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.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Defy the Storm by: Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland

 

There’s something really scrappy about Defy the Storm.  It’s the first young adult novel for Phase III of Star Wars: The High Republic, and it does something that is particularly interesting.  It’s Star Wars doing young adult dystopian fiction.  Specifically what Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland are doing is to write a novel that is reflecting the particular boom of the 2010s after the publishing and rise in popularity of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.  Defy the Storm is about doing just that, a group of characters at very different places in the galaxy far, far away defying the Nihil occupation in a way specifically tailored to a younger audience.  This particularly finds itself in the approach taken by Gratton and Ireland in the adult characters.  Throughout the novel there is this general sense of our young protagonists being largely ignored and treated like children.  Particularly the choice to open the novel by introducing the reader to Avon Starros, the daughter of a diplomat who has capitulated to the Nihil for her own personal gain.  Avon knows what her mother is doing is not only wrong, but also is very much an attempt for survival and betterment of themselves, but at her first opportunity, after being attacked by a member of the Nihil, escapes.  That isn’t actually the inciting incident for Avon as a character, it just allows the opportunity for her escape from the Nihil.  Mirroring her is Xylan Graf, a man forced to affiliate with the Nihil who is equally attempting to find his own way out from behind the Stormwall, it’s something that has been done and he’s determined to see it done again.  They’re paired throughout much of the novel, Gratton and Ireland putting their opposite personalities on display throughout.

 

The oddity of Defy the Storm for me is that the summary attempts to position Vernestra Rwoh as the protagonist of the novel, while Gratton and Ireland spend much of the novel shifting perspective between every character.  The title is one that lends itself to an ensemble style of storytelling, something that improves the book greatly because so much is setup.  This is the first in a line after all, but where Gratton and Ireland seem to gel the best is the character work.  Young adult fiction as a genre does have the mindset of characters for the young reader to latch onto, but with all of the switching there is something for each character to largely latch onto.  It’s particularly interesting since most of the characters are new protagonists, not continuing a lot of the plots of Phase I, at least in this novel, as The Eye of Darkness did.  This is not a bad thing, one running thread of Star Wars is about how old ideas are often just that, old, and in need of change.  Ironic considering the general state of the franchise post-2017, but that is besides the point.  Defy the Storm also puts one particular change for the Nihil front and center, and with that the Nameless as an almost more direct threat.  The Nameless as a concept has been in The High Republic as a publishing initiative, they were in the last novel Gratton and Ireland co-wrote.  But here there is almost a sense that this is a particular threat for this group of characters to understand and by the end potentially defeat.

 

Overall, Defy the Storm at least in terms of what The High Republic is, cements Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland as the most interesting writers.  Individually and working together there hasn’t been a novel that hasn’t at the very least been interesting.  Defy the Storm reads like a launching pad for the line in the best way, character examination as a way to explore a republic on what may be its last legs.  There is this sense of tragedy on the horizon, following that silly George Lucas quote, you know the one, about history.  And yet Gratton and Ireland just make you root for these characters although its clear that things are about to fall apart.  Perhaps it’s a little overstuffed in places, but then again that’s what a lot of Star Wars expanded universe media tends to do.  8/10.

The Bonding by: Ronald D. Moore and directed by: Winrich Kolbe

 

“The Bonding” is written by: Ronald D. Moore and is directed by: Winrich Kolbe.  It was produced under production code 153, was the 5^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 53^rd episode overall, and was broadcast on October 23, 1989.

 

The first 22 minutes of “The Bonding” is perfect.  It’s a straightforward dramatic examination of the grieving process and how easily that process can be stunted, or how when children have to grieve they can easily be overwhelmed by the well-intentioned adults who are only trying to help.  The pre-credits sequence of the episode is the inciting incident: an away team on a planet that once had people living on it goes wrong, a landmine detonates, the chief archeologist is killed leaving her son Jeremy behind to grieve.  Jeremy is played by Gabriel Damon and Ronald D. Moore’s script is very good at not overloading the dialogue on the child actor, meaning that a lot of his grief can be portrayed as suppressed, a child being left alone with nothing but the memories of his parents in the form of home movies that he just continually watches.  From a production standpoint it is an understanding of how to use a child character on one hand even when the dialogue given to Jeremy does fall into the tendency of adult writers to write children as adults, but smaller.  Keeping him mostly silent and letting his actions speak means that it’s far more powerful.  It also does help that his introductory scene is Picard giving him the bad news where Patrick Stewart just perfectly embodies the man struggling with his duty.  There’s a lot with Picard in this episode on how a starship might not actually be a great place for children to be raised.  There is also Picard’s own hangups on children in general, he does not like them but he also is a human being who has the basic empathy of dealing with the loss of a crewmember and a mother.

