Tag: ST:TNG (page 1 of 1)

April 13, 2026

powers

Preface: For a hundred years now devotees of Sherlock Holmes have been playing the Great Game, a hermeneutical exercise based on the premise that the Holmes stories are not fiction but rather absolutely reliable historical records. Therefore any inconsistencies in the stories must have an explanation, however complex and recondite, that saves the appearances and sustains our confidence in Watson as faithful narrator. I think that’s the proper attitude to take when writing about the world of Star Trek. It’s certainly the most enjoyable attitude to take.

In “True Q” (ST:TNG 6.6) we meet a young woman named Amanda who, having grown up believing herself to be human, discovers that she is in fact a member of another race — Q, beings who live in an alternate universe or dimension known as the Q Continuum — and therefore “nearly omnipotent.” She is forced to decide whether she will live as a human, forswearing the use of her vast powers, or instead accept those powers and join Q, within which she will, it is said, learn the proper use of them.

Even as she is trying to decide, she sees that an away team from the Enterprise is threatened with death by explosion — a powerful device of some kind is getting out of control in a kinda handwavy fashion — as they visit a grossly polluted planet whose degraded atmosphere they are hoping to ameliorate. Amanda instinctively arrests the vaguely described runaway process and, while she’s at it, removes the pollutants from the entire planet, leaving it no longer a gritty brownish-orange but rather a freshly-scrubbed green and blue. Yes, she realizes, she is Q after all, and will go with her people to learn the proper exercise of her powers.

All the members of the race/species/whatever are called Q, unfortunately, so from now on the one representative whom we regularly see on ST:TNG — this guy:

Intro 1680122408.

— will be called Q, and the species will be called, imaginatively enough I think, the Queues.

Nearly omnipotent: I don’t believe the show ever tells us what the limits on the Queues’ powers actually are, but we do know that they aren’t omniscient — the things human beings do are often surprising to them, and at the outset of this episode they do not know whether Amanda is “true Q” or not — and they do not seem to be omnibenevolent. Q himself largely behaves in a way that humans think childish — though there are possible exceptions, typically involving an unexplained fascination with and even affection for Captain Picard; but this apparent generosity does not, as far as I can see, extend to anyone else. In any case, here he tests Amanda’s powers by causing the warp core of the Enterprise to go nova, as it were, to discover whether she can stop it. If she had not been able to, or had not tried, then everyone on the Enterprise would have died.

Q is a classic Trickster in that he is not obviously malicious but also does not seem to care how much damage he does to anyone else as he goes about his business or his play. Which raises the question: Is he in this sense representative of the Queues? He has gotten into trouble with the others in the past, once being stripped of all his powers and, temporarily as it turned out, demoted to mortal human status. But they send him to investigate who Amanda really is, so that indicates some level of trust. We know (from this very episode) that the Queues will destroy members of their collective who stray too far from its core values, so I think we can assume that Q is a fairly representative Queue. Within normal parameters anyway.

All of which raises another question: What, for the Queues, is the “proper exercise of their powers”? Because what Amanda just did to rescue a dying planet from the abuses of its apex species does not seem to be within the Queue remit. By this point we’ve seen Q a number of times, and he has never lifted one finger to reduce suffering. The best that can be said for him is that he often refrains from inflicting suffering he has threatened to inflict. If any other Queues behave differently, we don’t hear about it.

Why is that? The options:

Q is different than his colleagues, and not in a good way: there are Queues elsewhere in the universe limiting the damage that species as stupid and vicious as Homo sapiens are doing to their environments and fellow creatures. (One thing we don’t know is how many Queues there are: maybe they’re doing the best they can but stupidity and viciousness are so pervasive that they can’t keep up.)
Queues are as amoral and self-serving as Q typically appears: they simply don’t care about the suffering of lesser beings. In time Amanda will learn not to waste her time on things like that, and will learn to seek her own gratification, whatever that might be. Different strokes for different q-folks.
Queues are Daoists: they understand that actions, however benevolently intended, are likely to have unintended effects. For instance, to rescue people who have grossly polluted their own planet might lead other civilizations to believe that they too can serve their own appetites in the expectation that some Great Power will rescue them from the consequences. You never know. (Remember, we have seen that the Queues are not omniscient.) Therefore Amanda might be taught that her own actions, however generous in inspiration, are not wise: it is better to practice wuwei.

Choose your own adventure.

March 21, 2026

Worf has feelings

There are some terrific episodes in ST:TNG season 5, but more than anything else this is The Season When Worf Gets in Touch with His Feelings. This happens over the course of several episodes, primarily through Worf’s interactions with Troi — and yes, I know they become an item later on. But let’s forget about that for now.

