“The Vengeance Factor” is written by: Sam Rolfe and is
directed by: Timothy Bond. It was
produced under production code 157, was the 9th episode of Star
Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 57th episode overall,
and was broadcast on November 20, 1989.
“The Vengeance Factor” is an episode that has me
slightly puzzled. It’s an episode that
excels in terms of showing off Captain Picard as the non-violent diplomat and
Riker as a pinnacle of non-toxic, respectful masculinity, but it’s also an
episode that while having commentary on slavery also makes the slave character
the episode’s twist villain slowly working a master plan to kill not her
masters, but an outcast group of pirates who are coming to the negotiating
table for reconciliation and reparations.
Yes, “The Vengeance Factor” is an episode that is politically savvy
enough to acknowledge the need for reparations to those oppressed in some way, yet
the slave is a villain who apparently cannot understand her position. It’s all because the reveal of the character’s
villainy is actually a third act twist for the episode which reads as if writer
Sam Rolfe wrote himself into a corner and needed a way to resolve the microvirus
subplot that was a danger to the negotiations.
Yes, there is an assassin that is killing members of the Gatherers with the
Sovereign Marouk, played by Nancy Parsons, leading the negotiations and as red
herring. Rolfe sets the Sovereign up as
equally unreasonable as the Gatherers, and she should be the villain of the
episode and not her assistant/servant/slave because the dialogue is certainly
not clear. The reason to bring
reconciliation are also odd, it’s because the Gatherers are interfering and
stealing from Federation outposts. The
conclusion of the episode is equally odd, Riker just outright kills the villain
Yuta, played by Lisa Wilcox. All of
these elements just come together as particularly odd, and really don’t mesh
well with each other to make the runtime uneven.
Timothy Bond directs his first of two episodes of the
series and while his direction isn’t necessarily bad, it is quite standard for late
1980s television and there is a sense that it’s the direction dragging down the
pace of the episode. He is shooting it
almost like a mystery, the script giving Riker and Crusher as characters investigative
plots, but the audience already kind of knows what is happening with this
episode when the conflict begins. Getting
the Enterprise crew involved also just reads as contrived, they feel
like outsiders unofficially as the negotiators; they are pushing themselves in
on these people and forcing their way of life for selfish reasons which is very
odd. It doesn’t violate the Prime
Directive because the Acamarians as a people are technologically advanced
enough that it doesn’t actually apply. Rolfe’s
script is also odd because while it has multiple subplots, none of them
actually end up going anywhere and everything reads like setup until that
particularly abrupt conclusion. The Gatherers
themselves are played mostly by men who are treated often as over the top comic
relief but by the time you get to the third act they are all pushed to the
background for the big reveal. The
ending of any given episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and any
episode of television really, is important to tie everything together and “The
Vengeance Factor” suffers because the ending leaves everything to fall apart.
Overall, “The Vengeance Factor” has some things going
for it, Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard is particularly strong in the
diplomatic role the episode gives him and Jonathan Frakes as Riker has some
nice romantic scenes. The message,
however, is incoherent with an ending that leaves a main character a murderer and
the reveal to the murder mystery someone who is already oppressed in her own existence. It comes across as an underdeveloped script
that is juggling way too many ideas for any of them to really come to the forefront
leaving the episode both difficult to talk about in terms of anything
interesting and a mediocre watch. 5/10.
