The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by: L. Frank Baum

 

Throughout the years I have written reviews on quite a few fantasy series, mostly modern books though Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy was also thrown in there for good measure.  Since it’s the new year I’ve decided to go down the rabbit hole (or perhaps more aptly over the rainbow) of some explicitly pre-Tolkien fantasy.  I’ve always adored both the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.  I’d even read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by: L. Frank Baum multiple times.  I knew about the sequels, however I have never read them, and yet the fourteen Oz books by Baum are in the public domain and I have a friend who sings their praises.  So this year, in an effort to review a bit more than what has become my standard, I have decided to attempt to read and look at these 14 books (plus one extra included in the editions I have written apparently from Baum’s notes).

 

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz will always be overshadowed by the 1939 film, even going so far as being republished often as The Wizard of Oz.  It was always going to be this way, it’s incredibly difficult to get the film’s version of Oz out of the mind of the reader, unless you’ve read the novel first.  But that shouldn’t discount L. Frank Baum’s way of actually telling the story because it does not follow the narrative structure of a film.  The first chapter is a very quick introduction to Dorothy, crafted with care to convey how terribly dull the Kansas landscape is and as it has made its people while Dorothy is saved by her dog, before a cyclone whisks her, Toto, and her farmhouse off to a distant land.  There’s an urge in me to recount the differences between The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Wizard of Oz which I will largely resist, however, Dorothy as a protagonist is largely the same, wishing to get home simply for the love of her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry; the Wicked Witch of the West is not green though color does play an important part in distinguishing the four featured areas of Oz (Munchkin Country, the Emerald City, Winkie Country, and Quadling Country being blue, green, yellow, and red respectively); the wicked witches are not sisters and neither is a major antagonist; and finally there are in fact four witches as the only witches in Oz the Good Witch of the North being the least powerful who sends Dorothy towards the Emerald City and Glinda the Good Witch (or sorceress) of the South who sends her home in the end.

 

Baum keeps the book episodic, each chapter or two essentially being a new danger for Dorothy to face or a new friend to meet.  The general people of Oz are kind to her, even if at first they appear scary or dangerous as is the case with the Cowardly Lion and even the Flying Monkeys.  There are dangers, going into the woods is always dangerous, but Baum is considerate to give as many backstories as he can: the Lion was born a coward, the Tin Woodsman had his ax cursed by the Wicked Witch of the East to slowly shop him to bits, the Scarecrow remembers being made.  The Wizard himself is a humbug and as said in the 1939 film is a very good man, just a very bad wizard.  He still wants to help, even if he has gotten this child to commit a murder of a Wicked Witch.  The people live different lives: there is a country of people made from China who if they leave their country they become stiff and are often scared of being stepped on, the Munchkins had been slaves under the witch until Dorothy dropped in, and even the Winkies make the Tin Woodsman their leader to help them recover when the Wicked Witch of the West is melted.  What makes this fascinating is that L. Frank Baum while writing about a world where so many different societies and yet was a deeply racist man.  He fully supported the total annihilation of Native American populations despite marrying a woman whose mother was a staunch advocate for Native Americans.  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is odd because it doesn’t actually reflect Baum’s dangerous views, and as a man he contained multitudes (he was a proponent for women’s suffrage and I have been told that many of the sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz lend themselves to a feminist reading and various queer readings).  This is a book that wants to impart the morals of holding one’s own while relying on others, Dorothy and her friends have a great sense of community and their “allies” who come to help them come to be because Dorothy is just nice to everybody.  There are monsters, bear/tiger hybrids called Kalidahs, the Wicked Witch of the West, and a giant spider, plus some natural dangers like rushing rivers and a field of deadly poppies.

 

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz works so well because it is a well-written fairy tale.  It is not talking down to the children, though understands the logic of a child where the world around them is exactly what they see.  Oz does not need to be like Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Lewis’s Narnia, it’s a land that is real and the story of a little girl just trying to get home will resonate if its in a technicolor masterpiece or a short novel written for children over 100 years ago.  10/10.

The High Ground by: Melinda M. Snodgrass and directed by: Gabrielle Beaumont

 

“The High Ground” is written by: Melinda M. Snodgrass and is directed by: Gabrielle Beaumont.  It was produced under production code 160, was the 12^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 60^th episode overall, and was broadcast on January 31, 1990.

