TNG Deathmatch Episode 24: Conspiracy vs Preemptive Strike

So: Conspiracy. Back when this first aired in the UK (in 1990 I think) and for a long time afterward, as I recall, we thought it was a barnstormer, the best episode so far, leaps and bounds ahead of anything TNG had done previously. And we didn't even get the full episode - Remmick's exploding head was not shown.

Watching it now, I'm trying to recall exactly what it was that we thought was so exceptional. Picard is roused from sleep by an urgent message from his old friend Walker Keel, who wants to meet secretly. Keel tells Picard that he suspects a conspiracy is taking over Starfleet, and Picard mocks his paranoia. Keel and two fellow captains tell Picard of officers being reassigned, of mysterious deaths - and then, after the Enterprise leaves, Keel's ship blows up with all hands lost.

Picard returns to Earth to discuss the matter with Admiral Quinn, the man who expressed vague worries about Starfleet's integrity back in Coming Of Age. Quinn now dismisses his own fears as just an old man's fancy, and invites Picard to Starfleet headquarters by way of apology. When Picard beams down, Quinn remains aboard, and attempts to infest Riker with a bizarre alien parasite. There's a brief fistfight in which Riker, Geordi and Worf are bested by this elderly man, and then Crusher shows up and just stuns the guy without a word, no messing about. (I had always thought she had her free hand in her pocket the whole time, which would have been fantastic - just standing there, hand in pocket, zapping away - but on a recent rewatch it seems she's actually just holding her hand by her side as if called upon to shoot someone mid-Vogue. Shame.)

The crew discovers an alien protrusion on the back of Quinn's neck, and Riker goes down to Starfleet Headquarters too, but has he been infected?! We don't know, dun dun duuuhhhn. Picard's superiors are being creepy, dinner turns out to be maggots, Riker fakes his own possession and he and Picard start shooting up the place, culminating in the discovery that poor old Commander Remmick is the queen bug. They phaser him most violently, the enormous bug explodes out of his chest, and they phaser that too.

Afterward, it turns out that all the other bugs magically died when the queen was killed, because that definitely makes sense and totally happens in nature - for instance, if you kill a queen bee, EVERY SINGLE BEE in the hive will definitely die immediately no matter where it is. Don't look it up, I already checked, I promise. Data says that Remmick was sending a homing signal when he died, and the episode fades out on the ominous sound of a transmission parping through the stars, which was a lot more effective when it first aired and is less so now that we know this cliffhanger was never revisited.

To its credit, it tells a simple, punchy story with a lot of action, and though I prefer Trek when it's talky, sometimes you just want to see a guy's head explode. Comparing this to the unsatisfying, bloodless moral dilemmas of Symbiosis or Justice, I can understand why it made such an impact, but I'm glad they didn't lean into the monster-of-the-week format much after this.

Preemptive Strike is the farewell episode for Ensign Ro, a popular recurring character despite only appearing in maybe a half-dozen or so episodes. It's nice that she was so well-regarded as to deserve a swan-song before the series ended. Barclay didn't get one, and nor did Guinan, but then, the wider story of the demilitarised zone created by the Cardassian-Federation peace treaty did lend itself to Ro's story in particular.

Ro has been away on Starfleet's advanced tactical training course, and upon her return is tapped by Picard to infiltrate the Maquis, because sending a Bajoran undercover worked out really well the last time.

The formation of the Maquis happens a lot quicker than I remember. Per Memory Alpha, Journey's End aired on 28th March 1994, with DS9's The Maquis airing on the 24th April. Preemptive Strike aired on the 16th May. There are only 3 episodes of TNG between Journey's End and Preemptive Strike.

I know that a month in broadcast terms doesn't necessarily equate to a month in-universe, but it really didn't take long for the informal solution reached by Picard and Gul Evek in Journey's End to go totally tits-up. One broadcast month between "If you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone" on TNG, and "the Cardassians have poisoned the public replicators and killed a guy they were interrogating" on DS9. 

I wonder if Sisko ever found out that the Maquis were essentially created because some random Cardassian Gul told Captain Picard "we won't bother your colonists after you're gone, probably" and Picard just took him at his word? I guess Necheyev didn't mention that detail when she was bawling Sisko out for not being able to fix the situation. Maybe she was annoyed that Sisko never gave her canapés. If I'd been her I'd have ordered Picard back to the DMZ to fix his own mess, but then, TNG was never about the long-term implications. DS9 in this case literally had to clean up TNG's mess.

