Contagion by: Steve Gerber and Beth Woods and directed by: Joseph L. Scanlan

 

“Contagion” is written by: Steve Gerber and Beth Woods and is directed by: Joseph L. Scanlan.  It was produced under production code 137, was the 11^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, the 37^th episode overall, and was broadcast on March 20, 1989.

 

The 1988 Writer’s Guild of America strike truncated the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and in doing so, the production staff went through several changes, often episode by episode in terms of who was in what role, who was hired, and who was fired.  The first four episodes had to be written and put into production incredibly quickly, and this creates a knock on effect for the rest of the season where if there was a viable pitch for an episode it essentially would be accepted and put into production.  It’s not a season with many returning writers, but several of the new writers brought onto staff would only contribute one episode.  “Contagion” is another such episode from the writing team of Steve Gerber and Beth Woods, Gerber being the more notable writer of the pair having created the Marvel character Howard the Duck.  That is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the episode, because “Contagion” is one of those episodes that’s just kind of a standard piece of science fiction.  The biggest influence is drawing on “The Neutral Zone” to continue the Romulan plot that Star Trek: The Next Generation has laid down, by having the Enterprise enter the neutral zone after the Yamato, a ship that also entered the zone which promptly explodes.  There is then a Romulan ship and the contagion of the title is actually a computer virus that despite the crew’s best efforts infects both the Enterprise and the Romulan ship.

 

The premise of a computer virus taking over the Enterprise and slowly destroying things is actually a great idea, very much looking at how computers have changed since the 1960s.  There is also an attempt at writing the episode as cosmic horror, the dialogue at points implying that the virus is both alive and evolving and the eventual reveal that it is from a planet with sufficiently advanced technology.  The addition of the Romulan ship is there to add extra tension as both sides still hate each other and interestingly Gerber and Woods don’t make them work together, but has Picard be the one to actually save the day by restarting their computers.  Yes, this episode resolves with the most common response to tech support of turning the computer off and on again to reset things.  What’s odd is that this is an episode that takes its first half quite slowly, several logs from the Yamato are shown and the mystery is allowed to build.  Then the problem becomes that the resolution of the episode is one that just kind of comes too quickly.  Exacerbated by the episode having quite a few scenes in the first half that really are just repeating what we already know, something that has become a recurring issue for this season in particular.  There’s a brief sequence where Data is dead and resurrected in an artificial attempt to raise the stakes of the episode as it was slowly limping towards its conclusion.  Carolyn Seymour is the guest star of this episode as the Romulan, Taris, giving a particularly memorable performance even if as the primary “human” antagonist she isn’t actually in the episode much.  Joseph L. Scanlan is probably the show’s second best director behind Rob Bowman at this point and he shoots the episode well, at least communicating the emotion of the scenes and the tension even if the plot is fairly weak.

 

Overall, “Contagion” is fine.  It is a perfectly average episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  It takes a premise that is honestly a fantastic one for science fiction in general, however it doesn’t actually do much with the premise despite interesting attempts at worldbuilding of an ancient civilization almost entirely off-screen until the very end of the episode.  It’s stretched too much to really elevate into a good time, but it’s also not an actively bad episode like so many of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first two seasons have been.  5/10.

Camera Obscura by: Lloyd Rose

 

A camera obscura describes how light through a pinhole into a dark space will invert an image projected through the dark interior.  It’s a pinhole image and has had several uses throughout history to teach art, observe eclipses, and eventually during the development of photography and film.  Camera Obscura is Lloyd Rose’s second Doctor Who novel, once again featuring the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji and like her previous novel, The City of the Dead, it is one of the best the series has to offer.  In essence, Rose is exploring the reflection to humanity the Doctor poses, Sabbath as a reflection of the Doctor and their own identities, and in many ways the Victorian origins of the Doctor as a character.  The plot of Camera Obscura is one involving alterations to the timeline, there’s actually a time machine going awry and the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji eventually have to work with Sabbath to stop it and save the day.  Rose’s plot is simple when you actually lay it out, but she does what only can be described as obfuscating beautifully by slowly torturing the Doctor, suffering from the lack of heart and reveal in the novel that it’s in Sabbath linking them intrinsically as similar.  Rose references Victorian and Victorina inspired literature such as “A Scandal in Bohemia”, The Hound of the Baskervilles, the works of Jules Verne, Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige, Harry Houdini, and the works of Edgar Allen Poe all as essential for who the Doctor is.  He has fallen into this terrible depression, the novel putting him further through the ringer, positing that without his second heart he can be grievously injured and nearly die.

