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.

 

The Suns of Caresh by: Paul Saint

 

There’s a curious streak of the Past Doctor Adventures novels to have the occasional debut novel feel like an original science fiction story repurposed into a Doctor Who novel.  The Suns of Caresh is one such novel, spending much of its first act setting up an amphibious alien society that develops in reverse to Earth amphibians, becoming more aquatic as they grow.  Their planet is at risk of a disruptive orbit and their inhabitants seem to be at least partially time sensitive as a Time Lord called Roche seems to be a dictator.  The more front and center protagonist of the novel is Troy Game, a Careshi who escapes to Earth pursued by Roche and the Furies, creatures that inhabit the time vortex as perfect assassins (think Weeping Angels under a different evolutionary route and in a story five years too early for “Blink).  For a debut novel, Saint brings a lot to the table, the prose itself really has a handle on the odd imagery and switching between Troy Game’s rather alien perspective and the human perspective of Simon Haldane, a complete nerd who provides shelter for Troy on Earth.  Saint is playing with a specific brand of science fiction romance between a human and an alien, but subverting it by making it fairly explicitly one-sided from Simon’s point of view.  As a character Simon is quite the insufferable narrator so when you get to his eventual fate it feels more cathartic over anything else, but Troy as a character despite being alien and not understanding Earth and Earth culture is characterized immediately as intelligent and self-assured.  The subversion is particularly nice and when Troy eventually makes contact with the Doctor and Jo there is a lot to get through the back half of the novel where Saint goes off the rails.

 

Saint attempts a time travel story where two other characters take the visage of the Doctor, there is a professor who is living backwards because of Roche, and Roche has his own needs.  He is also specifically Israeli and named after the prophet Ezekiel which feels like Saint trying to say something with the character, but for the life of me it isn’t particularly clear.  Roche as a character is at least an interesting, almost force of nature throughout the second half of the book, written in a way to be a parallel to the Doctor in exile.  This doesn’t quite work as well, Saint makes the decision to set this after Carnival of Monsters and in his introduction to the Doctor is clear that the Doctor is ecstatic to be traveling time again and Jo is almost mystified at traveling more consistently with the Doctor.  Roche also takes on the Doctor’s visage at points and there are scenes near the end of the novel with a lot of the vortex inhabitants having sent the Furies after Roche and later the Doctor.  The Doctor as a character, however, actually does sing off the page even if Saint uses him and Jo sparingly.  They take on the teacher/student relationship that feels very much informed by fandom over many of the actual serials the characters featured in on television, serials that largely would have been available to view on VHS at this time.  The Suns of Caresh is almost written with a generic Doctor/companion pairing in mind and retrofitted to the Third Doctor and Jo, especially apparent with the way Jo interacts with the near future of 1999, a near future that works for basically every single Doctor/companion pairing from the series’ original run.  There just isn’t quite enough strong characterization from Jo in particular to make this work, Saint possibly working off using Sarah Jane as a companion and setting this during Season 11 or maybe somehow using Liz to accommodate the Doctor’s exile.

 

Overall, The Suns of Caresh is a very solid debut science fiction novel, even if in terms of Doctor Who it doesn’t feel as consistent with the leads.  The supporting characters are excellent and Paul Saint clearly has a grasp on imagery and science fiction ideas.  The plot does rattle along quite nice and although the final act becomes murky, it does at the very least end with a high and a particularly optimistic ending which is also nice.  6/10.

The Enemy by: David Kemper and Michael Piller and directed by: David Carson

 

“The Enemy” is written by: David Kemper and Michael Piller and is directed by: David Carson.  It was produced under production code 155, was the 7^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 55^th episode overall, and was broadcast on November 6, 1989.

 

