The Emerald City of Oz by: L. Frank Baum

 

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up would receive it’s American debut in 1905.  Its place in literature is an integral text in the understanding of adolescence and the need for children to grow up: at the end of the play Wendy Darling takes her brothers back home while the emotionally stunted Peter Pan stays behind in Neverland.  Peter Pan does not leave fairyland, he never grows up and when he returns again to take her back she refuses to go because being stuck in childhood means he forgets things left behind.  He is stuck.  The Emerald City of Oz, published in 1910 is a different take on leaving fairyland.  L. Frank Baum proposes that perhaps fairyland is a better place to be than the real world, that sometimes childlike logic and especially kindness can have a better outcome than the trials of adulthood and society.  The Emerald City of Oz, it is important to note, isn’t entirely taking on a child who refuses to grow up, but adults who have lost their inner child.  The inciting incident of The Emerald City of Oz is that Dorothy’s Uncle Henry has lapsed payments on the farmhouse, rebuilt after the cyclone in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Henry and Em don’t believe Dorothy actually went to Oz multiple times, were happy to entertain her stories since despite disappearing she always managed to turn up again safe and sound.  They are adults, adults don’t believe in lands of make believe where everybody gets along with everybody else and nobody actually has to do work that they don’t want to.  They get the grand tour of the country, encountering wonderous people from living bread, to living utensils, and of course cameos from the most famous of the Oz characters.

 

Going to the fairyland of Oz means that the grey characters of Kansas have to relearn exactly what it means to be a child.  It also means an escape from having to fend for themselves.  The farm being taken away because of bad crops and economic depression is explicitly stated in the book to be a problem of capitalism as a system.  Baum does not give faces to the members of the bank which is an important detail, dehumanizing something as grand as the system despite the adults initially denying the existence of fairyland as a utopia where everybody is provided for.  Baum also does not forget the bank taking the farm, when the Nome King invades Dorothy does propose everybody go back to the farm so Baum can make a point that a good society isn’t one where you abandon your fellow people in times of hardship.  Aunt Em and Uncle Henry maintain disbelief even while on the road throughout the Land of Oz, though Baum goes through lengths to show how this disbelief unravels slowly.  He keeps their reactions at this very adult distance of people who won’t deny the reality of their eyes, but still have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing these fantastic things.  There is also a point that life should be lived doing things, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry do want to find some work in Oz even if it isn’t for money.  They cannot spend their days sitting around doing nothing, even traveling is doing something like building community with different peoples of Oz.  Also the Wizard of Oz can now do actual magic which is the closest thing to a character in Oz getting character development so far.

 

The different places and peoples of Oz is following the same structure as Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz, becoming repetitive just before Baum gives Dorothy a slightly longer adventure being lost from the party.  Bunbury is a fun diversion, but the real parallel is Baum swapping adventures with the protagonists by following the Nome King, given the name Roquat the Red, allying himself with other creatures who are not deadly afraid of eggs.  General Guph is the Nome sent out to recruit allies, but rhetorically this gives The Emerald City of Oz this little edge of danger, a ticking clock that there is an invasion coming that the protagonists don’t actually know about until the final act.  It is a plot that also follows the structure of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz, but in reverse.  There’s actually a lot of humor in this telling, however, as Guph often has to make these lofty promises to other armies of land and people under subjugation.  Baum positions the Nome King as an authoritarian once again despite some of the humor, he is wicked because he would take away the autonomy away from the Ozites.  Guph promises some of the allied armies with as many as 20,000 slaves which is particularly fascinating as Baum is an author who lambasted war in general, this book concluding without bloodshed but trickery.  This does contradict his views of the settler colonialism of the American west of course, but people are complicated and often hypocritical in his views.  There is implication that slavery is worse than death, something that likely would have been instilled in Baum in childhood growing up in the Union during the American Civil War.

 

Overall, The Emerald City of Oz is a return to form after The Road to Oz.  It is Baum’s attempt at replicating Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”, to say goodbye and go out with a bang while actively being in conversation with what it means to go to fairyland and away from reality.  The Emerald City of Oz has several ideas around community building and making fairyland a place where people are allowed to live together, safely, free from the oppressive nature of selfish rule and by extension money.  It works best when it eschews the established formula, even if it does this by paralleling the formula between protagonists and antagonists.  Not quite the perfect return to form, but a very close to it.  8/10.