 

When a theatrical counterweight is landed on his chest, Fitz and Anji individually lose themselves to their own reflection in each other.  They’re both humans who have been put through their own hell in their own right, neither quite knowing to do without the Doctor but also knowing that the Doctor has been irrational for a while.  Rose doesn’t split the novel into subplots, so Fitz and Anji as characters are there to represent what the Doctor does to people instead of having their own arcs, which could be a problem but Rose never sacrifices what makes them work as characters.  Early in the novel is a fairly classic sequence of logically working through the con of a séance, only to reveal there is something odd actually going on, mainly that Constance Jane is actually possessed.  There is a magician called Octave doing impossible tricks with doubles of himself, a psychiatrist and his evil twin, and Sabbath has saved and hired a female serial killer to be his own assistant in another reflection of the Doctor.  Rose employs a freak show with the Doctor as his own freak, though the freak characters are the representation of normalcy in Camera Obscura.  Many characters have doubles, quite literally splinters due to breaking in the timestream, so that anything happening to one of them happens to the other.  Some are splintered within themselves, as is the case of Jane in an interesting take on dissociative identity disorder, though attributing that to the science fiction aspects of the story manifesting in different ways.

 

Lawrence Miles did a lot of work in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street to establish who Sabbath was, but it’s Lloyd Rose here who really takes the character and makes him work.  He is utterly charming, putting everyone at ease while simultaneously feeling like a predator on the prowl.  The way Rose introduces him and the Doctor both play on similar descriptions to add to the parallels, the prologue and first chapter both taking their time to establish if it’s Sabbath or the Doctor we are following.  There is a sense that you know exactly what Sabbath’s plans are and the power he has over the Doctor, having his heart means that he has claim to part of who the Doctor is.  Camera Obscura under the surface becomes an examination of one’s sense of identity.  That’s why dissociative identity disorder is used in the plot, though it is outdatedly called multiple personality disorder since this is a book from 2002.  The Doctor has to reclaim his identity by the end, he needs to pick himself up through the support of Fitz and Anji.  The implication at the end of the novel is that he is regrowing his second heart to regain his status as Time Lord, because with only one he feels too close to an odd human.  The contempt for humanity is fascinating for the Doctor, yet as Rose presents it, completely in character.  He’s barely a Time Lord and that’s been slowly killing him.

 

Overall, like The City of the Dead and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura is a high concept novel that filters its concepts through incredibly compelling character drama.  The simplicity of Lloyd Rose’s plot once again makes this one of the best novels BBC Books has to offer, and once again is a shame that Rose only wrote four Doctor Who stories.  It’s incredibly imaginative to explore ideas of identity, reflection, and just how the Doctor could never be equal to humanity (he is above us).  10/10.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Path of Vengeance by: Cavan Scott

 

Phase II of Star Wars: The High Republic is meant to mirror the prequel trilogy and that is nowhere more apparent than Path of Vengeance.  Cavan Scott writes this final novel in the phase, mirroring the plot progression of Revenge of the Sith, watching someone fall from where their worldview and everything they love breaks down around them through the manipulation tactics of a charismatic, but obviously evil leader taking control of their culture’s dominant philosophy.   That philosophy just isn’t the Jedi/Sith binary, but the schism that has been developing within the Path of the Open Hand since this phase began.  Path of Vengeance is a young adult novel and paired with Path of Deceit, and now that my reading of the phase is over, it becomes clear that this pair is really where the story arc of the phase succeeds its best.  Convergence and Cataclysm are a pair of books that are more concerned with the actual Jedi than the Path, same with The Battle of Jedha, an audio drama that I ended up listening to because reading Star Wars books are part of a book exchange with my friend.  It’s incredibly interesting to see that the heaviest material and most interesting character exploration is in the pair of young adult novels, the adult novels having the potential to be just as interesting and are just as important, but one of those just didn’t work and suffer from having a writer who wasn’t quite on the same page as everyone else.  Path of Deceit and Path of Vengeance as a duology is honestly just an excellent example of showing someone’s rise, corruption, and fall.