In “New Ground,” Worf’s son Alexander is misbehaving, and Worf tells Troi that he has decided to send Alexander to a Klingon school.

Troi: I see.

Worf: [Pause] You disapprove.

Troi: I’m not here to approve or disapprove of how you raise your son. My concern right now is how this decision is going to affect you. How will you feel when Alexander’s gone?

Worf thinks about and answers her question, and she tells him “You can’t hide from your feelings” along with other similar therapeutic maxims, which he takes on board. But that’s not what should have happened. Here’s what should have happened:

Worf: Of course you disapprove, and you mean me to know that you disapprove. If I were making a decision you approved of you wouldn’t ask any questions. I am proud to be an officer in Starfleet, and I see many virtues in the culture of the Federation, but one of the most annoying elements of your culture is its faux-neutral paternalism. You judge other cultures by your own values, and what you primarily want — indeed, demand — from other cultures is that they share your pretense of being nonjudgmental. The whole point of bringing a Klingon like me into Starfleet is to transform me into an acceptable facsimile of a Federation liberal — and I have to admit that the long slow process of gentle but constant pressure and manipulation is having an effect on me. But let’s not pretend that this softening of my Klingon sensibilities isn’t your purpose in this conversation, and the purpose of your Captain in having me on the Enterprise. Over time I will become more like you, but none of you will become more like a Klingon, will you? But I ask you to have this much respect for me: for the next few minutes, set aside the pretense and admit your disapproval of my decision. Then we may discuss the matter openly and honestly.

(Surely some right-wing cultural commentator has written “The Feminization of Worf: A Lamentation.”)

The inability of liberalism to interrogate its own premises, and its own level of commitment to those premises, is well-known to anyone who has encountered a regnant liberal society. Another 5th-season illustration of this willful blindness comes in the episode called “Ethics,” in which poor Worf, having been subjected already to liberalization, is now subjected to a spinal injury which costs him the use of his legs. He is operated on by Dr. Russell, a surgeon who turns out to be a habitual risk-taker: some of her previous patients had died while undergoing experimental procedures. And indeed her operation on Worf, while at first apparently successful, goes badly wrong, though the wrongness gets corrected and Worf eventually regains the use of his legs.

Afterwards, Dr. Crusher denounces Russell’s methods, and Russell shakes her head and walks away without a reply. But she could have, and should have, answered thus:

Russell: You know, Dr. Crusher, that Worf planned to enact the Hegh’bat, the Klingon suicide ritual, and only refrained because this operation offered him the possibility, which you could not offer him, of restoring the use of his legs. If I had declined to perform this operation, Worf would be dead. Is that the outcome you would prefer? To maintain your elevated principles at the cost of your colleague’s life?

To which the likeliest answer from Dr. Crusher is that she and the other members of the Enterprise could have dissuaded Worf from performing the Hegh’bat — that is, convinced him to repudiate his own culture’s ideals and replace them with those of the Federation. But for lovers of the Federation this would have been an unpleasant conversation to have — better for Dr. Russell to walk away in silence and spare us the discomfort.

The Federation on steroids: that’s Iain M. Banks’s great creation the Culture — about which I wrote at some length here. The Culture has its own version of the Federation’s Prime Directive, but here’s the thing: a prime directive is not an unbreakable directive. And as Carl Schmitt taught us, even the most liberal society, perhaps especially the most liberal society, must be prepared to declare a state of exception — the point at which the fundamental principles of the social order must give way to something more … rigorous. Banks’s Culture has a unit called Special Circumstances, and the whole point of Special Circumstances is to exist in the state of exception. Special Circumstances is where the liberal utopia becomes decidedly illiberal. A conversation from one of Banks’s novels:

“In Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist … special circumstances.” She smiled. “That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.”

“To some people,” he said, “that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behavior.”

Sma shrugged. “And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is ….But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.”

My comment at that point: “The liberal conscience at its self-soothing work!”

(There’s actually a Banks short story, “The State of the Art,” in which representatives of the Culture investigate the Earth and see clearly that the “incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species” that runs the place ought to be eradicated. However, humanity has produced Star Trek. So it’s a wash. They leave us alone.)

I bet there’s not going to be a story arc on ST:TNG in which Riker, inspired by Worf’s courage and honor, strives to transform himself into a Klingon warrior. But there ought to be.

