“I find no honour in this whatsoever, Captain. You will forgive me if I don’t stay.”
a.k.a. the One Where Worf’s Brother Is Paul Sorvino. Worf, who doesn’t apparently have a good enough brother already, is retrofitted with a human adoptive sibling here, in the form of… yeah… Paul Sorvino. Now, I love Paul Sorvino (and the adoptive brother has been mentioned previously in the series’ first season, so it’s a fair play), but this episode is a disaster.
The trouble with “Homeward” isn’t Sorvino or even the adopted-brother thing; it’s everything else. The episode crams together two of Next Gen’s lazy-writing staples – a Prime Directive morality play, and a hey-let’s-fool-around-with-the-holodeck scenario – and arrives at an episode that can only, at its best, recall other, better episodes, like “Who Watches the Watchers” and “Pen Pals.”
And the rest of the time, it’s the worst. I haven’t the faintest idea what the episode is trying to do in terms of storytelling, except perhaps prove unequivocally that fucking with the Prime Directive is a bad idea – while having none of the characters come away having learned that, or even noticed that it might have been a bad idea. Paul Sorvino decides to save a handful of pre-industrial alien peasants because their world is about to blow up (why only a handful? How is this species meant to propagate itself with a gene pool the size of a proverbial thimble?). He does this by beaming them onto a perfect simulation of their planet, as recreated on the holodeck, when no one is looking (because the aft science station on the Bridge can, apparently, do that – especially if you’re Paul Sorvino). Having forced Captain Picard’s hand (where countless Romulan masterminds have failed, but hey – Paul Sorvino!), he convinces the Enterprise to keep the peasants on the holodeck in a running simulation (instead of, say, putting them in hypersleep) while the crew shops around the galaxy for a nearby class-M world that the peasants can be surreptitiously dropped on without noticing anything (having spent the episode “journeying” through an evolving holodeck simulation that morphs their old planet into their new planet). And, uh, while all this is going on, Worf and Paul Sorvino nearly have a fight. Oh: and Paul Sorvino totally blew his muck in one of the alien women, so there’s a half-alien, half-Paul Sorvino baby on the way (cuz genetics, I guess).
And literally everything works out. Everything comes away sunshine and roses, and Paul Sorvino gets to live out the rest of his life as the baby-daddy of a totally unsuspecting alien woman (Penny Johnson, in her first Star Trek appearance), which has all manner of creepy sexual assault overtones, even within the bonkers conceptual framework that would have let any of this happen in the first place. WTF, Paul Sorvino! Go home(ward), you’re drunk.
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.