 

Scott had a monumental task laid out before him in writing this, he has to tie up all of the threads knowing that because this is a young adult book, there is inherently a larger audience of adult Star Wars fans who have already committed to The High Republic and the traditional young adult audience, also likely a majority fans, who likely wouldn’t be committing to reading the material aimed at adults.  This is also attempting to tie together multimedia stories into one, so there is a lot of the first act of the novel to be recapping a lot of what went on in Convergence and Cataclysm, especially Cataclysm as things build to the Path of the Open Hand fleeing to Dalna where much of the rest of the novel takes place.  Path of Vengeance does get dragged down because of this slightly, it becomes one of those necessary extended points of exposition and catch up, while Scott makes it largely compelling it does feel a little redundant after immediately reading Cataclysm.  Scott also makes use of multiple point of view characters, which is fine, but whenever we’re not in the perspective of the Ro cousins, the book ends up lacking ever so slightly.  Now this is another aspect of the multimedia project tying together other storylines, I was informed Scott was writing the comics at the time and that clearly influences how much of the final act of this novel was written.  There is a Padawan character, Matty, who gets quite a bit of point of view, but sadly his narrative just isn’t as compelling as the main narrative.  This isn’t really a book about the Jedi, it’s about the Path having begun to splinter, continuing to splinter, and part of that splinter becoming the Nihil from Phase I.

 

Path of Vengeance is a novel that belongs primarily to Marda Ro; poor, traumatized Marda Ro.  Plagued with visions of Kevmo, the internal conflict of despising the Jedi while loving one of them who has died, and being completely taken in by the Mother who has been manipulating her the entire time, so much of Path of Vengeance is putting her as the analogue to Anakin Skywalker, except her ending is much less dark and her fall is actually better written.  Yana Ro, her cousin, is the other primary point of view character, and her story is equally interesting and far more violent in terms of the radicalization by the end, but then again there is more interesting about who Marda actually is and what makes her tick.  The entire third act of the novel actually gives itself over to fantasy, becoming closer to a thriller novel as forces greater than Marda are eventually released.  The actual establishment of the Nihil is something that happens on the very last page of the novel, and only indirectly by symbol and not name, an important distinction because unlike the film series that this multimedia project is emulating, there was clearly an arc planned from the very beginning.

 

Overall, Path of Vengeance and indeed the entire Phase II of The High Republic has been one of those stories that I’m very glad I was able to experience, even if there are still issues here that don’t quite work.  The book is quite long, especially for a young adult novel, but Cavan Scott is a writer whose prose is excellent and his strengths have always been writing characters, especially characters going through their own personal hell and falling down because of it (look at his early Doctor Who work with Mark Wright for other examples of that).  This is Marda Ro’s world and we’re sadly all living in it.  8/10.

Redemption! by: Simon Furman with art by: Kev Hopgood and Tim Perkins and letters by: Zed

 

“Redemption!” is written by: Simon Furman with art by Kev Hopgood and Tim Perkins, and lettering by: Zed (a pseudonym for Richard Starkings.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 134 (February 1988) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! by Panini Books.

 

“Redemption!” is a comic story that commits one of the cardinal sins of storytelling, closing the path for any interesting stories immediately after opening them up.  “A Cold Day in Hell!” introduced Olla as a companion and while that story wasn’t exactly great, there at least was some attempt to give Olla an introductory arc.  She’s a heat vampire who at the end of “A Cold Day in Hell!” wanted to get back to her own people, a perfectly fine motivation, and was established to be at the very least a little selfish.  It’s clear that Simon Furman in creating this character wants to do something with this character, “Redemption!” serving as the next step in that story.  Except “Redemption!” is also the final step in that story.  In an eight page comic strip, Olla is revealed in a series of twists to be: from a people who are treated as badly as the Romani but in space and enslaved, have been lying to the Doctor and is actually an evil criminal and cold blooded murderer, and is swiftly booted from the TARDIS because the Doctor doesn’t condone murder.  That’s literally all that “Redemption!” actually does as a story, that and starting with Olla as a servant to the Doctor, something for whatever reason he doesn’t really question, just giving some lip service to it being something he doesn’t like.

