“These are not my stars. Even the heavens are denied me here.”
A favourite of mine, not just of the third season but of the entire run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Defector” brings epic badassery to the long-simmering Romulan conflict on Next Gen, delivering a stunning first act and equally stunning climax, and driven by a a terrific guest turn by James Sloyan as the defector in question. It’s A-game material all around, from the entertaining prologue in which Data performs Henry V (against Patrick Stewart, no less, surreptitiously portraying a holographic Williams in a bit of makeup and a wig), to the magnificently delivered visual effects and musical score.
On the latter point, I’d argue that Ron Jones never delivered a better single stretch of music than the building iterations of his Romulan motif that rise and rise through the episode’s entire first act, until the thrilling sequence where a D’Deridex-class warbird sails brazenly across the Neutral Zone and stands nose-to-nose with the Enterprise – before promptly departing behind its cloaking device.
This is Ron Moore’s second script for Next Gen, and it’s a vast improvement on his first, a tightly constructed plot of intrigue and suspicion as “Subcommander Setal” (revealed, in short order, to in fact be Romulan Admiral Jarok) crosses the Zone to warn the Federation that the Romulan Empire is massing a fleet in preparation for an attack. The episode refers directly back to “The Enemy,” beginning to create a sense of serialization in the show that knits the larger Star Trek universe together in a more compelling way than episode-of-the-week antagonism and villainy. Tomalak returns, even more sneeringly malevolent than last time, and John Hancock pops up as Admiral Haden, making me wonder once again about the thankless task of playing viewscreen-only admirals in Star Trek. They pay you to, what? Sit in front of a camera and make a phone call for a couple of minutes?
It’s the character beats that make the whole episode play – Riker and Jarok swearing at each other in Klingon and Romulan; Picard’s heart-to-heart with Data where he implores the android to keep a positronic record of these historic events so that future generations can benefit by Data’s impartial view. But best of all is Sloyan, whose dynamic and charismatic Jarok dances madly across his own morality in his ever-increasing desperation to convince Picard and his crew that an apocalyptic Romulan-Federation war is, in fact, imminent. Sloyan describes his lost homeworld of Romulus with such convincing passion that we can almost see the spires of his home glistening over the Apnex Sea at dawn; in fact, when we finally pop round to Romulus in “Unification” and Star Trek: Nemesis, I distinctly remember feeling like Sloyan’s verbal visual effects were better.
It doesn’t take any particular genius to work out the fact that “The Defector” is a tragedy, with Jarok as its tragic hero, but the final strokes are strongly played nonetheless. Bonus marks to Worf and Picard for calling in the Klingon cavalary to thwart Tomalak’s smug intentions to display the Enterprise’s wrecked hull in the center of the Romulan capital. The good guys get away, just barely; but this is glorious, operatic stuff.
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.