When developing Star Trek: The Next Generation, the decision to move relations between the Federation and the Klingon Empire is a fantastic piece of storytelling potential.  It meant that you could develop a character like Worf as part of the Enterprise crew and that the Federation can actually make peace with its enemies.  There’s also the real-life parallels of the Cold War, dominant in the geopolitical space of the original series, slowly coming to a close in the late 1980s.  Where the differences for Star Trek: The Next Generation comes along is in exactly who the main enemy of the Federation would be.  Gene Roddenberry created the Ferengi meant to be a critique of capitalism that in execution in the first season came across as more humorous than anything else.  Maurice Hurley seeded ideas of the Borg in the first season before their appearance in the second season episode “Q Who”, though that would be their only appearance in that season.  David Kemper and Michael Piller in “The Enemy” pose what at this point in Star Trek: The Next Generation works as the best enemy for the series, the Romulans.  This is at least partially because Kemper and Piller aren’t trying to introduce a completely new race of people but taking one established in the original series as equally part of the Cold War and bringing them up to a point politically that parallels the waning days of the war.  The Romulans and Federation are established clearly as being on the road to peace and cooperation, though early on that road.  Romulans were also used sparingly in the original series, though that was due to the makeup work took quite a long time, so there is more to be fleshed out and developed.  The second correct decision is to largely ignore the two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation to feature the Romulans, “The Neutral Zone” and “Contagion”, both episodes that didn’t actually do much to progress Romulan society.

 

“The Enemy” instead is a masterful look at the cycle of violence and these deep enshrined biases that are guiding the decisions of the characters.  Kemper and Piller have a script that keeps every subplot focused on Federation/Romulan relations somehow.  The setup takes the twist of not being about a potential peace treaty, but a planet in Federation space called Galorndon Core plagued by storms that are essentially a death trap.  The Enterprise is responding to a distress signal, Geordi LaForge as part of the away team is stuck and the signal came from Romulans.  The singular injured Romulan, Bochra played by John Snyder, is taken to the Enterprise to recover after he and Geordi have to work together (Geordi is set blind by the planet interfering with his visor), Picard has to contact the Romulan ship that is attempting to recover him by entering Federation space, and Bochra needing blood that only Worf can donate.  The scenes on the planet give LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge his best material for the show.  Geordi is completely sympathetic and a humanist character faced with an alien that thinks his very existence is a mistake: Romulan society does not tolerate disability while humanity (in the far future) doesn’t just allow it, but accommodates it without intentionally “fixing” it.  They have to work together to get to a beacon that the Enterprise (designed by Wesley) is signaling.  This is also where the episode explores the idea that Bochra can change and Romulan society can learn from things: Geordi being left blind means Bochra, who is completely ready to die, has to be altruistic for essentially a greater good he doesn’t actually need.  It’s also the sequences of the episode that David Carson just excels at.  The lighting on the planet set makes great use of shadow, with flashes of blue tinted lightning to help accent the faces of the actors adding to the oppressive atmosphere.  Close-up shots dominate the sequence, possibly because the sets are smaller, but in effect is means that everything is just as tense and terrifying.

 

Once the episode gets back to the Enterprise while Carson’s direction is still great and the episode is tense, that is mainly due to the script and the performances, largely because Carson is shooting on long-standing sets with standard lighting techniques.  It doesn’t quite bring the episode down in terms of quality, it just loses some of the tightness of the first act.  On the other hand, when the plot shifts to asking if Worf should donate his blood to heal a different Romulan found by the away team while Geordi is still trapped on the planet we get a secondary positive attitude towards the Romulans from Riker and Crusher: Riker briefly seeing that the Romulans could be like the Klingons which Jonathan Frakes is great at, but more impactfully Gates McFadden as Dr. Crusher gets some of her best material thus far appealing to Worf’s sense of humanity and her own duty to do no harm.  The Romulan is a patient and patients have a right to care, despite being enemies of the Federation and the Enterprise.  The script doesn’t have her really pressure Worf into giving his blood, she advises him to but the text and McFadden’s performance is clear that it is entirely his choice.  Michael Dorn as Worf is another major focus here, the episode emphasizing that Worf’s hangups are a result of his childhood trauma and those feelings while immoral are not invalid.  It is a problem that Worf is going to have to eventually work through, and the twist of the knife is that the Romulan dies before Worf can actually make the decision.  This means that “The Enemy”, despite having a conclusion on Picard’s soldiers, is an episode that doesn’t actually resolve the tension.