 

Now Furman is still characterizing the Doctor as a more generic characterization, though by the time this strip came out Season 24 had finished airing.  There is at least a little bit of Sylvester McCoy’s voice in the strip, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t start to feel like the Seventh Doctor until 1989.  “Redemption!” as a story doesn’t actually work, but it feels that a lot of that isn’t actually in Furman’s hands but in the hands of editor Richard Starkings.  Starkings wanted short, one-issue stories with rotating teams and specifically without a companion.  Anything Furman wanted to do with Olla he basically had to do here so she could be written out and the strip could move onto basically episodic adventures.  “Redemption!” is drawn by Kev Hopgood and his style is quite exaggerated, which at least partially suits some of the alien imagery in the script (there is an alien warlord attacking the TARDIS so we can get to the Olla reveal).  It isn’t a style that I particularly like, but he is a new artist coming onto the strip and trying to give it his own stamp with the teams being rotated between stories like the authors.

 

Overall, “Redemption!” is the prime example of how to not tell a story, compressing several stories into the shortest period possible because of editorial mandate, striking off what could have been a lot of interesting storytelling to take things into a new direction, ignoring the potential interest of a Doctor and companion at odds with each other.  3/10.

The Dauphin by: Scott Rubenstein and Leonard Mlodinow and directed by: Rob Bowman

“The Dauphin” is written by: Scott Rubenstein and Leonard Mlodinow and is directed by: Rob Bowman.  It was produced under production code 136, was the 10^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, the 36^th episode overall, and was broadcast on February 20, 1989.

 

“The Measure of a Man” was the best episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation thus far, so it only feels fitting that the immediate next episode is one that does not work.  “The Dauphin” takes its title from a French word meaning the heir apparent to the French Throne.  It also etymologically comes from the same words as dolphin.  Louis XVI was referred to as dauphin before ascending the throne.  Likewise, “The Dauphin” is an episode about Wesley Crusher falling in love with an alien princess who is meant to unite her planet while being transported on the Enterprise.  That is the plot.  No real B-plot, the conflict coming from Salia’s protector Anya being overprotective.  That and the massive twist that the aliens don’t actually look human and have only taken human form to fit in during transport.  When it is revealed of course Wesley just rebukes her which feels really out of character for, well any Star Trek regular cast member, but especially Wesley considering how many aliens he’s met at this point.  Much of his own plot in this episode is taking relationship advice from practically every other member of the crew who will speak with him, including Worf who is a Klingon and therefore not human and someone Wesley should apparently be repulsed.  There’s also a long history of problematic tropes involving queer, usually trans or gender non-conforming, characters not deserving love because they are the other and when they seek it they are rejected through repulsion.  Scott Rubenstein and Leonard Mlodinow are likely not intending bigotry, but still the tropes are just being used.  The episode isn’t helped by the fact that Salia is incredibly underwritten and young actress Jaime Hubbard has little chemistry with Wil Wheaton.  Star Trek: The Next Generation is a show that does not know how to use any younger cast member and while Wheaton at the very least has experience under his belt and knows how to take Rob Bowman’s direction.

 

The entire episode does also suffer from being generally underwritten, something that is becoming a problem in this season of Star Trek: The Next Generation in general, with a lot of scenes just progressing so slowly because we have to reach a 45-minute runtime.  Rubenstein and Mlodinow are not only the writers of this episode, but the script editors as well, a position they would leave before the season was over.  There’s a sense that neither of them are television writers, especially since once again “The Dauphin” is the only episode either of them contribute to the series.  The pair would script edit two further episodes before leaving the series entirely and that’s probably for the best.  This really is an episode where almost nothing happens:  Salia has an overbearing protector played by Paddi Edwards who was the eels in The Little Mermaid.  That’s at least a fun enough performance.  There is exactly one genuinely amazing character scene stuck in the middle of the episode.  When Wesley asks for advice from Riker and Guinan, Jonathan Frakes and Whoopi Goldberg are allowed to flirt for about three minutes.  Frakes and Goldberg have this impeccable chemistry that really sells how suave Riker is and how Guinan can easily fall under his spell, as could anything, and just as quickly as it starts, it ends and was all an act by two people who know each other well and have separately been in love.

