5x01 Redemption (2)

[7.4/10] There’s enough material in the second part of “Redemption” to do four episodes. That is, in a weird way, something to be grateful for. We are thankfully past the early seasons of the show where writers might try to stretch half an episode’s worth of incident across a full hour. But the problem is that all of the great storylines present here are, by necessity, given the short shrift. There’s just not enough real estate to give each of them the time they deserve.

The reveal that Tasha Yar had a daughter in the past deserves its own episode. The machinations of the Klingon Civil War deserves its own episode. Data’s first time as captain of a starship deserves its own episode. Worf’s experiences as a Klingon officer and return to Starfleet deserves its own episode. Most of these ideas are good. Each of them have enough meat on the bone to warrant their own meal, and “Redemption” is reduced to nibbling at each of them.

Aside from the issue of cramming four king-size trucks into a compact car parking space, the episode also makes some calls that require the audience to turn its brain off and accept some implausible or unpleasant things. Chief among the former is the concept of Picard’s “blockade” in space. I don’t know where to begin with the smell test problems that idea has.

Frequently, the images we see suggest the blockade is a two-dimensional plane, which begs the question why the Romulans can’t just go around it. More charitably, assuming the Federation blockade is more of a three-dimensional net, it raises all sorts of logistical questions. How could a series of ships arranged in some sort of polyhedron send beams to one another wide enough that there would be no gaps, to where every link in the chain would be filled in? Even assuming we can chalk that one up to Treknobabble, is the border between the Romulans and the Klingons so small that a minor Federation fleet can encompass it?

I don’t want to be a nitpicker here. Lots of Star Trek episodes depend on vague sci-fi concepts that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Those concepts are there to serve the story, and the blockade does too. I’m reluctant to be too harsh on it. But it’s the kind of concept that instantly raises tons of intuitive “How would that actually work?” questions that cloud its utility in telling the story.

On a bigger scale, though, I have some real issues with the concept of Tasha’s daughter Sela. The show righted a wrong in “Yesterday’s Enterprise*, giving Lt. Yar the chance to make her death a meaningful one rather than a senseless one. It required a little of that sci-fi magic to make it happen, but it paid tribute to Tasha as originally conceived: noble, loyal, and courageous.

I get the impulse to want to bring Denise Crosby back to the show in some form. I even understand the impulse to use a preexisting fantastical concept in the show to make it happen rather than having to invent another one. But good lord, there’s something so dispiriting about the transforming the noble sacrifice of a woman escaped the dreaded “rape gangs” on her home planet to become a decorated Starfleet officer and went to great lengths to make her death mean something into a horrible tale of torture, years of sexual slavery, and a daughter who hates her. Stories must go on, but god, what a slap in the face to the character.

Nevermind that to make all of his happen, you need to have Guinan suddenly remember things with much more clarity than she seemed to before. And she has to explain it to Picard in an exposition dump. And you have to introduce rumors of survivors of the Enterprise-C and have Sela be willing to board the Enterprise-D to explain all of this back-bending contortion of continuity. None of it feels organic. None of it builds on character developments past. None of it seems to serve any purpose beyond “Denise Crosby’s back. Isn’t that cool?”

But damnit, it is cool! I like Picard vs. Sela! I like their bloody chess game over the stupid blockade. Like so many things in Star Trek, it requires you to turn off your brain a bit and not think too hard about the implications of certain ideas. And yet, taken on a pure story level, it’s cool to see the Captain of the Enterprise matching wits the crafty offspring of his former lieutenant, with the balance of power in the quadrant at stake.

Picard’s blockade works as a means for Starfleet to not directly interfere in an internal Klingon conflict, while still operating to support Gowron’s cause and catch any Romulan interference. That’s one of the things I like about Picard’s depiction here. He is someone who firmly believes in working within the system. But he lobbies Starfleet Command to let him pull this off, with a plan for how and why it could work, and potentially give them leeway to join the fight. He’s not the type to go beyond the guideposts of Starfleet protocol, but he’ll toe the line, find ways to make the rules work to his advantage, with practical considerations and a means of getting things done. It’s just one of the many reasons he’s one of television’s best paragons of leadership.

He and Sela pussyfoot around the existence of the blockade and its purpose, which is pretty fun amid the exposition dumps to explain Sela’s arrival. Picard even has a plan to bait his Romulan adversaries, feigning a hole in the blockade with another ship waiting to catch the Federation’s foes in the act. Sela’s too smart for it though, relenting despite her subordinate’s insistence because she knows her opponent’s craftiness, and comes up with an alternate plan to get supplies to the Duras Sisters that would have worked but for one enterprising android. Seeing the strategic back and forth between her and Picard is a thrill, even if the mechanics are shaky at best.

