by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

Eight episodes into season five of The Next Generation, “Unification II” gives us a dedication card for Gene Roddenberry at the start of the episode. He suffered from cardiac arrest and passed away while the crew was in the middle of filming “Hero Worship.” The card’s unique placement, at the front instead of at the end of the episode, is a really touching moment and an absolute gut punch. It’s not typical, but it was Gene—you know?

It was also during season five of TNG that the idea of a new Star Trek show was turning from a thought and into a show bible. Season six (the back half of it) would air alongside the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, after all. It’s a series I’ll be watching, in my own personal journey, but that I probably won’t document. Mostly because, dear God, there’s just so much Star Trek! But it should be noted that DS9 is the first series that Roddenberry wasn’t involved in at all, since his health was in such a decline leading into the conception of the show. 

So, this season of Star Trek: The Next Generation has a lot of interesting things to say (for better and for worse), despite having a fair number of mediocre episodes within its 26 episode order. It wasn’t quite the followup to a spectacular season four that I was expecting, if I’m being honest. But it also made my brain spin in a million directions. So, that’s something. 

One of the things I wanted to look at in Captain’s Log, especially moving into The Next Generation was the limits of utopian storytelling. It was true in TOS, as well, but it’s much more prominent in TNG because of its closer proximity to our modern era. Fictional utopian societies can only be as progressive as the most left ideal of the time they were written in. It’s the biggest limit in this kind of storytelling, and often these stories don’t even get pushed as far left as they could be because they need to have a kind of populous appeal.

The major themes I want to talk about from season five, though, are the limits of medicine, the idea of gender and sexuality, and the willingness to commit war crimes and genocide—all in the progressive, utopian 24th century. In the back-to-back episodes of “Ethics” and “The Outcast” we get the first two ideas. Both episodes I have a lot of negative feelings about, and the other idea we get in “I, Borg,” which is, perhaps, one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever put to screen. 

In “Ethics,” Worf is injured beyond Starfleet and Dr. Crusher’s abilities. He has a large stack of barrels fall on him and he becomes paralized because of it. We’ve got two ethical dilemmas converging in this Ronald D. Moore penned episode—and I should note he later said he hated working on it. The first dilemma is the ethics of the right to die, but specifically the context of the right to die when physical disability is a major factor. It’s apparently baked into Klingon culture, and Worf believes it is his duty to end his life because of his injuries. The second dilemma is the debate about how far medical experimentation should be allowed to go, in order to potentially advance the field. 

Seen by a lot of the creative team as the first real time they’d had deep, interpersonal conflict between lead characters, “Ethics” is a messy episode. It’s filled with lots of moral conversations that were front and center in the early 1990s, and remain conversations we keep coming back to in the modern era. And I think that the show does a medium to good job, especially for 1992, at balancing both sides of those two conversations, even though I don’t find the episode to be particularly good, in a general sense. 

Part of my reaction to it, though, comes from the idea of medical futures and how far Star Trek is actually willing to imagine what the future of health would look like in the 24th century. Like, I’m sorry, it seems kind of weird that they can’t help Worf with a normal medical procedure and end up having to resort to Dr. Russell’s risky surgery. I’ve discovered, through watching The Next Generation, that I really dislike how underdeveloped medical science is in the Star Trek universe, when so many other things are really hammered out. It becomes something that’s only thought about, and expanded on, within the context of any given episode where it’s important, and I think that’s a mistake. 

The next episode that aired, although it was a few weeks later with TNG’s funky schedule, was the episode “The Outcast.” This is our episode with what little actual queer commentary Star Trek could muster at the time. Though because it’s playing with sexuality, that means it’s also playing in the arena of gender roles and dynamics. In the episode, the crew of the USS Enterprise meets a humanoid alien race called the J'naii, who have evolved past gender. 

Except that they haven’t fully “evolved past gender,” as Soren, one of the J’naii, reveals to Riker later on in the episode. There are members of their race who more closely identify with the gender binary, despite gender (and sexual relations generally) being a high crime of sexual perversion. Soren is one such person, more closely identifying with womanhood, and she begins a brief relationship with Riker before being discovered and going through what amounts to conversion therapy. 

Now, there’s a lot going on in this episode. “The Outcast” was always intended to be TNG’s response to the contemporary conversation around sexuality in the early 1990s—a time when homosexuality was still in the DSM, though its inclusion was slowly evolving. (“Persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation” wouldn’t come completely out of the DSM until 2013, which is certainly something.) 