 

Overall, “The Dauphin” is another example of a bad episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that suffers because there is nothing there.  What is present in the episode has been done before by basically every other television series with a child character, and likely better in so many other places.  The performances are particularly weak, the messaging is accidentally quite hostile in places, and the script is padded by two writers who don’t actually have a ton of writing experience.  3/10.

A Cold Day in Hell! by: Simon Furman with pencils by: John Ridgway, inks by: Tim Perkins, and letters by: Zed

 

“A Cold Day in Hell!” is written by: Simon Furman with pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, and lettering by: Zed (a pseudonym for Richard Starkings.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issues 130-133 (October 1987-January 1988) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! by Panini Books.

 

The Seventh Doctor is my favorite Doctor, this is no secret.  However, going into his Doctor Who Magazine comic run I was generally dreading starting this because in 1987, the show itself was in a complete state of flux.  Eric Saward left in anger in 1986 during production on Season 23, Colin Baker was fired and rightly refused to come back for a regeneration, John Nathan-Turner had to commission the first serial of Season 24 and was still being promised the ability to move on from the show if he stayed just one more season, and new script editor Andrew Cartmel was barely able to script edit Sylvester McCoy’s first serial Time and the Rani while getting three other serials commissioned.  On the side of Doctor Who Magazine, the sales were going down because the show was dying; John Ridgway, the comic strip’s artist becoming high profile enough to request better compensation; editor Sheila Cranna leaving and being replaced by letterer Richard Starkings; and the decision to switch from a single artist to a rotating troupe of pencillers and inkers after one last story for Ridgway and inker Tim Perkins.  Perkins would remain with the strip as inker and occasional artist entirely.  The pair do work well together and this is a story where the art is the best part, Ridgway’s style is just as detailed as you’d come to expect and keeps things moving.  The writing would continue to be a rotation until Doctor Who made a brief television return with Alan Barnes and Scott Gray essentially taking over the script for the Eighth Doctor version of the strip.

 

Top all of that off with the fact that the first strip “A Cold Day in Hell!”, began releasing October 8, 1987, three days after the airing of Part One of Paradise Towers, the fifth episode the Seventh Doctor featured in.  Simon Furman as an author had already contributed to the strip twice with two shorter strips, “The Nature of the Beast” and “Salad Daze”, neither being particularly great ones, but he is given six issues to essentially cover the opening of the Seventh Doctor’s time.  “A Cold Day in Hell!” takes up four of those issues, certainly to allow the Seventh Doctor to develop a little bit by the end, probably beginning scripting just as Time and the Rani has started to air.  Time and the Rani not really establishing who the Seventh Doctor is because as previously stated, Andrew Cartmel couldn’t actually properly edit the scripts.  The home video market also would have recently released The Seeds of Death, so Furman clearly stuck the Ice Warriors into the plot to entice fans to read with a returning monster.  This leads “A Cold Day in Hell!” to just be an almost grab bag of ideas putting together, seeing what we can stick to a wall before completely jettisoning off any remaining elements of the previous strip because this is a new Doctor, we need a new companion.

 

The Doctor is characterized as a generic Doctor, understandably, and is often sidelined in the plot by being knocked out in between issues so Furman doesn’t have to try characterizing him.  The characterization in the opening is also really reflective between the Doctor and Frobisher on Peri’s fate in The Ultimate Foe, continuing the comic strips’ loose grasp on continuity because in these early scenes it almost feels like it’s meant to be the Sixth Doctor but the magazine just had to continue with the Seventh.  The Doctor is also just kind of obsessed with giving Frobisher a holiday, something that he would do with Mel during Season 24 making me wonder if Furman was given that as his only starting point, Furman latching onto that as his only character trait.  Frobisher leaves at the end to help the people of the planet A-Lux because that’s something he thinks he can do while the Doctor goes off with Olla, a heat vampire who starts the story as rabid because A-Lux has become a planet covered in snow.  The Ice Warriors are here because a faction of them wish to have their own empire, so they turned A-Lux into a cold wasteland echoing The Seeds of Death.  The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon are also frequently referenced.  Both Olla and the Ice Warriors are characterized fairly well, Olla just wanting to go home in the end and the Ice Warriors being at least fun Doctor Who villains but that’s really about it.