 

The character moments processing grief are the best scenes of the episode.  Moore remembers that Deanna Troi is actually the ship’s counselor so Marina Sirtis gets to act as mediator throughout, understanding that Jeremy’s mental state is precarious.  It’s the best material Troi as a character has been given so far in the series, there’s an actual purpose and person the script gives unlike previous Troi centered episodes and this isn’t even an episode that focuses on Troi.  Gates McFadden and Wil Wheaton as the Crushers also have to relive the death of Jack Crusher in this episode, metaphorically.  There is a conversation paralleling how Wesley slowly forgets the face of his father as he ages while Beverley can never get his face out of hers.  It’s a beautiful image about the pain of memory, aging, and growing through the grief.  Wheaton further gets a powerhouse monologue near the climax working through his feelings towards Picard’s responsibility in the death of his father that feels like a side element in a packed episode.  Brent Spiner as Data gets a scene examining why grief is more powerful when it is someone you know versus someone you don’t know, in Data’s mind all death should be seen as equally tragic and worthy of grief.  The scene doesn’t quite land on any conclusion towards where it is going, instead leaving it for the audience to muse on for the rest of the episode.  Worf is the crewmember most affected outside of Jeremy: he led the away team that killed Jeremy’s mother, as part of Klingon culture he is the one responsible.  The title refers to a ritual Worf offers to Jeremy, bringing him into his own family as almost recompense and as part of Jeremy’s own grieving process, it allows Jeremy the clarity and connection to someone else now that he is truly alone.

 

The back half of the episode for me doesn’t quite hold up, at least when the actual alien threat plot, an alien life form from the planet takes the form of Jeremy’s mother to tempt him to live life with them and not find acceptance.  This is a great little addition to the plotline and all, it’s about grief holding you back as an aspect of the process, the alien lifeforce does offer basically an eternal distraction from grief in the form of a simulacrum of his own mother.  It’s a great idea and is executed mostly well, the alien impersonating her is its own lifeform that also clearly needs connection and a symbiotic bond with a physical body that feels like a missed opportunity due to being introduced in the back half of the episode.  There’s also the trouble of Susan Powell in the role of Marla Aster sadly being one of the more stilted performances.  Director Winrich Kolbe who is great when directing Gabriel Damon, doesn’t seem to know exactly how he wants to shoot Powell, a lot of it is shot to read as at all sinister which is clearly what the script wants.  It's not episode breaking, far from it, the episode is still an incredibly strong one, but it is just one addition that either needed more time or a rewrite to avoid the intrigue of what the creature is and deserves (as it kind of comes down on the side that the creature doesn’t deserve to exist because it is predatory despite really just looking for companionship).  It’s just another example of those little unintended consequences of what the episode is doing and in a way adding an alien threat that didn’t necessarily need it, just an idea to explore.

 

Overall, Ronald D. Moore’s debut Star Trek: The Next Generation despite having a rougher conclusion, is an incredible examination of grief and works best when it is playing out like a standard television drama and not an installment of a science fiction show.  It really does allow the cast to explore how their characters grieve and give space to someone else through the grieving process, while working within a script that remembers that Worf is in fact an alien, Data is an android, and both of them would be grieving in completely different ways from the rest of the cast.  It even has a child character that feels particularly great.  8/10.

The Chimes of Midnight by: Robert Shearman

 

The Chimes of Midnight was written by Robert Shearman, based on his audio story of the same name.  It was the 196^th story to be novelized by BBC Books.

 

It’s honestly a surprise that it took over 25 years for Big Finish Productions to novelize any of their audio dramas, especially since The Chimes of Midnight and Jubilee are two novelizations published not by Big Finish, but by BBC Books as part of their Doctor Who line proper.  The choice for the pair makes plenty of sense, they are both releases labeled iconic and from one of their best writers (and a writer who had written for the television series).  The tricky part about novelizing any audio drama is actually going to be the medium shift, while prose isn’t a truly visual medium there is a general convention that setting and character needs to be established in text and there isn’t always going to be apparent in audio where everything is soundscape and vocal performance plus whatever is used on the cover to represent the story.  Robert Shearman’s prose actually shines in terms of the descriptions, The Chimes of Midnight is a story that has one primary setting of the downstairs of an Edwardian house.

 

It’s a basic setting, Shearman knows this.  Much of the humor in The Chimes of Midnight comes from the fact that it is a simple setting and that the characters are stock characters.  The murder mystery at the center is intentionally stock, it’s all of course a smokescreen for a story celebrating life and how the lower class is overlooked in society because of their position.  There is something more evocative of the line “I am nothing, I am nobody” when it is in prose, the repetition becomes more notable as well as Shearman adding slight variations on the phrase or other phrases to evoke that idea of being nobody.  This is especially apparent because Shearman is continually bringing up the fact that this is a time loop with perspectives periodically from the servants dying and coming back at the strike of the clock.