 

“The High Ground” is inherently difficult to discuss.  When people discuss media that has aged poorly, it rightly comes with the caveat that the poorly aged aspects were not okay at the time and are not okay now.  “The High Ground” is one of those episodes where there are certainly things presented that fall into this camp, but it’s also an episode that is quite progressive for 1990 while propping up in the end a very centrist message.  Centrism as an ideology is weak, built on compromise that can only ever get you so far that instead of say acknowledging the humanity on both sides of a conflict, it actively picks the more authoritarian side by necessity of having to be on both sides.  This is an episode that does this in spades.  Melinda M. Snodgrass meant “The High Ground” to be an allegory for the Troubles and the fight for Irish independence from the United Kingdom.  As with any piece of allegory that does not explicitly map everything one-to-one, it does mean that the interpretation of a group of terrorists or freedom fighters depending on your perspective attempting to break away from an authoritarian regime by any means necessary after nonviolence doesn’t work.  The most obvious modern day parallel is Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.  This is particularly made obvious due to the dialogue of the Rutian characters, that is the authoritarian regime, explicitly calling the Ansata, the rebels against the government, animals.  The main Rutian representative also is presented as a moderate who has been radicalized because of the death of several children, though her advocacy for the Ansata isn’t actually giving them rights and yet is presented by the end of the episode as on the morally superior side.

 

There are particularly good lines, said by Finn our main “terrorist” character saying “The difference between generals and terrorists, doctor, is only the difference between winners and losers” and “How much innocent blood has been spilled in the cause of freedom of your Federation, doctor?”.  Snodgrass’s script is showing humanity on both sides and wants to get to the complexities of the issues.  Data played perfectly by Brent Spiner is also given lines about this particular line, bringing up the in universe Irish Unification of 2024 among other violent conflicts.  The actual plot of the episode that is using this conflict from the backdrop is that Dr. Crusher is kidnapped by Finn as a hostage and the Enterprise has to negotiate for her release.  Now one aspect of the episode to be praised is the opening sequence where Crusher is captured.  It presents Dr. Crusher as determined to help the injured in the attack despite Picard demanding she, Worf, and Data be beamed up.  Worf and Data get away, but Crusher is captured and treated well by Finn throughout the episode, she has to be because Snodgrass understands that if you want to actually examine terrorism the terrorists do have to be humans.  Gates McFadden for her part is given particularly meaty material, though through Crusher’s capture there is the issue of slightly implying a Stockholm syndrome-esque relationship at points.  Richard Cox plays Finn with as much sympathy as the script clearly wants the audience to view him as, though the episode takes the time to build him as a well-rounded person while making him a martyr for short term gain on the authoritarian regime.

 

That’s when the Enterprise leaves, which would be a powerful statement but the episode falls apart completely with this conclusion.  It wants to read to the audience as being sympathetic to the terrorists, there is a moment where one of them puts down a gun and it is commented upon as possibility of peace.  Snodgrass just has the Enterprise leave but frames their exit and not actually taking a side in the conflict as perfectly morally responsible, despite Finn at several points telling Crusher that in them not taking a side they are taking the side of the authoritarians.  It's the sin of inaction when someone has the ability to do things, completely being uninterested in examining what the Enterprise could actually do to bring peace to these people.  The decision to have the Ansata bomb civilians and children is meant to be read as the horrible war crime that it is, however, while presenting the Rutian and the Rutian government as being authoritarian the latter gets mentioned less and that is a problem.  It’s an example of shifting the blame on the authoritarian regime to the individual and not the system that has created the terrorist threat in the first place through their own human rights violations and war crimes.  That is the central problem of the episode and is what is dragging it down.  The third act doesn’t want to take sides but then implicitly does.  Now, once again, some of this is partially in retrospect of an allegory being parallel to other conflicts, Snodgrass wants the viewer to be thinking about the Troubles and while other conflicts even of the time are there, this is reacting to one where history is written by the victors with the 35 years of retrospect since this episode was broadcast.