 

Overall, “A Cold Day in Hell!” is a story with potential: the Doctor faces Ice Warriors on a holiday planet that has been terraformed into being cold could be something great if there was anything to say.  It’s a story that just hits every expected beat of what Doctor Who is with barely any characterization to elevate it into anything interesting.  A whimper of a start.  5/10.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Cataclysm by: Lydia Kang

 

After so many of these Star Wars book exchanges, I have come to one that was just not a good book.  Cataclysm is an adult novel in the second phase of The High Republic publishing initiative and it is a prime example of how these initiatives can have multiple writers not being on the same page: it finishes the storyline begun in Convergence, mainly the fallout from The Battle of Jedha (an audio drama that was fairly good even if a production style I am largely unfamiliar with) but it feels like a completely different cast of characters and motivations outside of one exception, the Mother of the Path of the Open Hand being the best thing about the novel.  It’s at least the one thing that pushes forward and has a sense of foreboding as it becomes ever clearer that the order is being radicalized into becoming the Nihil from the first phase of this publishing initiative.  The Mother as manipulator in the face of a kindly, but stern old woman has been one of the best aspects of this second phase of The High Republic and I believe just a difficult character to do dirty since Star Wars villains to be effective already have to have strong characterization in general.

 

At its core, Cataclysm suffers because the author Lydia Kang is unable to really engage the reader.  While this is promoted as a book for adults as opposed to young adults, Kang’s prose throughout is incredibly basic, even more basic than some young adult novels I have read.  Basic prose isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there are stories written in a basic way regarded as classics because of the intentionality of the prose.  The intentionality isn’t really here in Cataclysm, only becoming effective in the final chapters instead of any of the buildup to the big action that ends the novel.  The basic nature of the prose means it becomes difficult to actually read what is happening because it lacks any sense of flow from scene to scene, character to character.  This creates a knock-on effect where Kang’s characters feel particularly one-dimensional when they shouldn’t.  The majority of this novel’s cast is also the cast of Convergence and Kang while picking up the plot of the novel doesn’t actually capture any of the depth of the relationships that Zoraida Cordova put down.

 

This is especially apparent in how Axel Greylark and Gella Nattai are portrayed, both sanded down to their basest elements and any hint of past romance or romantic chemistry is removed.  Kang posits that they could have been good friends, but Gella is a Jedi so there couldn’t be any romantic feelings.  A lot of the drama and the internal conflict, especially for Axel, is just gone because of this.  Kang also doesn’t really write Xiri and Phan-tu as well with their partnership of necessity leading to a kind of romance, though not the most romantic kind.  The rest of the characters are equally as bland, Kang also deciding to use Yoda as a character in a major capacity which while technically correct, just feels like Kang reveling in the fact that she is writing a Star Wars book.

 

Overall, Cataclysm was just a major disappointment.  It’s a novel that doesn’t read well from an author who feels like an outlier from what the rest of The High Republic is doing, which is especially a shame since it is meant to be a finale for one of the miniseries in this second phase.  4/10.

The Measure of a Man by: Melinda M. Snodgrass and directed by: Robert Scheerer

 

“The Measure of a Man” is written by: Melinda M. Snodgrass and is directed by: Robert Scheerer.  It was produced under production code 135, was the 9^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, the 35^th episode overall, and was broadcast on February 13, 1989.

 

Melinda M. Snodgrass was not a writer before soliciting the storyline for a Star Trek novel that was picked up and published in 1984 as The Tears of the Singers.  I have not read it, but it led to her working with George RR Martin before submitting a spec script in for “The Measure of a Man”, and because the 1988 Writer’s Guild of America strike meant the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation needed scripts it was accepted and put into production.  For Snodgrass, this also brought her onto the show as both a staff writer and story editor, eventually becoming the only story editor after four episodes on the job (the production offices of Star Trek: The Next Generation were a revolving door of staff, just watching the opening production credits vary wildly episode by episode).  This is also an episode that I went into knowing that it is highly regarded among both fans and non-fans alike, but I went in knowing very little about the actual plot.