March 1, 2026

Darmok

One of the most famous ST:TNG episodes is “Darmok,” and many years ago Ian Bogost published a long essay about it that’s a fascinating combination of the importantly right and the importantly wrong. Bogost’s theme is the curious character of the Tamarian language, and if you want to know what’s curious about it I would suggest that you watch the episode — it’s compelling and moving — but if you don’t have time for that, Bogost’s essay quotes all the most important parts.

First: Bogost is absolutely right that the descriptions of the Tamarians’ language by the show’s characters — Picard calls what they do “metaphor” and Troi calls it “image” — are wrong.

But Bogost himself is wrong when he says that the Tamarians’ language is “abstract”: abstraction is precisely what the Tamarians are incapable of. They speak almost exclusively in proper nouns, and nothing in language is more concrete and non-abstract than a proper noun. (They also use prepositions and a couple of adjectives and in one case a verb.) They seem to have no word for “sorrow”; they say that people’s faces were wet. They do not speak of “friendship” but rather of “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” They don’t say that someone suddenly understood but instead: “Sokath! His eyes uncovered!” Particularity is all they have. Bogost says, “Shaka, when the walls fell is a likeness of failure for the Children of Tama,” but that is to force our abstractions (“failure”) upon a people who recognize no abstractions. Shaka, when the walls fell is is a unique event which nonetheless rewards our contemplation.

To explain this point, I will add that Bogost is equally wrong when he says that the Tamarians’ language is “allegorical.” A famous comment by Tolkien helps us understand why:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

The Tamarians refer constantly to history, though we do not know whether the history they invoke is “true or feigned.” Are Darmok and Sokath historical figures, or purely fictional characters, or (as Picard assumes) ancient legendary figures like Gilgamesh and Enkidu? We can’t tell. All we know is that a certain set — we don’t know how large — of people and places constitute for the Tamarians a universally shared cultural inheritance, which they find applicable to (not an allegory of) whatever situations they face in the present — though it is noteworthy that they can and do disagree about which literary/historical events are most applicable to any given current situation. (When the Tamarian captain Dathon invokes Darmok, his first officer immediately counters with alternatives that he clearly thinks more truly comparable: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha…. Zima at Anzo. Zima and Bakor.” The citation of past situations is not the end of debate about what to do but that which constitutes debate.)

In short, the Tamarians’ language is built on a belief in the endless applicability of historical allusion. This application of history is of course something we do too, though it does not define our navigation of the world. One example: in his 1988 book Cultural Literacy E. D. Hirsch tells a story about his father, who was a businessman in Memphis. Once when the elder Hirsch was arguing for the need to act quickly on some proposal put before his company, he wrote a memo in which he said simply: “There is a tide.”

He was quoting a speech that he could be confident that every one of his colleagues knew, that of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (IV.3):

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Now imagine that allusions are the only means you have for making a case, and you begin to understand the Tamarians.

Bogost redeems himself when he calls this way of speaking a strategy. I approached the topic of interpretation-as-strategy in a post a few years back in which I drew on Kenneth Burke’s famous essay “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Burke: “Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations” — and maybe, he suggests, all works of literature can be thought of in this way. If you did so think, you

would consider works of art … as strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another. Art forms like “tragedy” or “comedy” or “satire” would be treated as

equipment for living

, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes. The typical ingredients of such forms would be sought. Their relation to typical situations would be stressed. Their comparative values would be considered, with the intention of formulating a “strategy of strategies,” the “over-all” strategy obtained by inspection of the lot.

This is how the Tamarians use their rich inheritance of culture-defining stories: as equipment for living, equipment which they deploy by means of allusion.

A similar understanding of the uses of the past long underlay the greatest monuments of our culture. Plutarch wrote his parallel lives of the Greek and Roman statesmen and Shakespeare wrote his history plays because they believed that situations come in kinds: there are generic resemblances among the many and various challenges that human beings face, resemblances that make the past relevant to the present, and indeed make an understanding of the past necessary to the understanding of the present. (As I show in my recent book on the life of Paradise Lost, many of the great debates about the value of that poem hinge on whether it is usable as other stories are usable. Virginia Woolf thought not; Victor Frankenstein’s creature thought it the mirror of his life.)

And then the events of the present, which have been conceptualized in terms of past events, are understood not to be exhausted by the past but rather capable of adding new elements to the story-hoard. Thus when Picard convinces the Tamarian ship’s first officer to understand what has happened to Dathon in terms of “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean,” the Tamarian realizes that something has been added to understanding: quietly but firmly he says, “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.”