 

Overall, while Melinda M. Snodgrass and director Gabrielle Beaumont does want to avoid assigning a moral high ground, that is what “The High Ground” does by the end of the episode and that’s what makes it frustrating.  There is so much to actually really like here, the performances in particular and the decision to at least attempt portray terrorists as sympathetic.  But it does not want to actually say anything in the end and that leads to an episode that comes across as being pro-authoritarian because our heroes just leave the authoritarian regime to continue their oppression.  The score of this one is also a bit arbitrary, but 4/10 seems right.

The Hunted by: Robin Bernheim and directed by: Cliff Bole

 

“The Hunted” is written by: Robin Bernheim and is directed by: Cliff Bole.  It was produced under production code 159, was the 11^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 59^th episode overall, and was broadcast on January 10, 1990.

 

Sometimes an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation will be a perfectly decent episode with a good enough premise that only elevates itself with its ending.  “The Hunted” is one such episode.  Robin Bernheim only wrote this episode, intentionally drawing on the end of the Vietnam War, though 15 years after it ended, making it become a generic reflection on soldiers returning from the field traumatized and excluded from society.  This is something especially apparent when looking at the actions of Republican politicians towards veterans, pulling support to welfare programs, expanding military spending, and embroiling the United States in more overseas conflict.  These ideas would very much be in the mind of the production team of Star Trek: The Next Generation when making “The Hunted” because the allegory is there, and the ending is what really seals it as a great episode.  The ending of the episode is Picard actively denying support to a regime that created a race of super soldiers and then left them in prisons for committing no crime.  It is an internal matter and their application to join the Federation in the future will be considered based on how they actually deal with the veterans.

 

The script is a cold knife and the point where it’s most biting in its commentary, all through a single dramatic monologue that was partially missing the gravitas in a lot of the previous episode.  This issue does largely come at the hands of television standards and practices, as well as the budget allocated to each episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The script clearly wants to go to the darker places of what happens when a large portion of a society is used, abused, and then thrown away.  The climax in production would have originally involved an insurrection leading to massacre and not a peaceful, if uneasy, resolution.  That original climax would likely have pushed the episode further than what ended up on-screen.  This is a problem that pervades the entire episode, lowering the stakes and with that the tension creating a knock on effect that drags the pace of the episode down.  The pace reads as if sequences are missing and stretching the scenes that are there has created that lack of urgency that pulls the episode down.

 

The main soldier character in the episode representing the plight of the veterans is Danar, played by Jeff McCarthy, is doing his best with material that has clearly been cut down in rewrites.  The character on paper is clearly meant to be a representation of post-traumatic stress disorder, the physical enhancements influencing his emotions to become more agitated easily and making violence unavoidable.  “The Hunted” does want to dwell on the emotions of veterans, Danar being paired through much of the episode with Troi who is able to make an emotional connection, though integral for making the episode work not a romantic one.  It’s especially nice that this comes after “The Defector” which was just as strong for Troi, making it seem at least like there are multiple writers on this show who understand the need to move away from pinning her into a sexual role.  “The Hunted” builds on her compassion towards Danar and his situation, despite the fact that the Enterprise do still have to return him to his planet because they are not really able to interfere with a foreign power.  Again this helps make that Picard speech at the end actually work quite well for the episode despite toning down some of the power the original ending would have had.  The episode also treats Danar’s drive to escape his capture by the Enterprise as something justified, once again putting the morality of the Enterprise crew slightly into question despite making what should be the correct decision in the end.  They support the bloodless takeover of the Angosian in the end, but that’s the big turnaround in terms of morality because the threat is completely external to the Enterprise.

 

Overall, despite undergoing some severe rewrites that weaken it “The Hunted” is at the very least bold for telling a story where an insurrection is seen as the proper course of action because a government is oppressing a minority group (though that minority being veterans isn’t exactly commented on).  It is made by the final act and ending when we get to the Angosians as their bureaucracy does come across as the right amount of insufferable and the insurrection feels nothing but victorious.  Plus Marina Sirtis once again gets something to do in the plot that is ever so slightly more solid than the usual material for her character.  7/10.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Temptation of the Force by: Tessa Gratton

 

