The Vengeance Factor by: Sam Rolfe and directed by: Timothy Bond

 

“The Vengeance Factor” is written by: Sam Rolfe and is directed by: Timothy Bond.  It was produced under production code 157, was the 9^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 57^th episode overall, and was broadcast on November 20, 1989.

 

“The Vengeance Factor” is an episode that has me slightly puzzled.  It’s an episode that excels in terms of showing off Captain Picard as the non-violent diplomat and Riker as a pinnacle of non-toxic, respectful masculinity, but it’s also an episode that while having commentary on slavery also makes the slave character the episode’s twist villain slowly working a master plan to kill not her masters, but an outcast group of pirates who are coming to the negotiating table for reconciliation and reparations.  Yes, “The Vengeance Factor” is an episode that is politically savvy enough to acknowledge the need for reparations to those oppressed in some way, yet the slave is a villain who apparently cannot understand her position.  It’s all because the reveal of the character’s villainy is actually a third act twist for the episode which reads as if writer Sam Rolfe wrote himself into a corner and needed a way to resolve the microvirus subplot that was a danger to the negotiations.  Yes, there is an assassin that is killing members of the Gatherers with the Sovereign Marouk, played by Nancy Parsons, leading the negotiations and as red herring.  Rolfe sets the Sovereign up as equally unreasonable as the Gatherers, and she should be the villain of the episode and not her assistant/servant/slave because the dialogue is certainly not clear.  The reason to bring reconciliation are also odd, it’s because the Gatherers are interfering and stealing from Federation outposts.  The conclusion of the episode is equally odd, Riker just outright kills the villain Yuta, played by Lisa Wilcox.  All of these elements just come together as particularly odd, and really don’t mesh well with each other to make the runtime uneven.

 

Timothy Bond directs his first of two episodes of the series and while his direction isn’t necessarily bad, it is quite standard for late 1980s television and there is a sense that it’s the direction dragging down the pace of the episode.  He is shooting it almost like a mystery, the script giving Riker and Crusher as characters investigative plots, but the audience already kind of knows what is happening with this episode when the conflict begins.  Getting the Enterprise crew involved also just reads as contrived, they feel like outsiders unofficially as the negotiators; they are pushing themselves in on these people and forcing their way of life for selfish reasons which is very odd.  It doesn’t violate the Prime Directive because the Acamarians as a people are technologically advanced enough that it doesn’t actually apply.  Rolfe’s script is also odd because while it has multiple subplots, none of them actually end up going anywhere and everything reads like setup until that particularly abrupt conclusion.  The Gatherers themselves are played mostly by men who are treated often as over the top comic relief but by the time you get to the third act they are all pushed to the background for the big reveal.  The ending of any given episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and any episode of television really, is important to tie everything together and “The Vengeance Factor” suffers because the ending leaves everything to fall apart.

 

Overall, “The Vengeance Factor” has some things going for it, Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard is particularly strong in the diplomatic role the episode gives him and Jonathan Frakes as Riker has some nice romantic scenes.  The message, however, is incoherent with an ending that leaves a main character a murderer and the reveal to the murder mystery someone who is already oppressed in her own existence.  It comes across as an underdeveloped script that is juggling way too many ideas for any of them to really come to the forefront leaving the episode both difficult to talk about in terms of anything interesting and a mediocre watch.  5/10.