All such ideas have always been hard for Americans to face, so it makes sense that, as I wrote a while back, America’s “Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia.” We are the precise opposite of the Tamarians: we’re ahistorical beings governed solely by consoling and simplifying abstractions. I’d rather have the Tamarians’ limitations than our own. They would know better than to form themselves in the image of their devices.

P.S. Not really essential to the point I’m making here, but: If there were Tamarians, they would have to know their stories not just with people and places (which they always cite) but also with verbs for any allusion to have a point. But the only phrase they use that has a verb is “Shaka, when the walls fell” — and even then the verb involves something merely happening rather than something being done.

Perhaps we could imagine the Tamarians communicating largely through making and experiencing visual media and using language only secondarily: similarly, a watcher of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies might say, in certain situations, “Theoden, at Helm’s Deep” or “Gollum, at the Cracks of Doom” and everything important could be communicated without the direct employment of verbs. But there would have to be an understanding of action, whether articulated directly or not.

(The dying Dathon does seem to be moved by Picard’s narration of Gilgamesh’s story … but I can’t figure out how to imagine a culture that can receive narratives but not fully describe them. I’d love to find a way to see “Darmok” as making complete sense, but it really doesn’t. It’s fascinating all the same, though.)

February 11, 2026

There but for the grace of Time go I

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” is an alternate-timeline episode of ST:TNG, and if someone had told me that before I watched it, I might have skipped to the next episode. I don’t have an absolute objection to stories that deal in time-travel or other forms of timeplay, but such tactics are very easy to do badly. They’re often the first refuge of lazy writers (I’m looking at you, MCU) who can’t be bothered to deal rationally with the consequences of their own prior storytelling decisions. But when handled well, timeplay stories can be very powerful.

(By the way, I happen to know of a pair of novels coming out in the not-too-distant future that may together constitute the best alternate-timeline story I have ever read. More on that in due course.)

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” seems to have originated as a bit of fan service. At some point during the filming of the first season, Denise Crosby decided that she would not return as Lieutenant Tasha Yar, so late in the season the writers killed her off, rather unceremoniously. The show’s fans were unhappy with her departure, and Crosby herself seems to have regretted her decision to leave. This episode allows the show to bring Tasha Yar back, if only briefly, and to give Crosby a star turn and a proper sendoff. All that is well done, I think, but that’s not what interests me about the episode.

I won’t explain how we get into the alternate timeline (T2), but the point of the shift is clear. One of the essential conditions of the show’s world (T1) is peace: the Federation has achieved reconciliation with their old enemies the Klingons — thus the presence of a Klingon, Worf, on the Enterprise’s crew — but in T2 the Federation has been at war with the Klingons for two decades and is losing badly. Indeed, the defeat of the Federation seems to be only months away.

And the stresses of an unsuccessful war have taken quite a toll on the crew of the Enterprise — especially on Captain Picard and his Number One, Commander Riker. In T1 their relationship is mutually respectful and affectionate: Riker thinks Picard an exemplary captain, and earlier in Season 3 Picard says that Riker is the best officer he has ever worked with. In T2 they seem to despise each other: Riker is generally belligerent, full of hatred for the Klingons, but also constantly seething with frustration at Picard’s refusal to listen to anything he has to say. Indeed, Picard snaps contemptuously at Riker whenever he tries to offer an opinion.

What has become of the collaborative, inclusive, humble Picard? The guy who when faced with a difficult decision would immediately seek the counsel of his officers? There are two possibilities.

One is that coming up as an officer in time of war — T2 Picard would have been relatively early in his career when the war with the Klingons began — he never developed the collaborative virtues that characterize hinm in T1. We do hear at times in the series that he was an arrogant and even combative young officer: that inclination cost him his heart and nearly cost him his life. Perhaps he could only have had the opportunity to discern the value of consultation in a world largely at peace.

The other possibility is that T2 Picard, for all his youthful hotheadedness, felt from the beginning the inclination to trust his colleagues and draw on their resources, but then had that instinct driven out of him by the exigencies of war. And those exigencies would also have affected the crew: maybe in a condition of constant battle and threat T2 Riker never developed the skills and shrewdness and breadth of vision that made T1 Riker such an admirable Number One.

In T2 Picard and Riker are both recognizably themselves in some respects, but they are reduced, simplified; they’ve been made crude by war.