Phase III of Star Wars: The High Republic interestingly has focused more than the previous two phases on the very human relationships between our heroes.  Tessa Gratton also has become a rather prominent writer in this phase cowriting Defy the Storm, a young adult novel that explores how defiance under occupation takes many forms, and being the sole writer on Temptation of the Force.  Temptation of the Force makes it easier to see what Gratton’s strengths as a writer are.  They are adept at balancing shifting perspectives and their character work is particularly excellent.  Themes of defiance find their way throughout the novel, the large strokes of the plot are about breaking through the Stormwall and into the Occlusion Zone through several almost insane schemes.  The perspective shifts quite a bit to essentially every character established by The High Republic on the side of the Jedi and Marchion Ro and Ghirra Starros on the side of the Nihil.  Gratton’s characterization of Ro is what readers should have come to accept by now: a megalomaniac with a penchant for the trope of the Xanatos Gambit where even when he loses he still finds a way to win.  While his chapters are entertaining, it is actually Ghirra Starros on the side of the Nihil that is more interesting thematically.  She has lost her daughter due to completely avoidable circumstances, her name being rejected and her motivation being self-preservation and financial self-improvement.  Her intelligence is never actually in doubt, but she is a collaborator of her own volition and for her betterment.  There is a complete sense that she underestimates the lengths Ro is willing to go for power, however, that is not really her personal flaw.  Her big flaw is that complete selfishness, something that is only shattered by the final words her daughter says to her in the climax of the novel, best described as a death knell.  She made her choice and poor Avon sees exactly what her mother has always been.  Avon for her part doesn’t actually play as much of a major role in the novel, but when Gratton does use her it is for this particular effect.

 

Also making choices is the ripped apart romance of Xylan Graf and Cair San Tekka, beginning the novel separate and building much of the story to their reunion.  As with many romances pulled apart early, the reunion is nothing but bittersweet.  The Nihil have left both of them scarred in their own way, they are only separated again because that is for the best.  Gratton’s dialogue for the pair is of this unlikely couple that is somehow married incredibly happily to each other, neither willing to lose the other but still having to say goodbye.  The dialogue knows how to shoot you directly in the heart.  Cair is also a man dealing with a new disability, losing a hand and yet not wanting to accept help from a prosthetics specialist.  The disability is now a part of him, something he must accept.  Gratton also just excels at writing this longing.  In a way that is the temptation the title Temptation of the Force is referring to as Graf and Cair aren’t the only romantic couple of the book.  As the cover boasts, the central relationship of the novel is between Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann.

 

The Star Wars prequel trilogy goes into the Jedi code involving the impossibility of attachment, in the mind of George Lucas conflating attachment with possession and unhealthy relationships.  In theory, it’s brilliant and what Anakin and Padme represent, though the audience largely took it towards the view of relationships of the Catholic Church’s priests: celibate and married to the job of being a Jedi.  Gratton (and other Star Wars novels I have read and reviewed) does not make them celibate or even dispassionate.  Both couples are incredibly passionate, that passion is really what made me like both Kriss and Mann more in this novel than any of their previous appearances in The High Republic, but both couples are struggling with that temptation of attachment.  Kriss and Mann as a couple are that perfect compliment to one another: they push and pull their patience and impatience together depending on the situation.  Action versus inaction in how to deal with the Nihil and Marchion Ro and the Nameless threat, how each of them reacts to each trial, and especially how they react to each other.  The thrust of the novel is how difficult it becomes to resist that temptation and give into the selfish, possessive love that if we’re continuing the Catholic Church metaphor would be more a concept of lust over love.  This means when they eventually work it out, both couples in their own way, the conclusion of the novel continues to be that big win.

 

While Gratton’s acknowledgements cite being asked to write essentially The Empire Strikes Back what they exceled at with Temptation of the Force is to create that multi-layered story to move everything forward.  While there are two couples at the center and plenty of exploration of the Nihil, this review didn’t even have the chance to really cover Bell or Burry or even some of the scenes of interfacing with the normal people living under occupation.  Gratton has written something quite close to a masterpiece, very much the strongest of The High Republic and one of the strongest Star Wars novels I’ve read.  9/10.

The Defector by: Ronald D. Moore and directed by: Robert Scheerer

 

“The Defector” is written by: Ronald D. Moore and is directed by: Robert Scheerer.  It was produced under production code 158, was the 10^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 58^th episode overall, and was broadcast on January 1, 1990.