Brothers by: Rick Berman and directed by: Rob Bowman

 

“Brothers” is written by: Rick Berman and is directed by: Rob Bowman.  It was produced under production code 177, was the 3^rd episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 77^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 8, 1990.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation is Brent Spiner’s world and we are just observing it from the outside.  “Brothers” is Season 4’s first Data focused episode and the first episode written by Rick Berman, the executive producer who would be responsible for Star Trek as a franchise after Gene Roddenberry until the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005.  Berman is a controversial figure, believing Star Trek needed to be fully adherent to the vision of Gene Roddenberry, that is through the lens of the things that Gene Roddenberry put on-screen during the original series and the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation when he was alive, not necessarily the philosophy behind many of those decisions.  That is largely a discussion for other episodes when he is more in charge fully, but “Brothers” is an episode that shows Berman isn’t incompetent when it comes to telling a story.  “Brothers” is an episode that asks Brent Spiner to play a triple role: Data is taken over by a signal bringing him to the hideaway of his creator, Dr. Noonian Soong with his brother Lore following soon after, all to explore essentially a family dynamic between two brothers at odds while an oblivious and almost selfish father who sees his creations as objects.

 

Soong fits the stereotypical mad scientist: he’s an old man with frizzy white hair stuck in a home that is also a laboratory.  He’s been hiding on this planet for years and the episode very much positions him as this absent father who does not really care for his creations.  He cannot see either Data or Lore’s perspectives on life: early on in their conversations he expected Data to follow in his own footsteps and become a scientist instead of entering Starfleet and wasn’t even aware Lore was “active”.  By the end of the episode, Soong doesn’t actually learn the error of his ways or anything, he brought Data back to give him emotions and essentially complete his life’s work which is thwarted by Lore taking the emotion chip for himself.  That twist is particularly fantastic because narratively it is Lore acting out, almost rightfully, to trick a father who does not actually care about him.  He cares about Data, even asks Data to reconcile with Lore on his own deathbed seeing an error at the very last minute of his life, not properly, and the episode is aware of this because Spiner as Data gets the final shot contemplating his brother silently which is genuinely fantastic.  Spiner as Soong, really playing up the madness of a man who cares about one of his children and almost nothing else.  Spiner as Lore is also picking up right where the performance in “Datalore” left off, and because there isn’t actually a big scheme to take over the Enterprise or anything here, just eventually get that chip.  Berman’s script is one that is reliant on dialogue to communicate the story and obviously the performance of one actor.  Rob Bowman is in the director’s chair and his dynamic sense of blocking guides the heavy dialogue sequences while juggling the triple role.  There is a tendency in drama to employ a technique called backacting where you will have two actors having a dialogue scene with their faces towards the camera.  Because of the triple role, Bowman cannot rely on that, instead often times we’ll keep Data or Lore in shadows while the focus is on Soong before setting up reverse shots with Soong completely out of frame.  This is likely because of the different makeup job on Soong being more difficult to recreate with a stand in since it’s a new makeup, while the Data makeup is for the team been distilled down to a science.  Visually this does make the episode surprisingly dynamic, especially with Bowman also having the camera move through scenes with several walk and talks to keep the dialogue moving even on a smaller set.

 

The important plot point here is that both Data and Lore were summoned by Soong against their wills, the first act of the story is this horrific sequence of Data outside of his control performing a mutiny on the Enterprise.  This mutiny is quiet, starting by making life support fail with the pretense of an accident so the rest of the crew abandons the bridge and then locks the rest of the crew out of the controls.  He does this silently, Spiner not being allowed to change his face enough but the minute expressions just add to the uncanny valley of the character and the danger of the situation.  The script also adds this secondary tension of a child on the Enterprise in quarantine because of a prank of his brother’s, an obvious parallel to the Data/Lore relationship, This is the B-plot of the episode and the real shame is that these brothers are dropped largely after the first act, only to come back at the very end, because there isn’t actually a whole lot of drama there, but it really should be resolved before we get into the meat of the Soong plot.  It’s actually quite nice to see Dr. Crusher be a doctor and it once again allows Gates McFadden material to be a full character, even if the role of doctor bleeds slightly into role of mother as well.  The tension is that the sick child could die if the Enterprise doesn’t get to the nearest Starbase because of a parasite acquired from eating a plant cultivated on the ship after a prank gone wrong.  It’s an effective B-plot, made more so by Michael Piller’s inclusion of Lore in the plot as that wasn’t in Berman’s original script, reflecting that Berman is a producer over a writer.