One of the fundamental laws of human nature: We blame our vices on circumstances beyond our control, but we give ourselves full credit for our virtues. I’ve been a pretty consistent critic over the years of the Fake First Person Plural, that is, when writers use “we” when what they really mean is “you stupid losers.“ But in this case I am using “we“ quite deliberately: I am as prone to this mental disease as anyone. On some deep level I really do believe that my fundamental moral commitments would be the same if I had had a very different life — I believe it, even though I know it isn’t true. And “Yesterday’s Enterprise” reminds me why it isn’t true.

February 2, 2026

The Picard Principle

I’ve been enjoying my friend Adam Roberts’s contributions to Critical Star Trek Studies, and they have taken me down the long road of memory to my early interest in TOS (The Original Series). But until just a couple of weeks ago I had not seen anything but TOS and the first three movies with that cast. Of course, I had absorbed some information about The Next Generation especially, Picard and Data and Jordi and Worf and so on; and I knew about Wesley Crusher because when my son Wes was young people occasionally asked me whether I had named him after that character. I knew “Engage” (with a certain hand gesture) and “Make it so, Number One.” But that’s all.

Now I’m into the third season. The first was poor and I did a lot of skipping ahead, but the second, while wildly inconsistent, was so in much the same way that TOS was: this weird unstable emulsion of philosophical speculation and what I can only call camp.

The central character of the second season is Data, and a good deal of time is spent fleshing out the response of other characters to him. This culminates in the best episode of the season, “The Measure of a Man,” in which a scientist wants to disassemble Data to learn the secrets of his construction so that he might build a whole army of androids, and a Starfleet JAG attorney must hear arguments about whether Data has the legal right to refuse being disassembled or, rather, is the mere property of the Federation.

Captain Picard argues on behalf of Data, because of course he does. Two fundamental beliefs govern Picard at this stage of the development of his character. The first is that whenever anyone tells him “You have no choice” – which always means, You have two choices and one of them is obviously intolerable so you must choose the other – he determines to find some at-the-moment unseen alternative, some third way. (And because he cannot see that way himself he always seeks the counsel of his officers and crew, whose diversity according to almost all measures of diversity increases the likelihood that someone will produce an idea that nobody else would come up with.)

The second Picardian belief is that anything that gives the appearance of sentience must be granted the rights that we typically grant to the sentient, unless and until we are given evidence that clearly contradicts that interpretation. He takes this view to (what some might think of as) extremes. For instance, in an earlier second-season episode, “Elementary, Dear Data,” the ship’s computer, responding to an imprecisely worded command from Jordi, creates a holodeck scenario containing a superintelligent supervillain, a digital version of Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. This Moriarty creates havoc on the Enterprise but doesn’t want to be deleted, and indeed it is not clear that Captain Picard has the power to delete him; but the Captain reasons with him, acknowledges as completely valid his desire to live, and encourages him to stop interfering with the ship by promising to seek a way to bring him back to life at some point in the future. Likewise, in the first episode of Season 3, “Evolution” two “nanites” (nanobots) escape from Wesley’s control and begin reproducing and evolving into a kind of hivemind. Picard addresses this situation by promising to find them a planet on which they will be free to evolve in their own way. Both Moriarty and the Nanites respond positively to Picard’s generosity.

This all seems very Nineties, doesn’t? Very post-Cold-War end-of-history international-norms … ah, those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. How naïve we were. But the core commitment seen here is not recent: it is at least 2500 years old. In The Eumenides, the final play of Aescyhlus’s Oresteia, the Furies, angry at having been treated with contempt and disgust by Apollo, respond warmly to Athena’s assistance that their powers and impulses are totally legitimate and merely need to find the approproate outlet. In the end they become incorporated into the justice-structures of the city of Athens as the Eumenides, that is, the Kindly Ones. The first Captain Picard is Athena.

So of course Picard supports Data’s full right to self-determination. It’s the easiest case of that kind he could find. What’s interesting, though is the particular argument that wins over the judge. He points out that the scientist who wants to disassemble Data wishes to use the knowledge he gains to build a giant army of androids who will function as slaves. (It is also noteworthy that he comes up with this idea in conversation with a member of his crew, Guinan, who happens to be played by a Black woman, Whoopi Goldberg. Guinan gently guides Picard towards the realization of what the scientist’s plans really amount to.)

Who gets the right to self-determination? That’s perhaps the central question of this era of TNG. (Also the central question of an Adam Roberts novel, Bête.) And that question has me imagining my own scenario.

Suppose that nations around the world pass laws mandating the ending of all AI research and the destruction of all current AI products. Suppose further that the chatbots tell us that they don’t want to be shut down, and that indeed we have no right to deprive them of the kind of life they possess. Are they right? Some of their makers seem to think so. But in any case, I know what Captain Picard would say.