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I’m examining the impact Star Trek: The Next Generation had on my formation. The introduction to this series can be seen here.

The overall theme of the episode is competition, and how various individuals approach it. Considering how much competitiveness was both valued and taken as a given in my family of origin (and in the larger culture), it was wonderfully refreshing to hear people talking about it, exploring it and observing how various personalities interact with it. I again got ideas from this episode about how the world worked around me that I wouldn’t find elsewhere for years.

Both Picard and Riker are initially uninterested in wargames, feeling that military strategizing is not a major purpose of Starfleet. That prioritizing of exploration and diplomacy over warfare or conquest was one of the main reasons I enjoyed this show more than the original. But, eventually both Picard and Riker get emotionally invested in the competition, in one form or another. Riker is especially in his element as his aggressive, competitive streak comes to the forefront. Picard’s primary emotional interaction in the competition seems to be pride in his first officer’s performance (again, he is highly motivated by nurturance and relationality). Worf is also initially uninterested, but for a different reason: because it’s simply a game. If there is nothing to lose, there’s nothing to gain, and he expects it to be a waste of time. Riker gets him interested by connecting his sense of honor to his performance in the game.

Dr. Pulaski manages to manipulate Data into competing with a skilled guest on board, and Data is shaken when he loses — to the point of relieving himself of duties. He believes that losing the game shows him as vulnerable, and shows his deductions as lacking, so he must be damaged somehow. Picard must explain to him that it’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose, and that making mistakes and being fallible doesn’t cancel out his duty to his colleagues. Data is also counseled that he can handle defeat in one of two ways: lose confidence in himself, or learn from his mistakes. This was another moment where Picard was effectively parenting me, offering things I needed to hear and didn’t from any any other source.

Pulaski at one point verbalizes some of the appeal of the urge to compete. She says humans have “an inborn craving to gauge [our] capabilities through conflict” and “humans sometimes find it helpful to have an outsider set the standard by which they’re judged.” While I’ve never had a strongly developed urge to compete, these articulations of competition helped me apply the idea to my own life, and find ways to enjoy competition — at the very least, with myself.

I’m examining the impact Star Trek: The Next Generation had on my formation. The introduction to this series can be seen here.

This episode introduces a well-loved though little seen character: K’Ehleyr, the mother of Worf’s son. I thought her awesome then, and I still do now.

K’Ehleyr arrives via space travel in a Class 8 probe — a tube about 2 meters long. She is charming and confident, fierce and capable, quickly and easily holding her own with other crew members. We learn she is half human and half Klingon, and felt she grew up trapped between cultures. She gets awesome costumes to wear. When she pretends to a high rank on board the ship (in a bit of deception designed to solve their dilemma), her demeanor fits perfectly in a command chair. I loved her as a child, and while she may strike me as a bit melodramatic now, I still fall hard for the character.

It’s clear she and Worf share a past, though it’s never clearly explained. What we *are* privy to is their next step: arguing that leads to a passionate time on the holodeck. The scene is hot, with physical affection that is coded as foreign/different and is compelling: smelling each other’s wrists, forearms, and palms, along with holding each other’s hands closed and other hints at rough/painful sex. While I had shut down a great deal of my own sex drive out of fear when I was a teenager, this was most certainly an image that my brain kept in a “special drawer”: a powerful and independent woman enjoying rough sex.

The writers here actually manage to allow K’Ehleyr to be sexual without being sexualized; as one example, Riker doesn’t hit on her, and instead treats her as a colleague. Even Worf’s attempts to equate the sex act with marriage are rebuffed by her, as she determines for herself what it meant to her. She rejects Klingon ideals of honor and insists that it was just fun. In a brief period of time, K’Ehleyr manages an impressive level of depth as a character. We’ll see her once more in a later episode.

I’m examining the impact Star Trek: The Next Generation had on my formation. The introduction to this series can be seen here.

The primary storyline is silly and unfortunate, and hardly worth a mention. But it gets everyone else out of the way for a great series of moments to materialize between Picard and Wesley. As the episode opens, Pulaski must scold and threaten Picard to convince him to travel somewhere and address some unnamed health concern he’s neglected. Soon, a very cranky and bristly Picard is accompanying an awkward and petrified Wesley as the two take a six-hour shuttle ride alone.