 

Overall, “Brothers” is less an examination of brothers, but of the issues a father can create in their children from the viewpoint of being absent, an added layer that writer Rick Berman likely wasn’t entirely intending to be there.  What’s elevating a good script is Brent Spiner’s ability to play three parts at once and carry the entire episode on his back.  8/10.

The Satan Pit by: Matt Jones

 

The Satan Pit was written by: Matt Jones, based on his episodes “The Impossible Planet” and the episode of the same name.  It was the 202^nd story to be novelized by BBC Books.

 

It’s no secret that the BBC decision to continue novelizations of the revival is one mainly aimed at the fans of Doctor Who.  The home media market already started to make the novelizations at least partially obsolete in the late 1980s, and by the time of the revival in 2005 and streaming video being just around the corner, there was no reason to really continue them.  That means that often the best of these revival novelizations do something to set themselves apart from just a standard retelling of the original episode.  Matt Jones’ The Satan Pit takes the approach of not centering the Doctor and Rose, instead telling the story near exclusively after the fact from the perspective of the three survivors with one interlude, placed just after the adaptation of “The Impossible Planet” from the perspectives of the detective and corporate representative interrogating our protagonists, and one scene from the perspective of the Doctor for the actual confrontation with the Beast.  That latter scene is the closest the novel gets to Jones just taking the script and translating it into straight prose, though he is very much interested in exploring the Doctor’s love of Rose Tyler through subtle amendments to the dialogue tags, channeling David Tennant’s performance into the prose.  This should annoy me, the Doctor in my mind should be an asexual character, however, Jones sells it particularly well because it’s one of those romances where “I love you” isn’t actually said.  There’s also the insecurity that the Doctor isn’t able to get Rose back home, he did promise her mother and it is eating him up from the inside.  Jones makes it explicit that the Beast is psychically enhancing everybody’s fears and trauma’s on the base, including the Doctor emphasizing the Doctor as fallable but not human.  His mind may work differently, but he is against something far bigger than him.

 

Jones is also careful about when he gives the Doctor his scene, instead of putting it in chronological order, it’s moved towards the end.  Ida, Danny, and Zach have actually finished their individual interrogations and we as the audience see a portion of their trial.  For the reader this has the effect of a mysterious resolution, theoretically we don’t know exactly how they got out, especially Ida who was unconscious for the climax of the story.  There was a possibility of ending it before the trial, and letting the audience not know the fate of the three, even if Big Finish Productions have brought them all back in their Torchwood range.  The trial sequence does make up for it in general.  Jones brings in ideas from “Planet of the Ood”, that the Ood are actually freed by the Doctor and Donna in between the end of “The Satan Pit” and the survivors making it back to Earth, and The End of Time, with the psychic link of the Ood to the Doctor specifically near the end of his life and the visit to people the Tenth Doctor had previously met included as an epilogue.

 

The Satan Pit’s worldbuilding is its biggest success.  Because we are in the heads of the supporting characters, many of the scenes that are just the Doctor and Rose that couldn’t be overheard are either omitted completely or are trimmed down to what could theoretically be on security cameras.  This makes the pair more distant and the supporting characters, especially Ida and Danny, as our real humans here.  Their traumas are always just below the surface of the mind, the Beast bringing them there for as long as they’ve been on the base, even before the beginning of the story.  It also adds this pressure of a society not so much on the brink of collapse, but one built on a capitalistic empire.  The interrogations take the events of the story as ridiculous, something cooked up between the three survivors for some unknown and frankly impossible game.  Jones uses it to reflect the current system of capitalism, stretched quite thin while being under the thumb of corporations who only care about the capital and not the human life.  Jones also posits an almost religious like fanaticism forming around the Doctor because of the destruction of property which while slightly silly feels almost like a commentary on certain aspects of internet culture.