 

Reading The Chimes of Midnight there is also this layer that while present in the original audio drama, feels brought to the forefront being in prose.  It’s an Agatha Christie mystery where at every chance possible the opposite choice is made: the setting being with the downstairs staff squarely places the crime among the lower class in comparison to Christie squarely taking on the middle and upper classes, the Doctor as a detective is initially squarely placed as part of Scotland Yard making him an authority when compared to Christie detectives like Poirot or Miss Marple who are amateurs, and the murders themselves are senseless suicides.  It’s all inversions of the classic tropes so much so that there is the chance that the butler actually did it, a trope that despite being omnipresent isn’t actually common.  While the characters here are stock, something explored far more thoroughly in the novelization is how they are compilations of people who Edith Thompson knew throughout her short life.  This allows Shearman to go further into the horror that he did on audio.  Similarly, there are some extra scenes that clearly wouldn’t play in audio such as the cooked turkey coming to life and running around the chicken and Charley getting her eye stuck in a keyhole.  These work because of the visual component of the prose, something that cannot be done on audio effectively.

 

Overall, The Chimes of Midnight is both darker and deeply funnier.  Shearman writing prose this way means that the story somehow hits all the harder in this interpretation.  Shearman’s experience as a novelist also shines through especially well.  It’s still one of the best Doctor Who audio dramas from one of the very best writers. 10/10.

Who Watches the Watchers by: Richard Manning and Hans Beimler and directed by: Robert Wiemer

 

“Who Watches the Watchers” is written by: Richard Manning and Hans Beimler and is directed by: Robert Wiemer.  It was produced under production code 152, was the 4^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 52^nd episode overall, and was broadcast on October 16, 1989.

 

It’s very possible that when Star Trek: The Next Generation is all said and done, “Who Watches the Watchers” might just be the definitive Prime Directive focused episode.  Sure, it’s an episode that writers Richard Manning and Hans Beimler don’t exhaustively examine the idea, the premise of Starfleet having a hidden base observing a population and planet secretly feels like it goes against the idea of the Prime Directive because it could cause problems like this, but it also could be intentional in the script and I’m just misreading the setup of the episode.  It’s an idea just asking for trouble, and sure enough the inciting incident is the cloaking device shielding the base from the Mintakan’s malfunctions and a Mintakan sees it, approaches, and is shocked because of the malfunction.  Crusher has to save him, but that involves bringing him to the Enterprise and everything spirals from there: Picard is seen as a god overseeing the overseers because an attempted memory wipe doesn’t work and the religion essentially spirals.  Much of the conflict of the episode actually comes from the crew of the Enterprise struggling to undo the damage as it spirals further and further out of control: there is a fantastic moment where Crusher insists on healing Liko because it won’t actually make the situation worse and Starfleet is responsible for his injuries.  That responsibility aspect of Starfleet is what is really at the heart of the episode, Manning and Beimler are very clear that it is the crew’s duty to undo the damage that they have done to this society and not be the gods that the Prime Directive is partially in place to stop humanity becoming.

 

The universe of Star Trek is fascinating on the subject of gods, several episodes of the original series include aliens that are godlike, and yet Christian imagery at points is present in episodes like “Bread and Circuses” that suggest Christianity is correct and a faith that would recur throughout the galaxy independently.  Much of this is likely due to the conservative Christianity that dominated the culture in the United States during the 1960s, Gene Roddenberry was an atheist and more importantly a humanist but was raised a Southern Baptist, though there is also some evidence he believed a form of Deism at points in his life.  “Who Watches the Watchers” is perhaps the most explicitly atheistic the franchise has gotten in terms of examining the intersection between religion and science.  The episode is very much interested in keeping them separate, Picard being the biggest advocate of talking to the Mintakins and attempting to put their technology into language they would understand.  It leads to the best scene in the episode where Patrick Stewart delivers a monologue about how their people started in caves, graduated to huts.

 

This is a speech given opposite the Mintakan leader Nuria, played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who has the perfect timing in not being able to accept that Picard isn’t a god.  Nuria wants Picard to bring back the dead, something that if he could he likely would do due to the dead being those killed by a flood months earlier.  Both major guest players are two excellent character actors: Scott as leader and Ray Wise as Liko, the injured Mintakin who starts the religious fervor.  It’s also built up because the initial attempt is to send Riker and Troi down to the planet to spread essentially heresy and blasphemy for this forming religion.  Gaslighting is the word of the day and there’s just something fantastic about how Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis both play off each other to try and get these people just to forget what Liko saw, the very much idea of seeing a hallucination in an injured state and shock causing the injuries to seem worse than what they are.

 

Overall, “Who Watches the Watchers” is an episode that works so well because it stays as humanist as Gene Roddenberry could at his very best be.  Yes, it has a setup that is particularly messy and the Prime Directive as an idea struggles in general to really work with what has been laid out at this point, but the character drama and humanity at the core of the entire casts performance and the fact that this is not an episode with a villain, everything is concluded peacefully and with understanding exemplifies a lot of what makes Star Trek work so well.  8/10.