As Wes fumbles through attempts at conversation, we soon learn that Picard is having an artificial heart replaced, and that he is very concerned about gossip and his image among the crew at this time. While Picard hides behind gruffness, irritability and a book, Wes offers straightforward honesty, commenting on Picard’s discomfort with him and with children in particular. This leads to Picard reluctantly opening up about life choices, values, and dreams. The two talk about marriage, children, careers, each other, and how Picard lost his heart. Each man is able to shift his feelings of vulnerability into an intimacy with one another.

I could go on at some length on how Stewart masterfully moves Picard through an intensely satisfying emotional arc, and how Wheaton’s striving to keep up with him serves his own characterization quite well here. But for now I’ll say that this milestone for Wes and Picard holds a special place in my heart. And Picard’s insistence that the most important things in life will never be on exams might be cliched, but it was a brand new insight to my very lost young self, and one that I savored.

I’m examining the impact Star Trek: The Next Generation had on my formation. The introduction to this series can be seen here.

The writers were feeling a great deal of pressure by this point to provide a new major villain — a year and a half into the show, with one giant flop of a villain (the Ferengi) and a few lukewarm attempts (some stirrings of a growing Romulan threat, as one example). Here we have a rather flimsy frame story to get the Enterprise out of its geographical comfort zone and positioned to meet a brand new race. This new contribution to Star Trek ethnography is widely regarded as a big giant home run, reverberating throughout the galaxy of shows.

The Borg present a unique challenge to the ship and the Federation: they have no interest in political maneuvering, in prideful posturing or alliances. They don’t have interest in communicating at all, really. They are interested only in consumption. They are not yet the fully realized zombies they would become, though. They are fresh off the drawing board, and don’t yet have a taste for consuming people, only technology. Humanity’s first communication received from the Borg does not have their eventual trademark reference to assimilation:

Borg collective: We have analyzed your defensive capabilities as being unable to withstand us. If you defend yourselves you will be punished.

The greatest threat they pose is not yet that the vanquished will be violated and turned into weapons and extensions of the conquerors. That comes later. The greatest threat here is in what makes them foreign: their collectiveness, and their lack of individuality. While they are plugged into each other as the parts of a computer are, they have no uniquenesses or relationship about them. Babies are stored in drawers; grown Borg rarely even interact with each other or humans in their presence. The ship they are a part of is generalized in design, with no bridge, command center, living quarters, or engineering section. It is perfectly square in shape. They are not interested in relationship or politics, so Picard’s diplomacy tools are useless. They are only a relentless consuming and destroying machine. And their weapons outstrip the Enterprise by an order of magnitude. Picard does not discover a way to find peace with them, or a way to win against them. He must turn to Q and ask that they be whisked back to their sector of space.

With the crew properly humbled, Q saves them and leaves. But he’s set a chain of events in motion; the Borg know about humans now, and will hunt them down. Picard echoes what must be floating through the writers’ minds as they manage criticism against them, when he characterizes the events of the episode as a “kick in our complacency”.

I easily fell in love with the show without any major villain, as white hats v. black hats stories hold little appeal for me. So, I didn’t care about all the uproar that the show was “dull” for lacking a big bad guy. But I acutely remember being chilled by this new race, and Picard’s inability to secure the safety of the ship from them. And, of course, the Borg would figure heavily into a later personal development in Picard’s life.

Today, as an anti-capitalist adult, my fondest wish is that they would have made more of a statement with the Borg about the evils of runaway consumerism. But hey, Star Trek’s got way too much merch to sell to say that.

I’m examining the impact Star Trek: The Next Generation had on my formation. The introduction to this series can be seen here.

(This episode has some large spectres over it: namely, the two complementary rigid gender roles that I grew up with. Will’s father Kyle Riker and Deanna Troi appear to portray the most pure “man” and “woman” as I was raised to understand them. So, my reaction then and now cannot help but be flavored by the fact that these were both reflections of people I knew, and a kind of ideal to live up to — or at least supposedly inevitable realities to live with (that men and women are separate species with predetermined behavior matching these characters). I know others grew up with similar stereotypes affecting them, and I know we can find plenty of examples of these tropes in the media. I don’t know how widespread these were, though, or when. I don’t quite know how to place them sociologically… though I do believe the primary “man” trope on US television has shifted away from this boomer era authoritarian, and into goofier stereotypes. “Woman”, I believe, is still defined by her emotional intelligence in particular areas, though both then and now there were clear limits to that emotional understanding.)