Anyway, yes. Because Ro is not only super-highly-trained now, but also an ex-convict, a rebellious nonconformist and a Bajoran, she's a perfect candidate to infiltrate the Maquis. She expresses some doubts about the mission because she's not unsympathetic to the Maquis' aims, but does it anyway because she wants to prove that Picard was right to have faith in her. She hauls up at the Mos Eisley cantina some scummy DMZ dive, falls in with the right crowd, earns the trust of the Maquis, and starts going on missions. Then, the kindly old Maquis leader she had looked up to and cared about for all of five minutes is killed by a Cardassian raid, and she's heartbroken.

When Picard devises a plan to entrap them, she gets cold feet, and he sends Riker as her fake Bajoran friend to keep her on-track, but at the last moment she realises she can't do it: she cannot, as a Bajoran, let these people be captured and punished for defending themselves against the Cardassians, treaty or no treaty. She reveals the trap and beams away, leaving Riker to go back to the Enterprise and tell Picard that Ro felt bad for letting him down. 

The final shot is of Picard in his ready room, staring grimly into space, his face stony with disapproval. The episode is hugely sympathetic to Ro's feelings, but this last shot does seem to endorse the view that Picard was let down by her when, in reality, Picard had no business sending her on a mission that he knew would be emotionally devastating. 

In Ensign Ro, she told him how, as a child, she had been forced to watch her father tortured to death by Cardassians. She told him how she had grown up feeling ashamed of him for begging for mercy, ashamed to be Bajoran; she told him how she had engaged with Admiral Kennelly in a plot to supply weapons to Bajoran terrorists. A Starfleet Admiral offered her a chance to help her people, and she had to take it.

Granted, that was two years ago, give or take, but to put Ro out there as an undercover operative shows incredibly poor judgment on Picard's part, particularly when she tells him that her primary motivation for the mission is to justify his faith in her. Not because she agrees that the Maquis are a menace, or that the treaty must be preserved, but to impress Picard. So, having lost her father in the most horrific way imaginable, she's setting Picard up as a father figure, someone whose approval she seeks, someone who (per The Next Phase) she admits she's intimidated by. Having felt ashamed of her own nationality, ashamed to have been Bajoran because of the way they were treated by the Cardassians, she is seeking a new place to belong.

There's an obvious conflict of interest in Ro and he shouldn't have made her go on a mission that would arouse such powerful, painful emotions. The minute she said that, he should have sent her to Troi to address her lingering issues about what she's been through. It's amazing there was never a moment where Troi was present, actually, to say "This is torment for Ro, and she's deeply conflicted. Never mind that she wants to prove herself to you, you are hurting her, and hurting the mission, and need to pull her out of there". It's insane.

Naturally, it takes three minutes for Ro - once she's accepted into the Maquis - to start feeling at home with them and glomming on to their leader, kindly old Macias, as her new father figure, bonding over food and music and talking tearfully about her father. Maybe on some level, her need for approval from Picard was lessened when she saw that he cared more about the mission than he did about her. The episode doesn't say as much, but it's easy enough to imagine. Sometimes a person offers to do something they don't want to do, just to hear someone say "No, I care about you and I'm not going to let you hurt yourself that way". When they don't say that, some thread of connection is cut.

When Macias, too, is killed by the Cardassians, Ro takes over for him at his request. The episode has to pack a lot of story into a short hour; it's hard to gauge how much time is supposed to have passed, and it comes across a little perfunctory, with Macias' literally asking Ro to take his place with his dying words, a few short days after she's joined the Maquis. She tells Riker that she's found her place at last, though it clearly saddens her. It saddens Riker too. 

It doesn't seem to sadden Picard, so much as disappoint him. It's hard to interpret the look on his face but it does not seem to be an expression of guilt, and personally, I feel it should be. Guilt for being instrumental in the creation of the DMZ, guilt for sending Ro into it. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. I would have much preferred a scene in which Picard recognises how he prioritised the mission to the extent that he didn't recognise how much it was tearing Ro up inside; that he is the one at fault, not her.

I mean, per DS9, in a year or two the Maquis are all dead. There's a pleasant thought. Bye Ro. It lessens my respect for Picard to think that he would feel angry that Ro betrayed him, but not guilty that he had let her down.

It's not a perfect episode, mostly because the scenes where Ro earns the trust of the Maquis and bonds with Macias all feel a little bit rote, played out in familiar beats at an accelerated rate, too fast to really feel convincing. There's also - I have to mention this - a really weird scene where Ro and Picard discuss the plan in the conference room, and instead of sitting together or studying a screen, they walk side by side along the table, then they get to the end...turn round...and walk back down the table. It's just bizarre and artificial. Why are they walking up and down the conference room like that? If they wanted to walk and talk, why not do it in the corridor instead of doing lengths of the table? It's very silly.

Mostly, though, it's a good send-off for Ro and for Michelle Forbes, and a shame it makes Picard seem like an insensitive hog.

WINNER: Preemptive Strike