 

Overall, The Satan Pit is a riveting read.  There is a sense that Jones isn’t actually writing for Doctor Who fans, which makes sense as he has written books that are meant to be for the general public even if they were technically spin-offs.  Swapping out the protagonists means the novel is a fundamentally different experience, with the focus on different aspects of the story and the society in which it is set and reflecting upon.  It changes much of the horror to work in the prose setting over two episodes of television.  10/10.

The Road to Oz by: L. Frank Baum

 

L. Frank Baum is clearly bored with the Land of Oz in The Road to Oz. Children once again demanded more Oz stories and he wrote this one within a year of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.  It follows the same formula: Dorothy finds herself on the way to Oz with a young male companion, an older mentor figure, and a wildcard character through magical circumstances.  After several misadventures with several different people, Ozma eventually gets involved to get our characters to the Emerald City before the mentor decides to stay in Oz and Dorothy makes it back home again.  The going back home again is literally the final line of the book, Dorothy and Toto going to sleep in Oz with the promise of waking back up in Kansas.  The Road to Oz lacks stakes, the goal to get to Oz is for Ozma’s birthday party and nothing more.  This is after the journey is well underway, until it is mentioned by one of the people met along the way the aimless nature of the wanderings is what dominates the book.

 

This time the inciting incident is one with surrealist potential but it gets dropped pretty early on.  The mentor figure is the Shaggy Man, an early example of the kindly hobo, who just asks Dorothy for directions to Butterfield, so he can avoid it, before they both slip out of reality down a trail of several roads.  The Shaggy Man is a character who fees distinctly early 20^th century, reflecting this attitude that is arguably kinder to a certain type of homeless person.  There is a distinction between hobo, a tramp, and a bum is this: a hobo being an almost respectable drifter who works while a tramp is a simple non-working traveler unless they must, and a bum neither travels nor works.  The Shaggy Man is not a bum, he is largely respectable with a proto-communist view on money and takes Dorothy’s kindness as given for being a good, American girl.  Baum’s economic philosophies coming out is nothing new with how previous books have characterized Oz as at this utopian monarchy, though The Road to Oz claiming there is no money in Oz should be fascinating.  Baum plays it off as just a normal thing, but does not actually explore it beyond that.  It’s also not just Oz, it seems the lands surrounding Oz also function without money.  When I discussed Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz there was a general sense that the thematic resonance of the previous Oz books was gone, and The Road to Oz does not actually improve matters.  This lack of money is a hint at some thematic relevance, there are a few lines that at least make the reader think what life might be like if people just helped each other instead of relying on the exchange of money for goods and services, but it’s a background detail.

 

The other two characters joining Dorothy, the Shaggy Man, and Toto are Polychrome, daughter of the Rainbow, and Button-Bright, a fool.  Polychrome is a perfectly fine character, fitting in well with the fantastical vibe that Baum hangs these novels on, but Button-Bright is one of those characters meant to be annoying and succeeds in being annoying.  The character is a commentary on the idea of the psychological blank slate, taking the world at face value and not really having his own sense of identity.  The individual adventures are also quite rapid here, Baum just stopping them whenever he gets bored and despite tributing A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a portion of the book, none of them particularly stick out when everything is said and done.  The final adventure is essentially a list of cameos from previous Oz characters, almost preternaturally quoting The Wizard of Oz 30 years too early.  That and including characters from other books Baum has written, a marketing stunt to increase sales of the books Baum clearly enjoyed writing more.  At least Jack Pumpkinhead’s cameo has this darkly comic edge of having several heads that have rotten and having his own graveyard.  The Road to Oz reads as a once great author falling because his readers are almost too demanding.

Overall, The Road to Oz is a book that at the very least might be enjoyable to young children who want more Oz stories, but there really isn’t much for even the slightly older children to really latch onto.  Devoting parts of the book to an advertisement for other work by Baum while including a surface level analysis of communism is at least a funny choice, Baum financially wasn’t doing as well at selling non-Oz books so the need to market is sadly there.  The road to Oz is a long one and one that is about as generic as the series has gotten, reminding readers of better stories instead of telling a story of its own.  4/10.

Invaders from Gantac! by: Alan Grant with art by: Martin Griffiths and Cam Smith and letters by: Gordon Robson

 

“Invaders from Gantac!” is written by: Alan Grant with art by: Martin Griffiths and Cam Smith, and lettering by: Gordon Robson.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 148-150 (April-June 1989) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! by Panini Books.