 

“The Enemy” was a proper reintroduction to the Romulans for Star Trek: The Next Generation, positioning them far closer to the relationship the Klingons were to the original series.  “The Defector” comes exactly three episodes later for a second appearance that is nearly as interesting by once again presenting the crew of the Enterprise with a single Romulan to face.  As the title implies, the idea is that reflecting instances of the Cold War, the Romulan Admiral Jarok, played by James Sloyan, is defecting under a different name after the discovery of the Romulans installing a base in the Neutral Zone.  The conflict of the episode then comes with the Enterprise crew not quite knowing if they can trust Jarok or being put into a trap.  What’s fascinating about the episode is that it opens with a sequence that foreshadows essentially the entire episode in a way, a scene from Henry V (a play I have not read) of Henry coming among the common people.  It's a great scene, but it is a little odd that it’s included here in what specifically reads as the production team realizing they have Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart leading the show and haven’t really taken advantage of that.  It is not Picard in the role though, it’s a holodeck program, but again we needed to take advantage of Patrick Stewart.  Data is also present, the scene ending with discussions on the nature of performance and acting as a lead in to the episode proper.  Jarok introduces himself as Setal, a lowly logistics clerk that has come across information that he shouldn’t have spurring on the defection.  The entire episode is draped in deceit exactly like this, the question being if it is a question of deceit for the greater good, deceit for selfish reasons, or deceit for the inevitable betrayal.

 

Sloyan’s performance as Jarok is fascinating, the makeup team on this episode in particular has added some extra detail to the makeup job.  The features on Jarok seem just a bit more exaggerated in a way, making him look a little less human despite Romulans falling into the camp of humans with bits stuck on aliens that are easy to do on Star Trek.  It’s subtle differences and not a full scale redesign like the Klingons between the original series and the films/The Next Generation, but the subtle differences go a way to otherize Jarok.  Sloyan is also not acting through incredibly heavy makeup, he still has use of his face throughout the episode.  Jarok is defecting for the sake of his family, he has a daughter, he knows that war is very likely coming as the Romulans are encroaching the Neutral Zone.  And yet, he opens with nothing but deceit and is interrogated by the crew.  The interrogation scenes are particularly intense, Ronald D. Moore’s script for this sequence of events in particular doesn’t actually paint the crew of the Enterprise in a positive light.  Picard, Riker, and Troi are all fulfilling the duties of military officers, being inherently distrustful of Jarok and almost pushing into the realms of torture.  The interrogation is incredibly pressing, Robert Scheerer shoots it in a lot of close up, often keeping Riker and Troi shot from the back to make them faceless.  The episode is right to make you sympathize with Jarok, the final scene of the episode does have Picard opine about how one day there will be peace and they can deliver a letter from Jarok to his family.  For her part Marina Sirtis is actually given interesting material as Troi, using her empathic abilities to read the confusion in Jarok’s mind and to conform his statements to the crew’s own biases against him and the Romulans as a whole.  It reads like a defining moment to who Troi is as a character, someone who is willing to compromise ethics for the crew, she is allowed to be a fully complex character which has been an issue with her character throughout the series thus far.  The episode is building to the point where Jarok is not actually being deceitful on the whole, he is lying about who he is but he is the victim of Romulan deceit.

 

The Romulan incursions are false.  Jarok was given false information to lure a Federation ship into the Neutral Zone and start a war.  The only reason that this fails is because Picard is a strategic genius and has brought three Klingon ships along with him because he knew something was up.  This aspect of the conclusion is the weakest aspect of the episode, it reads almost as if Moore realized he was getting close to the end of the episode and needed a conclusion to resolve the twist and neglected to have anything setup.  Though using the Klingons as resolution is an interesting parallel to show how far they have come in terms of relationship with the Federation and how far it is for the Romulans to actually go.  Jarok’s ending is far stronger: as he has been lied to and has nowhere in the universe to go as the Romulans would execute him for defecting (which they caused) and the Federation clearly wouldn’t accept him after how they’ve treated him, he commits suicide.  That’s what prompts Picard to hope for peace with the Romulans and realize subtly that he and the crew have been wrong, his suicide note is what needs to eventually be delivered to his family.  It’s an incredibly powerful ending and almost makes up for the shorthand tricks used in the third act to get to that finale.

