“It’s Obachan! My grandmother!
We arrive at the notorious “mind rape” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Credit where it’s due, at least Next Gen was willing to do an episode about rape, which (in 1991) was still relatively rare – although, in a post-The Accused Hollywood, various television dramas were becoming more willing to address the issue. It doesn’t change the fact that in constructing and executing a tactical allegory for rape in Star Trek’s science fiction setting – namely, memory rape, by a race of telepaths – the whole thing still comes off feeling halfway between Creepy Old Uncle (i.e. skeezy) and Very Special Blossom (i.e., trite). This is one of the few episodes of Next Gen where the best word I could use to describe it is “gross.”
Let me see if I’ve got this right: evil Ullian telepath Jev forcibly accesses negative emotional experiences from peoples’ pasts, and then inserts himself into the memory to get his jollies while his victims fall into a coma from the stress. He does it to Troi first, then Riker, and then Crusher. If the episode has a positive aspect, it’s the polymorphous approach to who gets attacked; seeing Riker as one of the victims is a strong idea, and would be a lot stronger if the episode had focused on him exclusively, rather than seeing fit to victimize both of the series’ principal female characters as well.
But this is hardly the root of the trouble with “Violations,” which is ultimately just a very, very troubled episode. Alongside the genderization of victimhood as noted above, there’s also the problem that while the episode does present three psychic rapes, it isn’t actually about rape. It’s not about the experience of it, the response to it, or the social reaction to it; “Violations” is essentially a whodunit where the crime is psychic rape, but where (problem #3) we know who dun it from literally the first scene. So we have a strange situation here where there’s no story tension and no allegorical tension either; just an unpleasant affair where we watch three of our characters get psychosexually tormented by a whacko alien-of-the-week.
And in terms of “unpleasant,” it doesn’t get much more unpleasant than the episode’s first, and showpiece, psychic assault sequence, in which an after-poker romantic conversation between Riker and Troi apparently goes too far. Here, the episode is very sketchy about what Jev is inserting into Troi’s memories (if they’re real memories at all), and what might have actually happened. The implication, by omission, is that Riker may actually have sexually assaulted Troi at some point in the recent past, which is a much bigger deal than “Violations” seems to think it is.
Just about the only element of any canonical value here is the short memory sequence of Picard taking Beverly to see Jack Crusher’s body; poor Jack Wert actually returns as Jack crusher, for literally a single half-second shot of his upside-down corpse. That’s dedication, I guess. (Picard’s toupee also suggests dedication.) Otherwise, “Violations” is a shamelessly high-handed look at a grim subject, and is so unforgiveably clumsy in its execution that it comes off as one of the darkest instances of The Next Generation getting every single thing wrong. Boo.
One Enterprise out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.