 

While Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle were writing and drawing Detective Comics for DC, the former was also closely linked with John Wagner, writer of early Doctor Who Weekly comics.  “Invaders from Gantac!” is Alan Grant being poached by the Doctor Who Magazine team for three issues.  Grant doesn’t actually have some big connection to Doctor Who, but Grant was one of the earliest writers for 2000AD making it odd that it took this long to actually get him onto Doctor Who.  The same can be said for artists Martin Griffiths and Cam Smith who provide the visuals for “Invaders from Gantac!”.  “Invaders from Gantac!” is also notable for being like “Culture Shock!”, “Planet of the Dead”, and “Echoes of the Mogor!” that it is interested in being a Doctor Who story and not a backdoor pilot for a different series.  Alan Grant had a job to do and he was going to do it.  He wanted to write a story about an alien invasion, so he wrote a story about an alien invasion.  It’s a relief to get a story that is just trying to be Doctor Who because the sense of the early Seventh Doctor comic run is that there’s almost a shame in telling Doctor Who stories, possibly because the magazine’s sales were down and the costs to produce the magazine were quite high.  There were even talks of cancelling the comic feature of the magazine while the Seventh Doctor was still in his television tenure.  “Invaders from Gantac!” released during the gap between Season 25 and 26, the show was still in production with Ghost Light, the final serial in production order.  It’s the last comic released while the original run was in production, production would finish when the strip picked back up in issue #152 production on Ghost Light would have completed.

 

“Invaders from Gantac!” does have a problem, however.  While it’s a story that’s not ashamed to be a Doctor Who story, it’s a standard Doctor Who story.  The Gantacians are invading Earth to find a treasure for their great leader, implementing a bureaucratic martial law that’s played largely for comedy but at least is something to define them.  The twist of the story is that the treasure they want is on the other side of the galaxy which is quite the funny twist, but it doesn’t actually add anything.  The Doctor still beats them anyways with the help of new friend Leapy, a tramp who has been caught in the situation of martial law.  Grant does try making Leapy a slight commentary on how the homeless are overlooked by society so that’s something, but he’s also defined by his many fleas for comedy.  Grant is also largely familiar with the Doctor as the character in Season 24, making jokes and mixing metaphors which while slightly annoying is again at least a characterization of the Seventh Doctor.  The plot also makes use of being slightly longer than recent stories, having three issues so there’s actually some development to the Gantacians as a society even if they are a basic parody of bureaucracy, them getting the planet wrong is technically a joke about how things slip through the cracks when things are gone over too many times.

 

Overall, “Invaders from Gantac!” is at the very least fine, it’s better than a lot of what the strip had been doing by being an actual Doctor Who story, but it’s not going to live on as one of the greats or anything.  The Doctor is fine and the Gantacians are at least fun enough for a joke, but this is a story that’s fairly easy to forget in a sea of at best forgettable stories.  5/10.

Aliens of London by: Joseph Lidster

 

Aliens of London was written by: Joseph Lidster, based on the episode of the same name and “World War Three” by Russell T. Davies.  It was the 201^st story to be novelized by BBC Books.

 

The farting comedy of “Aliens of London” and “World War Three” is something that largely pulls the first half of the story down due to the tonal dissonance of commentary on the Iraq War and the search for weapons of mass destruction.  When it was announced as one in a batch of novelizations for 2026 there was ever so slight apprehension that Aliens of London would lean further into this comedy.  Joseph Lidster taking the helm, however, is one of relief because Lidster’s style is exclusively dramatic.  If Lidster was to write a comedy, it would be a black comedy.  Aliens of London is a story that does not actually change much to story, like many of the Target novelizations for the revival it’s far easier to add to the story than take away.  Tonally, however, much of the fart jokes are outright removed.  They are still a part of the story, the Slitheen still fart because of the compression into the human suits, but Lidster aims this as unsettling.  It happens at largely bad times and Lidster keeps these scenes in the perspective of stressed characters, emphasizing the general disrespect that politicians can have for their underlings which adds quite a bit to the commentary against the government that Davies included in the television story.  There’s still the issues of the fart jokes happening, the over the top camp lines are still there, but they are underplayed in the prose and added with a purpose.  Sure it’s enough to stop this from being one of the best novelizations, but it certainly goes a long way to make the half adapting “Aliens of London” more bearable.