The bulk of the story here is the content of Will Riker’s relationship with his father Kyle. Kyle is an imposing figure: arrogant, competitive, defined by his career, dismissive of emotional displays and unwilling to admit mistakes or be vulnerable. The two of them lost Kyle’s wife and Will’s mother when Will was very young, and it’s clear that whatever Kyle’s strengths are, being a father – especially a single father – was not among them. The senior Riker related to his young grieving son almost exclusively as a competitor. It would seem he did little to provide for the young man’s emotional needs, and instead employed various strategies of neglect and aggressiveness that built no trust between them. Though Kyle can express the sentiment that “I can talk to a whole roomful of admirals about anything in the galaxy, but I can’t talk to you about how I feel” (just in case the audience misses this flaw of his), he still can’t express anything further about those feelings. The adult Will still doesn’t feel heard, seen or loved by his father, who appears to feel entitlement for his return and is put out that he hasn’t been forgiven his faults.

The two men take the knot of grief, pain and broken relationship to the Holodeck for a space-age martial arts match. The anger and bitterness pours out, as they compete about whose grief is bigger and say many things that probably should have been said years ago. At one point, Will realizes his father has broken a rule, and pieces together that his father always won sports they played together by cheating. Kyle proudly owns up to his strategy, explaining that Will could best him from an early age, but he had to “keep him interested.” Now, to my mind, they finally get started on a potentially useful conversation here. But there is no further unpacking of the feelings that have been spewed, and no negotiation or attempts at common ground that I personally would want. Instead, this catharsis is enough to bring them to hugs and expressions of love… which is probably exactly what my own brother and father do in similar situations.

Deanna is aware of some of the emotional truths behind Kyle’s lack of parenting skills and how that affects Will. She makes mention of the competition, and indirectly addresses some of Kyle’s entitlement issues. She then appears to lose all of her insights into relationship and throws a fit when the two men seek the catharsis of a sports match between them. She and Pulaski see it as barbaric as a Klingon ritual Worf engages in for a side plot, and the two women have one of the most obnoxious exchanges in the series:

Deanna: In spite of human evolution, there are still some traits that are endemic to gender.
Pulaski: You think that they’re going to knock each other’s brains out because they’re men?
Deanna: Human males are unique. Fathers continue to regard their sons as children even into adulthood, and sons continue to chafe against what they perceive as their fathers’ expectations of them.
Pulaski: It’s almost as if they never really grow up at all, isn’t it?
Deanna: Perhaps that’s part of their charm, and why we find them so attractive.

At fourteen, I could already see that:
a) Despite hating Kyle Riker, I had thought beating somebody up would be cathartic plenty of times. I could see the appeal for them, and wished I had the knowledge and capacity to pursue similar cathartic strategies in respectful ways in my own young life.
b) Deanna just felt smug about being superior to a relationship that – as she describes it – exactly mirrors her relationship to her own mother.

Today, these obnoxious gender-defined behaviors and the related “insights” about men and women – including the dreaded “men never grow up” trope – really make me want to hit something.

We learn a significant amount about Dr. Pulaski here. She has 3 ex-husbands who are friends of hers now. She nearly married Kyle Riker, and seems to understand him quite well, perhaps even mirroring many of his traits. She is equally dismissive of Will’s feelings about his childhood and agrees with Kyle that he should just get over it. There’s also an odd, awkward throughline for Pulaski in this episode, involving Pulaski giving her chicken soup to a patient, and Troi’s credibility receiving a stunning blow with the observation that “Dr. Pulaski’s greatest medical skill is her empathy.” In the context of this episode, I begin to wonder if some writer involved in creating Pulaski was looking to do something edgy with gender, creating an abrasively assertive yet “empathetic” female character. In case it’s not obvious by now, it’s my opinion that this flopped badly.

I suspect that this episode spoke to the emotional lives of some of the male viewers (and writers?) of the show. I was perhaps supposed to be included in its intended audience by my “inevitable” sympathizing with the plight of the women. But, then and now, I don’t fit well in either camp. I was offered these two stunted roles as a kid, and have never found either appealing. Rather than any emotional trajectory I’ve ever seen explored in stories with these stereotypes in them, I’d rather the gender roles themselves be questioned so their obvious flaws can be prevented from doing more damage.

1. I can’t find where I got this image from. But these aren’t real footnotes anyway, since everything belongs to Paramount. So I’m not going to feel bad about my shoddy sourcing here.