 

Overall, “The Defector” is a surprising follow-up to the reestablishing of the Romulans, further cementing them as having their own story arc that will hopefully be followed up on.  Ronald D. Moore’s second script for the series shows once again that he understands how to integrate even unrelated scenes into the larger whole of an episode.  It’s particularly nice to have the crew of the Enterprise be seen ever so subtly as villains, or at the very least not the squeaky clean outlook that much of what has come before in the series.  8/10.

The Vengeance Factor by: Sam Rolfe and directed by: Timothy Bond

 

“The Vengeance Factor” is written by: Sam Rolfe and is directed by: Timothy Bond.  It was produced under production code 157, was the 9^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 57^th episode overall, and was broadcast on November 20, 1989.

 

“The Vengeance Factor” is an episode that has me slightly puzzled.  It’s an episode that excels in terms of showing off Captain Picard as the non-violent diplomat and Riker as a pinnacle of non-toxic, respectful masculinity, but it’s also an episode that while having commentary on slavery also makes the slave character the episode’s twist villain slowly working a master plan to kill not her masters, but an outcast group of pirates who are coming to the negotiating table for reconciliation and reparations.  Yes, “The Vengeance Factor” is an episode that is politically savvy enough to acknowledge the need for reparations to those oppressed in some way, yet the slave is a villain who apparently cannot understand her position.  It’s all because the reveal of the character’s villainy is actually a third act twist for the episode which reads as if writer Sam Rolfe wrote himself into a corner and needed a way to resolve the microvirus subplot that was a danger to the negotiations.  Yes, there is an assassin that is killing members of the Gatherers with the Sovereign Marouk, played by Nancy Parsons, leading the negotiations and as red herring.  Rolfe sets the Sovereign up as equally unreasonable as the Gatherers, and she should be the villain of the episode and not her assistant/servant/slave because the dialogue is certainly not clear.  The reason to bring reconciliation are also odd, it’s because the Gatherers are interfering and stealing from Federation outposts.  The conclusion of the episode is equally odd, Riker just outright kills the villain Yuta, played by Lisa Wilcox.  All of these elements just come together as particularly odd, and really don’t mesh well with each other to make the runtime uneven.

 

Timothy Bond directs his first of two episodes of the series and while his direction isn’t necessarily bad, it is quite standard for late 1980s television and there is a sense that it’s the direction dragging down the pace of the episode.  He is shooting it almost like a mystery, the script giving Riker and Crusher as characters investigative plots, but the audience already kind of knows what is happening with this episode when the conflict begins.  Getting the Enterprise crew involved also just reads as contrived, they feel like outsiders unofficially as the negotiators; they are pushing themselves in on these people and forcing their way of life for selfish reasons which is very odd.  It doesn’t violate the Prime Directive because the Acamarians as a people are technologically advanced enough that it doesn’t actually apply.  Rolfe’s script is also odd because while it has multiple subplots, none of them actually end up going anywhere and everything reads like setup until that particularly abrupt conclusion.  The Gatherers themselves are played mostly by men who are treated often as over the top comic relief but by the time you get to the third act they are all pushed to the background for the big reveal.  The ending of any given episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and any episode of television really, is important to tie everything together and “The Vengeance Factor” suffers because the ending leaves everything to fall apart.

 

Overall, “The Vengeance Factor” has some things going for it, Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard is particularly strong in the diplomatic role the episode gives him and Jonathan Frakes as Riker has some nice romantic scenes.  The message, however, is incoherent with an ending that leaves a main character a murderer and the reveal to the murder mystery someone who is already oppressed in her own existence.  It comes across as an underdeveloped script that is juggling way too many ideas for any of them to really come to the forefront leaving the episode both difficult to talk about in terms of anything interesting and a mediocre watch.  5/10.

The Price by: Hannah Louise Shearer and directed by: Robert Scheerer

 

“The Price” is written by: Hannah Louise Shearer and is directed by: Robert Scheerer.  It was produced under production code 156, was the 8^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 56^th episode overall, and was broadcast on November 13, 1989.