Joseph Lidster is also a writer who understands how to make the reader see how dark the Slitheen are.  One of the additions is a prologue scene from the perspective of the pig who the Slitheen use to fake their crash landing.  The pig is named Barry and was just living his life on a farm before he was plucked by the Slitheen for their plans, with Lidster also having the Doctor tribute him in the epilogue.  The Slitheen themselves are also positioned far more as dangerous hunters, Lidster’s darker tendencies being added as the individual Slitheen spending a year on Earth means victims of people who would be overlooked by society.  They have a need to hunt and kill, it adds this extra sinister layer to the aliens.  It’s more in line with what Davies would do with “Boom Town” but with Lidster’s prose it’s explicitly dark with carefully placed descriptors of the adrenaline and the blood.  There’s also this added layer of hedonism to the Slitheen, the one being Oliver Charles had several affairs with men and women, killing Oliver’s wife and his liaisons when the plan is put in motion because he is found at the last minute.  It’s presented as one of the first moments of alien activity in the novel, creating a gruesome yet callous first impression that just works.  The high emotions is something Lidster chases, letting Jackie Tyler get room to break down silently in an added scene because she was in fact ready to give up after a year of Rose being missing.

 

There is a little bit of expanded fan references, however, that are focused on to various degrees in the telling of this novelization.  The most obvious is the use of Toshiko Sato, given some scenes at both Torchwood Three and Torchwood One.  Lidster cannot help but include Jack Harkness and Yvonne Hartman in various capacities.  Jack’s scenes do work to expand that little continuity snafu in Torchwood with Owen as the medic, but more importantly it actually helps Tosh be a bit of a better character.  The Yvonne scenes are just a touch too indulgent, it’s filling in things that are made issues by future stories.  In the televised story there is a minor character credited as Muriel Frost, a character from the Doctor Who Magazine comics that is confirmed to indeed be that character by Lidster, referencing meeting the Seventh Doctor explicitly which is slightly better than the Yvonne appearances.  It at least is just expanding a character on television slightly and making the reader care just a little bit because the Doctor actually remembers and acknowledges her, something that makes sense to avoid on television since this is a story from the first series of the revival.

 

Overall, Aliens of London is a novelization that reads more like a political thriller while maintaining the integrity of the original scripts.  The couple of trims are in aid of creating a less comedic tone, emphasizing the drama and anguish of even the regulars.  There is an emphasis on humanity even if Lidster occasionally lets the fan brain take over and add in a couple of cameos, though mostly cameos with some substance to them.  There are still some weaknesses inherent in the story being told, but it is a great little read.  8/10.

Family by: Ronald D. Moore and directed by: Les Landau

 

“Family” is written by: Ronald D. Moore, based in part on a premise by: Susanne Lambdin and Bryan Stewart, and is directed by: Les Landau.  It was produced under production code 178, was the 2^nd episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 76^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 1, 1990.

 

“The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” has a final shot that by all conventions of television is the ending of that arc.  Picard has been saved, changed by the experience, and looks out upon the world below with uncertainty about where to continue.  The next episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation should be business as usual, that is how television works.  The writing room would have the awareness of how the characters have changed by the events of the previous episodes, but they are not continuing.  Showrunner Michael Piller decided, however, that there should actually be a follow up.  We shouldn’t go back to the status quo, The Best of Both Worlds was hell for our characters and they need to heal from a lot of that.  “Family” is the result of healing: not written under Piller’s pen but to Ronald D. Moore, though some material is adapted from an unused script from Susanne Lambdin and Bryan Stewart.  As an episode, this is a different beast for Star Trek as a franchise, playing out as a straightforward drama exploring three characters’ relationships with their families in the aftermath of “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”.  There is no big alien threat, the Enterprise is not malfunctioning, and the rest of the crew has shore leave.  There are some repairs occurring, but that is Moore’s excuse to keep the Enterprise on Earth for an extended period of time.  The conflict of the episode is entirely interpersonal tension, something that Gene Roddenberry would have absolutely hated as he fully believed that people would not have interpersonal conflict in the future.  Roddenberry by this point has been proven wrong, his outlook while utopian is not conductive to good drama.  Moore attempted to create a science fiction conflict in the episode, but was unsatisfied so kept it as 45 minutes of drama over anything else.