Honestly, there’s not a lot to say about if this episode succeeds or not as a commentary on queer sexuality (I don’t think it does). “The Outsider” is an ultimately clumsy attempt at showing the real world consequences of homophobia and conversion therapy. I can’t take stories like this seriously because it has the trappings of our real life experiences, but wraps them up in what amounts to heterosexuality. Which is where a lot of queer people fell at the time of the episode, too.

I mean, even Jonathan Frakes understands where the episode failed. He’s said multiple times, since the episode aired, that Soren should have been played by a man. Would he have kissed Soren’s character, though, if the actor had been a man? I’d like to believe yes, as I’m sure Frakes would say so, but given that it was 1992, who can really say. I doubt they would have aired it, in all honesty. 

But, the thing I think is actually the most interesting about “The Outsider” is the idea of gender that gets laid into the story. I think it’s actually much more interesting than whatever queer allagory they’re trying to do. Before Soren reveals her gender to Riker, she spends a lot of the episode asking questions of various crew members about their experiences of gender. She asks Beverly about her womanhood and she asks Riker to break down his understanding of men and women. 

Riker lays out a very binary, early 1990s idea of gender for Soren, which I think is a perfect showcase for the limits of utopian storytelling, in similar ways of “Ethics.” No matter how progressive the era is that you’re in, or how progressive you can imagine the future, you are ultimately bound to the ideas and ideals of your time. You may push them a bit, but so few can imagine as far beyond them as a true utopian society demands—especially not when you’re trying to put it on television for the audience of your actual time. 

But if there’s one thing we can imagine in a utopian society, or one that seems to be aiming for it without actually hitting it yet, it’s that there are some topics we are allowed to change our minds on. War, for instance, is one of them, where sexuality, gender, and medicine may not be. 

A few months before “I, Borg” premiered, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin met at Camp David and declared an official end to the Cold War. The war, which had been raging since before The Original Series premiered, was finally over. And this was the world that “I, Borg” was born into. It’s the story of a lone Borg who is brought on the Enterprise and separated from the Borg consciousness. Knowing that the Borg, at large, will come back for him, Picard (still emotionally reeling from his transformation a few seasons ago) views this as the perfect opportunity to destroy the Borg once and for all. If they can infect this Borg with a virus, he’ll transmit it to the whole consciousness once he’s reunited with them. It’s a thing we, and Beverly Crusher, like to call genocide. 

But things don’t go as Picard and Guinan (who shares a hatred and deep fear of the Borg with the captain) thought they would, as Geordi and Beverly bring the Borg back to health and he begins to change. They give him a name, Hugh, which he starts to identify with, and he eventually sees himself as an individual. He uses “I” instead of “we,” which is the moment Picard knows they can’t willfully destroy the Borg. Not if they can be unassimilated and find individuality. When they send Hugh back, they can only hope that his self actualization becomes part of the larger Collective before he’s reassimilated. 

So, when is genocide not genocide? Maybe it’s when the group being completely eradicated is unable to be rehabilitated. Maybe it’s when you’re being theoretically genocided back, even if the result isn’t directly death. Maybe it’s just when the paramilitary organization that ostensibly runs the universe decides to commit genocide, but thinks the word is yucky.

It’s a trick question, though. Genocide is always genocide, even if you call it by another name. And it’s only separated from “war crimes” because it doesn’t need to happen during the height of war, according to the UN.

And it’s all of these messy thoughts that make “I, Borg” perhaps the most important and interesting episode of the season, but I would also put it in the top five episodes of TNG. Period. It does a really nice job of humanizing an enemy, of showing the prejudices of beloved characters and bringing them to their knees, and it opens up a conversation about Starfleet, the utopian ideals of the Federation, and the wars they’re still fighting in the 24th century. Many episodes in season five of The Next Generation give voice to the multitude of wars that are on-going in the universe, though. It’s a concept that Star Trek continues to play with, but never really tries to break down in any deeply meaningful way—at least not yet. 

As I continue watching Star Trek, one of the great joys in my life, I am reminded that even with a great vision of the future, we are bound and limited in our storytelling abilities by the furthest we can currently see. And, honestly, I think that’s okay. I think we should be able to look at the utopian hope of decades ago and be baffled that they couldn’t imagine the world we’re in today, let alone the world we’re headed into. If we saw ourselves accurately reflected, as we currently are, in the dreams of the adults of our youth, then we wouldn’t be galloping into strange new worlds. We’d be running up against the fence of the final frontier and wondering why we didn’t keep exploring and growing and moving the goal post.

Utopian storytelling, even with the best of intentions, has its limits—and it should. We should be going into a future far beyond the dreams of those who came before us.