 

As with any of these episodes, as I am watching them for the first time, I attempt to go in as blind as possible, so I didn’t even make the obvious connection between “The Measure of a Man” and the focus on Data as a character.  What I certainly wasn’t expecting was that “The Measure of a Man” is an episode that works because it is a courtroom drama.  Snodgrass before becoming a writer was a practicing attorney so placing the conflict both in a courtroom setting and as interpersonal drama.  Gene Roddenberry had the belief that interpersonal conflict would be gone by this point in the future, but that has a tendency to completely derail a lot of the stakes and tension in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Snodgrass avoids this by making much of the episode’s conflict internal: the system of Starfleet is used to resolve the conflict, even with the villain of the episode, Brian Brophy’s Commander Maddox, doing the inhuman and abiding by the eventual ruling.  This episode builds to the conclusion of Data being a sentient being and his own lifeform, an artificial lifeform, but a lifeform nevertheless with all the rights that entails.  He is not Starfleet property as the trial becomes litigation for.

 

Snodgrass’s script is absolutely brilliant at laying down the case for Data and building to the conclusion while also fully playing out the case of the prosecution.  The prosecution, due to the setting being a new starbase lacking the necessary staff, is represented by Riker.  Riker’s arc in the episode is having to prosecute his fellow officer and friend.  Presiding over the case is Captain Phillipa Louvois, played by Amanda McBroom, a woman insistent on Riker performing the prosecution to the best of his ability or else her first ruling, Data as toaster and therefore property, will stand.  When all is said and done, Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner get to have this particularly wonderful scene where both Riker and Data reflect on Riker’s actions: Riker is wracked with the guilt of prosecuting his friend while Data is actively grateful.  Data’s reasoning is that if Riker didn’t prosecute and the original ruling stood, he would very much have died, the episode also implying that the stakes for the greater universe being a slave race of androids being developed.  This idea of the slave race is given voice by Guinan, Whoopi Goldberg actually appearing in a good episode for once and an episode deserving of an actress of her caliber.  “The Measure of a Man” is very much concerned with establishing the difference in outset of a person as a person versus a person as a thing (or worse a piece of property).  It also actively reflects humanity’s use of slaves, especially the American slave trade and the structural and institutional racism in the United States of America, all without ever having to state it.  Guinan is the one who comes up with the argument Picard uses.  It is also telling that Riker’s arguments against Data are purely physical: they focus on the essential facts of his makeup, nothing about his mind, his experiences, or his relationships, effectively making the argument that in talks of personhood and the deserving of autonomy, biology doesn’t actually matter, it’s sentience.  Sentience is difficult to actually prove, though in defining it sets out three criteria: intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness.  It’s the consciousness that is near impossible to actually measure in any meaningful way specifically in the case of Data, though philosophically you can argue he is conscious as he makes his own decisions outside of his basic programming, “The Measure of a Man” not ever bringing up the Turing test as a possibility.

 

On top of all of this, making “The Measure of a Man” such an engaging watch, Snodgrass’s script is full of these little moments and details.  The episode opens with a poker game between Data, Riker, Pulaski, and O’Brien (who is slowly becoming an actual character it seems).  This isn’t something that has any real bearing on the plot outside of Data not being able to bluff and losing a game, but it’s a moment like this that makes the characters feel like characters.  Likewise the scene establishing Picard and Louvois’ relationship and previous prosecution.  The script itself is also detail oriented: Maddox and Louvois both refer to Data as ‘it’.  ‘It’ here is being used as an impersonal pronoun, making the audience have this immediate dissonance, you know how the pair see Data and are disinclined to like them.  Snodgrass is also interested in exploring how the characters have changed since Season 1, the trail brings up events of “The Naked Now” and “Datalore” specifically to create a sense of continuity and growth for the characters.  Tasha Yar and her romantic experience with Data is explicitly referenced.  There’s this misunderstood notion that characters in a franchise like Star Trek don’t actually develop or have arcs because the episodes aren’t serialized, but this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of television as a process.  Even when not serialized a season of television is still a piece of long-form storytelling where characters can grow and change.  The only other nitpick is that Pulaski, who has been very much anti-Data as a person, only has brief appearances, though were she given more to do it might have derailed the episode on the whole.

 

Overall, “The Measure of a Man” is clearly a blueprint episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Although the first script from a writer who only had experience in prose, it’s an episode that fundamentally understands how to write a piece of character drama while raising interesting political and societal questions.  Despite not conforming to a science fiction narrative, in favor of a legal drama, it is a perfect piece of science fiction.  10/10.

