Legacy by: Joe Menosky and directed by: Robert Scheerer

 

“Legacy” is written by: Joe Menosky and is directed by: Robert Scheerer.  It was produced under production code 180, was the 6^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 80^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 29, 1990.

 

The first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation attempted and largely failed to discuss mature topics.  Tasha Yar’s backstory involved a planet of conflict run explicitly by “roaming rape gangs”, heavily hinting that she was a victim of such abuse.  Even if she wasn’t specifically assaulted, she was raised in a traumatic environment that would inform her upbringing and especially her personality.  Because the first season was largely written by a rotating group of writers, she was not a character explored particularly well.  When her backstory did come up it was often ancillary to the plot, sometimes even glossed over in a single line.  Denise Crosby did leave the show near the end of the first season, Yar’s death in “Skin of Evil” effectively ending any of that intrigue.  The third season brought Yar back in “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, one of the best episodes of the show thus far and reflective on the underutilized potential of the character.  It should not be surprising that the fourth season would also continue these threads in an attempt to continue the renewed interest in Yar with “Legacy”.  Setting an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Yar’s home planet to explore its ruthless and violent society without Tasha Yar being there is at its core an odd decision.  Yar can only be given more depth from either situations such as “Yesterday’s Enterprise” with an alternate timeline version, or by other character’s relationships to Yar.  There is the possibility of additional flashbacks to bring Yar back, however, “Legacy” does not do this instead the episode’s big supporting guest character is Yar’s sister Ishara, played by Beth Toussaint.

 

The production team not casting Crosby as Yar’s sister is a solid decision.  While Crosby certainly has the range to play her character’s sister, giving it to a different actress means a different interpretation to Turkana IV.  Writer Joe Menosky focuses the script on the desperation of the planet.  Things have changed, the “rape gangs” are a thing of the past as an attempt for Menosky to avoid handling the concept which even mentioned in passing did not work, but there are still factions at war for the planet and hostages from a Federation freighter in danger.  Ishara is markedly different from Tasha, she is the one who stayed behind and leads the crew to believe she regrets that decision.  The big twist of the episode is that Ishara is lying, all of the trust she’s built with the crew and especially with Data was just to continue the violence between the Coalition and the Alliance.  Brent Spiner as Data is really the episode’s standout character, Menosky clearly loving the idea of a relationship between Data and Yar established quite clumsily (to put it nicely) in “The Naked Now”.  Menosky writes Data as not feeling emotions but still having the capacity for friendship in a way that is particularly interesting.  Friendship comes not necessarily from emotions but from a continued familiarity with someone over a long period of time.  There is also the idea that Data is in fact experiencing emotions and feelings, he mentions absence when a friend is gone in the case of Tasha Yar.  This is emotion, Data’s grief is portrayed as real.  On her part, Ishara Yar knows how to manipulate that grief for her own ends.

 

The episode is also considerably kinder to the betrayal of the character, she is allowed to go by Picard despite her actively harming two crewmembers.  There is far more nuance here with the idea of Tasha Yar’s legacy and understanding a planet’s situation where intervention would likely be inherently violent.  Menosky does not say the Enterprise shouldn’t interfere, but it should at least acknowledge that these situations are complicated to untangle which is a nice little idea.  Where “Legacy” does fail, at least in part, is that Toussaint does not have nearly enough chemistry as Ishara Yar as she really needs for the episode.  She is not giving a bad performance, but she does not really have chemistry with Brent Spiner.  The episode positions them as potentially in a romance which inherently has odd implications considering the romance between Data and Tasha, even if largely on-screen, has been established as a defining part of Tasha Yar’s legacy.  Toussaint is more awkward, though when she leans into the freedom fighter aspects of the character there is more confidence in making the character work.

 

Overall, “Legacy” is good, but it’s an episode that is almost working despite the absence of Denise Crosby as Tasha Yar.  There almost isn’t enough of Tasha haunting the narrative for an episode like this to work, likely due to the failure of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation to really explore what Yar’s background was.  That and the main plot of the episode leans a bit too close into the generic which does not help with the lack of character relationships.  It does say something to the increased quality of the show, however, when this is a relatively weaker episode as it’s still a good hour of television.  7/10.