 

Speaking of Picard, he is also a character given to the negative side of outlook towards the Romulans.  He is more levelheaded than Worf, at least on the surface, but the Romulans in Picard’s own mind are enemies.  They are the ones breaking the treaties and violating the Neutral Zone, the excuses that a ship just happened to go off course into Federation space.  The episode does leave this particular plot point unresolved, it is very possible that Tomalak, the Romulan commander coming to recover the ship that drifted to Galorndon Core, is preparing something violent towards the Federation under the guide of the Romulan Empire.  The outcome of this doesn’t actually matter, it’s all about Picard having to navigate this diplomacy when there are lives on the line that he does not fundamentally care for.  Yes, Geordi is in danger and Picard cares about him, but not the Romulans.  Patrick Stewart gives this particularly layered performance, underlined with nothing but frustration towards both the Romulans and the difficulties of saving Geordi without endangering anyone else in the crew.  Everything is just bubbling and boiling over, while like with Worf’s plot has a conclusion but doesn’t have a stable resolution.  It’s closer, there are no more deaths and Geordi and Bochra both get saved and returned to their ships, but there’s more to delve into and that’s just the perfect note to end on.

 

Overall, “The Enemy” is underrated, largely not being discussed despite clearly laying foundation for where at the very least Michael Piller wants to see Star Trek: The Next Generation actually go.  It’s an episode interested in examining tolerance and cooperation that is intentional in not resolving its central conflicts.  The bold choice is not to invalidate trauma despite knowing that lashing out because of that is generally immoral and forces the characters to sit with that without showing if they will change, opening up character arcs and setting them into motion while still resolving the general arc of the episode for the characters.  9/10.

Booby Trap by: Ron Roman, Michael Piller, and Richard Danus from a story by: Michael Wagner and Ron Roman and directed by: Gabrielle Beaumont

 

“Booby Trap” is written by: Ron Roman, Michael Piller, and Richard Danus, from a story by: Michael Wagner and Ron Roman, and is directed by: Gabrielle Beaumont.  It was produced under production code 154, was the 6^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 54^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 30, 1989.

 

“Booby Trap” is a conflicted episode.  Structurally, it is one that works fairly well: the three credited writers have an A-plot of the Enterprise being slowly drained by an ancient battle site that the crew has to escape and a B-plot of Geordi La Forge being unable to find a romantic relationship before slowly being lost in a holodeck program he creates of Leah Brahms, an engineer responsible for the design of warp drive.  This B-plot is quite a weird one, it’s essentially a love story between Geordi and a computer, yet the script doesn’t ever play this as a particularly weird thing to happen.  Now much of the issue here is actually in the setup, the pre-credits sequence is Geordi on a date that goes wrong, in terms of the text he is friend zoned by his romantic interest.  When he has to create the program of Dr. Brahms, he asks the computer to add personality to the reconstruction so it isn’t just a computer, and creating it in the first place is Geordi’s own attempt to work through the titular booby trap.  The episode does not do anything to really examine the fact that Dr. Brahms isn’t a real person, she’s a reconstruction of a person and is fairly explicitly limited by the power of the holodeck.  She does not get her own agency or real desires, her function in the plot is to give information and be a romantic foil for Geordi.  This is also the case for the woman Geordi is on a date with in the episode’s cold open, she gets a name but after this sequence she just disappears for the plot.  The rest of the female cast in the episode is also largely sidelined because the A-plot isn’t really a character exploration, that’s what Geordi’s B-plot is meant to accomplish.  Invoking the friend zone is clearly something of its time for the episode, this was made in 1989 after all, but it is an episode where there is absolutely no examination of personal dynamics.  There is exactly one scene where you think there is going to be an unpacking of the tropes, Guinan makes an appearance and gives Geordi some advice that is the fairly decent piece of you are overthinking a romantic relationship.

 

The trouble comes with the fact that the romantic viewpoint here is one of objectification, the consideration is completely on Geordi and not on the feelings of either potential romantic partner.  Now some of this is down to the amount of people working on this story: the script is credited to Ron Roman, Michael Piller, and Richard Danus but the idea is credited to Roman and Michael Wagner (who had left the show at this point).  The most likely scripts for production are a draft by Roman and Danus before Michael Piller reworked things to the version that eventually made it on screen.  There are clearly a lot of people attempting to steer the episode in one direction therefore losing some of the potential thematic clarity.  That isn’t to say the subplot is poorly presented, it isn’t.  LeVar Burton and Susan Gibney both have quite a bit of chemistry and share the screen well, the episode even ending on a romantic moment with the idea that sometimes its important to turn off technology in relation to the A-plot.  There is also a sense that the romantic relationship isn’t quite resolved, it’s just left on this almost unspoken note between the two characters.  Geordi is given more confidence in his romantic pursuits but that’s all the ending really does.  The final lines don’t actually say anything about the relationship which is perhaps the biggest problem because in the end it’s a neutral thing, leaning towards positive.