A Matter of Honor by: Burton Armus from a story by: Wanda M. Haight, Gregory Amos, and Burton Armus and directed by: Rob Bowman

 

“A Matter of Honor” is written by: Burton Armus, from a story by: Wanda M. Haight, Gregory Amos, and Burton Armus, and is directed by: Rob Bowman.  It was produced under production code 134, was the 8^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, the 34^th episode overall, and was broadcast on February 6, 1989.

 

Three authors on a script is rarely a good sign, yet “A Matter of Honor” is one of those episodes where it actually works.  Now it helps that two of the three names are just ones collaborating with Burton Armus on getting the idea behind “A Matter of Honor” down before Armus writes the actual script.  This is a good episode of television: it’s an episode that has a structured A-plot and B-plot that mirror each other on the theme of cultural exchange.  In a word, it’s a structured episode of television, again something that Star Trek: The Next Generation struggled with during its first season.  “Heart of Glory” from the first season begun Star Trek’s rehabilitation of the Klingons as part of the Federation, and is the first episode to really focus on Worf as a character.  “A Matter of Honor” is actually quite important for making the shift work: the audience has already had a year to come to like and trust Worf as a character, but not really to trust other Klingon characters.  This works because it is an episode about Commander Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes, integrating with Klingons as the A-plot in a literal exchange of crew program for the Federation.  Now, Worf does have a role to play in the episode, in the first act he gives Riker primers on Klingon culture, another addition of Star Trek’s expanding the race beyond the caricatures of the original series.

 

The most interesting idea is that on Klingon ships, now part of the Federation yet still run in line with their culture, the first officer’s main duty is the assassination of the captain.  This is not presented as some awful, barbaric practice, but an aspect of the Klingon’s warrior culture: the assassination should only occur when the first officer sees the captain as no longer fit for duty.  Klingon culture believes that a warrior should die a noble death in battle, not be able to live past their prime.  “A Matter of Honor” doesn’t do any deconstruction on this idea, such as where it might fall flat or be corrupted, however, that isn’t what it is intending to do.  The intent is to create a culture for the Klingons.  Writer Burton Armus understands the importance of food in culture, one of the central scenes between Riker and the Klingon crew he works for is eating dinner, something that could easily have been played for laughs in a culturally insensitive “look at these gross foods” a la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, however, Riker while occasionally being taken aback, isn’t ever framed as being tortured by the food.  Riker takes the food in his own stride, even if the Klingons are aware of the lack of appeal of their food to the human palate.  They make jokes about Riker needing something softer, suggesting breastfeeding which gives some insight into some of the toxicity of Klingon society (though the episode also presents female Klingons as equally strong warriors, mixed with tropes of the femme fatale).  Those insights are not elaborated on, but they are laying the groundwork for future Klingon episodes.  Much of the material is also elevated by Jonathan Frakes’ performance: from his scenes with Michael Dorn to the Klingons to his scenes opposite Picard, Riker feels like a fully developed character and impossibly amicable.  He has his own concerns, but he made an oath to both the Enterprise and the Pagh, he will be keeping them both when the conflict eventually arises.

 

“A Matter of Honor” also gets Rob Bowman directing, further cementing himself as the best director thus far for Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The Pagh sets are clearly small, but Bowman disguises this fact by shooting things as tightly as he possibly can, which has the secondary effect of bringing out a lot of the drama.  Now this does have the knock on effect of the standing Enterprise sets almost feeling less tense by comparison, though the B-plot itself generally is just less tense.  It’s another cultural exchange: the Enterprise gaining a Benzite called Mendon who just desperately wants to be helpful.  There are more cultural clashes by far in the B-plot, yet somehow that makes the plot less interesting.  Now the Benzite’s have only appeared in one episode previously, “Coming of Age”, the lack of a history is clearly contributing to the B-plot feeling shallow, but it also is just underwritten in general, not devoting enough to making Mendon feel like a character distinct from Mordock, the Benzite in “Coming of Age”, both played by John Putch.

 

Overall, “A Matter of Honor” is very good at being a groundwork laying episode.  The performances elevate the intricacies of Klingon culture, even if this is an episode where the non-Klingon related B-plot is leaving a lot to be desired.  While some of it hasn’t aged the best, there is the occasional problematic trope, the entire episode is a fantastic showcase for Riker and making Klingons feel like an actual culture.  7/10.