 

Deanna Troi seems to only ever be given plots relating to her sexuality, often reducing her down to a sex object for either a male lead or male guest character.  “The Child” is perhaps the most offensive of these, subjecting her to fairly explicit rape and the ensuing pregnancy, but “The Price” produced one season later continues this terrible trend.  “The Price” comes from Hannah Louise Shearer, her fourth and final script for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and her output has been decidedly mixed.  Her strongest contribution is the cowritten “Skin of Evil” or the story credit for “Pen Pals”, and there’s this sense that Shearer as a writer doesn’t understand the implications of much of what she is writing.  “The Price” focuses so heavily on Deanna Troi falling in this romantic relationship with Devinoni Ral, a negotiator present on the Enterprise for negotiations between several races for rights to own a stable wormhole that can revolutionize space travel.  The big twist in the romance, however, is that Ral is part-Betazoid and has been influencing the delegates towards giving the rights to his employers and has been influencing Troi into a romantic relationship.  The episode plays this latter aspect not as Troi once again being a victim of sexual assault through coercion, but it’s the former that means their relationship cannot work.  The reveal actually happens, not at the climax of the episode, but in the middle of the episode on a date and Marina Sirtis as Troi doesn’t actually play it as a problem.  She is once again a character who is okay with being violated and manipulated by men, and aliens that present masculine.  The only problem is the deceit of the rest of the Enterprise crew and delegates, painting Troi once again as an object of desire and not her own person.

 

This is explicit in a particular scene where Shearer remembers that Troi does have a romantic past with Riker, so Ral essentially gloats to his rival that he won.  Riker of course is the bigger man which comes across as further objectification of Troi.  She doesn’t actually get a proper say in her romantic life, she is passed around and influenced by the men in her life who see her more of a prize to be won.  Every scene where Troi appears is oddly written, the episode opening with a random scene of her wanting a chocolate sundae and the ship’s computer denying her request because it is unhealthy.  It’s a scene that feels straight out of the previous season where episodes would often be padded with these scenes that attempt to give character depth while being entirely disconnected from the rest of the episode.  This is also just a scene that doesn’t actually say anything about Troi as a character, immediately getting her to the bridge to introduce the other delegates.  The one scene in the middle of the episode where Troi gets to explore her feelings towards Ral is also incredibly awkward: it’s a completely 1980s workout scene between Troi and Dr. Crusher with some of the oddest sexual overtones in the dialogue.  Out of the context of the episode it is quite a funny little scene, but within context it’s just another scene really making Troi feel like less of a character.  The scripting problems aren’t the only issues with the romance, it's also just brought down further by poor performances.  Sirtis is a good actress, but she isn’t really served by the material she is given and director Robert Scheerer isn’t doing anything to give her actual direction.  She is paired opposite a scene partner who doesn’t know how to emote in line delivery, even in his scenes opposite the rest of the cast.  Matt McCoy gives a performance that reads as a charisma vacuum, which undercuts the idea that he is a charismatic negotiator and that Troi could find anything about this man attractive.

 

This is just one of the plots of the episode, and while Hannah Louise Shearer does at the very least integrate the two plots, the delegation plot is one that doesn’t feel like a Star Trek plot.  It involves essentially auctioning land rights for a wormhole that even when revealed to not be all it is cracked up to be, would be a fascinating scientific discovery to study.  The big twist is that it is not a fully stable wormhole, only one side is stable which is something that is presented as just scientifically uninteresting because it couldn’t be a source of profit or tax for the Federation or any of the other interested parties.  This works for the Ferengi who are here, though have absolutely no impact outside of attempting an assassination and being generally annoying, but the Federation is acting in this weird capitalist manner when they clearly aren’t meant to be.  It tries to have the desperation for this asset being for the scientific advantages and an almost imperialist expansionist mindset, the former being fine but then losing interest doesn’t actually work.  A semi-stable wormhole as presented early in the episode would still be a scientific marvel, just not nearly as much of a scientific marvel as the wholly stable wormhole option would be.  There’s also a moment where Geordi La Forge is a complete asshole towards the potential of being stuck with Data as a joke which is really cruel, something that underlines so much of the episode.

 

Overall, “The Price” is apparently just more degradation on the part of the main cast’s female characters.  It is the third season’s first really bad episode, though at the very least it attempts to tell a linear story and has some potential in the science fiction ideas it plays with.  Ideas that it abandons for bad performances, stilted dialogue, and just another misogynistic Troi plot.  3/10.