 

The script does surprise with the amount of humor it contains.  Both Guinan and Picard as characters get these great little comedic character moments: Whoopi Goldberg gets to have fun discussing how Guinan is into bald men while Patrick Stewart gets a bit fitting of his particular brand of Britishness as Picard adores ships in bottles.  The latter is a running gag that gives Worf and Data this hilarious one-two punch of Worf not playing with ships and Data not ever being a boy.  Its these little moments that help the audience get through the more uncomfortable nature of the B-plot.  The rest of the A-plot is also fun, Gabrielle Beaumont’s direction on the episode is quite economic, favoring longer shots to allow the actors to just perform the danger while Ron Jones providing the score adds to the tension to a lot of the more dialogue heavy scenes.  As an A-plot it isn’t particularly deep, it’s just a nice little science fiction scenario of an ancient trap being left in space that attracts the Enterprise.  It does feel like something that the original series could easily have accomplished and done, but that’s just about it, it’s an interesting idea and a perfectly fine plot.

 

Overall, “Booby Trap” is an episode that when everything is said and done is perfectly fine.  The A-plot is at the very least a fairly standard science fiction plot executed well while the B-plot becomes more of a mire to wade through its implications.  The script does feel like it is in the middle of a period of transition between production teams yet again after Michael Wagner left, but it’s well shot, well scored, and well-acted.  There is another example of Star Trek not treating its female characters well, reducing them to objects and completely sidelining the main female cast members in the episode which is sadly becoming par for the course.  As an episode, however, it’s likely one that’s just going to go in the background of generic Star Trek: The Next Generation.  5/10.

Jubilee by: Robert Shearman

 

Jubilee was written by: Robert Shearman, based on his audio story of the same name.  It was the 195^th story to be novelized by: BBC Books.

 

Jubilee more than The Chimes of Midnight, is Robert Shearman’s real tribute to the Target novelizations of his childhood.  Despite being published in a hardcover format and boasting a more standard 200-page count, Jubilee is short.  Publish this as a paperback and it would be the length of the standard Target novelization.  That doesn’t mean Shearman is a slouch with writing, far from it, but it does mean that he is distilling his story down to not so much the base components, that was essentially what Dalek was, but down to the emotions and the rage at the world that has gotten worse since 2003.  It is palpable on practically every page that Shearman is writing this in a world that has freely, through election given up so much of its own control over its government.  Nigel Rochester hasn’t changed in the 22 years since Big Finish Productions released Jubilee on CD, he is still the madman who believes he is the hero in his own story: he is only pretending to be evil, you see, he would much rather be off on his own selling apples.  Miriam Rochester wishes to overthrow the regime only to install a Dalek so she doesn’t have to make any of her own choices.  Evelyn Smythe is given an almost negative light at the beginning of the novel, she really does believe by the end that her history is the better one than this fascist 2003 regime.  The Doctor is the passive observer, slowly bleeding into his other self that has gone insane and to see the mocking, sexy parody of the dozens of incarnations on-screen.

 

The lack of choices being the source of humanity’s problems is central to Shearman’s thesis of Jubilee.  There is a moment when describing the elections that instilled this fascist dynasty was a simple yes/no referendum in a reference not so subtly pointing towards the United Kingdom’s referendum to leave the European Union.  Much of the story is framed through this lens of complete inaction and lack of identity: the names given to many of the supporting characters in the original audio are stripped away, this society doesn’t have need for names, names must be earned after service to the state.  The citizens of Britain are bodies to be led to the slaughter, crowds to jeer, workers to control the best of all possible worlds.  In removing the names, it is certain that some of the cruelties from the original audio are removed, but in their place is that smoothing over of identity that feels somehow more cruel.  It certainly makes the Dalek more pitiable when Shearman explores what the Dalek life is, this Dalek is one of the oldest as it has been kept alive.  The average Dalek lifespan is six months of hate followed by a swift death continuing to poison the universe.  This means in the adaptation of the fourth episode, when the Dalek invasion reasserts itself, Shearman has the Dalek slowly feel a sense of superiority to the Supreme leading the invasion. 

 

Overall, Jubilee again feels somehow more powerful in the format of prose because Shearman is making the reader sit with the ideas at play.  It’s somehow more harrowing with that writing style that while full of wit, lacks much of the comedy.  10/10.