troi away from Will as part of his overall negotiation strategy. Will goes on to serve him up a can of verbal whup-ass so definitive that I nearly shouted “RIKER’D!!” as the first officer left Ral slack-jawed at the table.
I quite like the other plot of the episode, which surrounds the Barzan Wormhole, a (temporarily) stable gateway to the Gamma Quadrant which serves as Next Gen’s prototype for Deep Space Nine’s key plot driver, the (actually) stable wormhole near Bajor. The Ferengi are used well in the episode, from the chair-obsessed Daimon Gos gatecrashing the Barzan negotiations, to the two flunkies who get stuck in the Delta Quadrant when the wormhole ups stakes and moves somewhere else.
Remember Star Trek’s open-door script policy? The idea of those two Ferengi stranded in the Delta Quadrant stuck in my craw long enough that I wrote an episode of Voyager about Captain Janeway and the crew finding out what happened to them. It didn’t sell, of course, but I was gratified (and somewhat incensed) a few years later when Voyager did an episode on that premise anyway – like, on the exact premise I’d written, which was that the two Ferengi twerps would set themselves up as god figures to a primitive culture for the fun n’ profit of it all. There must be a rule of acquisition to be written about all this, vis a vis Star Trek’s open-door script policy and false… uh… prophets.
My sentimental fondness for this episode somewhat overrides my common sense in terms of its score, so I’m giving it three Enterprises out of five, even though it probably doesn’t deserve more than two.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Three is available now.