It all comes to a head when Data is placed in command of one of the new vessels rushed into the fleet given the exigencies of the situation. When Data takes command of that ship, he gets resistance from his would-be first officer, Lt. Cmdr. Hobson, who seems offended not only that he’s been usurped by some outsider (shades of Geordi and that jerk engineer in Kirk and Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture), but by an android at that, expressing some good old fashioned space racism in the process.

I really wish we got more than three scenes of this story. There’s so much juice to the idea of the discrimination, even mere hesitation, from crewmen serving under an artificial life form. Writer Ronald D. Moore finds a good angle on it -- that other officers might worry that an android wouldn’t treat their lives with the sanctity a more traditionally mortal being might. And there’s some good bits to test that, with Data having to make decisions that balance the chance to detect the Romulan threat with a radiation risk to those under his command.

He even has to disobey (or at least tarry in obeying) Captain Picard’s orders. It’s an elegant way to make Lt. Robophobia blanche while showing that Data does have a vital quality for command that his superiors might reasonably worry about -- the judgment on when not to follow orders to the letter. The creativity to foil Sela and the confidence to seize the moment even when his commanding officer and first officer are both squirming demonstrate that Data’s worthy of the role and the occasion, something that causes Captain Picard to give him a pat on the back instead of the expected reprimand.

Were that the same could be said for Worf. If anyone gets truly short-changed here, it’s him. “Redemption pt. 1” was very much his story, taking time to delve into his complicated feelings about being a Klingon raised by humans, his family’s honor, and what it means to be a Klingon. Here, he spends most of the episode either off-screen or having been kidnapped by the Duras Sisters.

To be frank, most of all I wish we got an episode that was just Worf operating as a Klingon weapons officer, with barely a hint of Starfleet. As TNG showed in “A Matter of Honor”, there’s plenty of hay to be made from throwing a trained Starfleet officer into a new situation with different expectations, especially when it’s their ridge-headed neighbors. Mixing that with Worf’s already recognized baggage about his people is a recipe for success.

To be fair the wisps of it we get here are good! I like that Worf wants to make a tactical withdrawal while Kurn is more inclined to make splashy-but-risky attempts to destroy his enemies. He bristles at the way Kurn’s men drink and scuffle like frat brothers with their enemies on the neutral ground of the capital. He laments that Gowron spends more time fending off foolish challengers to his leadership in fights to the death than planning for the next engagement with the Duras family’s forces. Like Guinan predicted, Worf does give in and offer a belly laugh for once when surrounded by his brothers in arms. But as much as he wanted to be a “real Klingon,”, it’s plain that his internalization of human and Federation principles leaves him somewhat disgruntled over his new countrymen’s way of doing things.

The peak of this comes after Gowron has won the war, and offers Worf the life of a captured Toral (Duras’s son). Worf rejects the notion of inherited sin and spares Toral’s life, even preventing his brother from “avenging” the Duras family’s crimes via this helpless puppet. Whatever his desire to vindicate his Klingon heritage, Worf’s accepted human concepts of mercy, of rejecting bloodline-based shame, that keep him true to himself even if it is not the Klingon way.

I just wish we got more of it. Despite leaving to fight in the Klingon Civil War, we don’t see Worf doing much of anything during it. He rejects the Duras Sisters’ advances and ploys, but outside of some mild work at tactical and minor bit of fisticuffs, he’s all but sidelined. More than that, once it’s done, he’s just back on the Enterprise, easy as pie. Apparently you can kill the potential leader of an allied nation, resign your commission to fight in their war, and then when it’s done just be welcomed back with open arms. I’m not saying it’s implausible that Starfleet would take Worf back under the circumstances, but it’s all very quick and convenient.

That’s a natural outgrowth when you try to do four big stories in a single forty-four minute episode. The problem is magnified when the stories are too underdeveloped to be much of anything, but it’s all the more frustrating where, as here, they’re just developed enough to be a frustrating exercise in missed potential.

But the good thing about Star Trek: The Next Generation as it begins its fifth season is that even when an episode doesn’t hit every target it aims for, it’s still watchable, exciting, and even fun. After four years on the air, the series had grown comfortable, confident even, being able to put on ambitious hours like this one which fall short in places, and fall prey to the necessities of network television, but still manage to be entertaining in the process. It’s a good indicator for the show, to where even when it wasn’t great, it could still be pretty damn good.