 

This is the third episode in a row where Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard is given the central and technically impressive performance of the episode.  Picard goes to his family’s vineyard to visit his brother Robert and his family, played by Jeremy Kemp, Samantha Eggar, and David Tristan Birkin.  Robert is the younger brother who never really managed to match up to Jean-Luc’s lofty ambitions, but he is also a man of the world, maintaining the vineyard and having a conservative attitude towards technological progress at odds with his brother.  Kemp and Stewart immediately read as brothers, the former caring for the latter though being unable to see exactly the trauma that Picard has gone through.  Stewart plays Picard in every scene as a broken man putting on a brave face, ready to run away from the Enterprise so he doesn’t have to face the unknown of space.  It’s mirrored with the potential unknown under the Earth, but Moore’s script is adamant that that isn’t actually the unknown.  There aren’t new civilizations under the ground, but the Borg aren’t there.  He would be safe, he wouldn’t have to face it.  “Family” is a masterclass in writing that implication, there’s only one line where Picard actually acknowledges he is broken at the climax of his arc in the episode.  It’s all in Stewart’s performance of a man who sees his nephew adore him and the idea of going into Starfleet while not being able to encourage him because of how broken he is.  “Family” also does not posit that Picard is fixed by the end, but he is on a road to healing.  Setting his arc at his family’s vineyard also gives the episode a distinct look, director Les Landau making full advantage of the location shooting.  The California vineyards being used to double for France is a visual representation of what the Borg took away from Picard, turning him into a sterile member of the collective.  It also just makes “Family” a gorgeous episode to watch after what’s been a series of largely studio bound episodes.

 

Picard’s story is only one family being explored here.  While it is the heaviest, Moore parallel’s Picard’s trauma with Worf’s ostracization from the Klingons in “Sins of the Father”, brining in his adoptive parents played by Theodore Bikel and Georgia Brown.  Michael Dorn as Worf has always been one of those layered performances in the show, and this episode is no exception.  Worf’s parents love him deeply.  Sure, they have a tendency to be a bit embarrassing and a little overbearing, Bikel and Brown give performances of doting parents.  They understand their son isn’t a human, respect whatever path he was going to take to embrace Klingon culture, and are deeply proud.  Worf doesn’t have to face his problems alone.  It’s this plotline that hits me in a very personal place because Moore’s script clearly understands the importance of independence from one’s parents but also keeping that support.  Worf didn’t want his parents to visit the Enterprise, but in the end he’s happy they are there because he doesn’t have to face his dishonor alone.  The conflict here is also coming with this slight wall that Worf puts up throughout his parents’ visit, though it’s not one where it comes to blows.  It’s there to explore a relationship and Moore’s script also acknowledges where Sergey and Helena, that is Worf’s parents, can actually be overbearing quite a bit and also need to take a step back.  The added nuance is nice for a show from the 1990s.

 

The third plot is the smallest, it’s Crusher finding possessions she left on Earth including a message from Wesley’s father for him made when he was a baby.  Gates McFadden and Wil Wheaton in this episode are given perhaps the smallest subplot, but it’s also one with the biggest impact.  Wheaton in particular has gone down in history as playing one of the most annoying characters on television, but that’s just not true.  Wesley here is allowed to be a full person, struggling with the decision to view the message and so much of Wheaton’s body language in his final scene is perfect.  McFadden for her part is clearly relishing the material for the third episode in a row allowing Crusher a more proactive role, even if this proactive role is as a concerned mother.  The show is finally allowing Wesley to have his own development and come to his own independence as a parallel to both Worf and Picard’s plots.  These three plots work because they are fully parallel, there is no crossover here.  This is an episode of television that could not be made in today’s production landscape, taking 45 minutes just to look at where our characters are after the last two episodes changed the status quo.

 

Overall, “Family” is the third episode in a row to really take a risk, going against every rule that Gene Roddenberry would set out for Star Trek.  It should be unsurprising that this is a risk that paid off completely, because “Family” is one of those episodes that works because it sits with its emotions.  Were it made today it would be decried as woke propaganda, emasculating our male characters, and that’s why it works so well.  It examines the idea of family and returning to family after experiencing a trauma that you can never truly share with them.  10/10.