TNG Deathmatch Episode 7: Justice vs Dark Page

Bluntly, Justice is the worst. A relic of sixties free-love-ism that envisions a sexually-liberated future as a planet of half-naked bimbos who are childlike and primitive in their behaviour but also totally DTF – and the crew is also DTF, so much so that their review of the planet’s customs and laws fails to register that there is only one punishment on the planet Edo: execution. (Seriously. Yar confidently states early on that she’s reviewed their laws and found nothing of consequence. She should have been courtmartialed.) 

It's a weird view of sexuality that's very specific to Trek in general, wherein the creators envision a future free from sexual hang-ups or prudery, but cannot adequately portray it onscreen, partly due to the restrictions of television censorship, partly due to their own present-day prudery and hang-ups getting in the way. A society truly free of sex-shame wouldn't be nearly so nudge-nudge-wink-wink, so obsessed with flesh, simultaneously brazen and coy. It all feels like a sex scene in a fourteen-year-old's school creative writing project, inserted into the text to prove how cool and grown-up the kid is, and how if he gets any flack for it it's all the problem of backward adults. And the teacher just rolls her eyes and writes a note to the kids' parents that he really needs to start listening in biology. (Also, the link between childlike ignorance and sexual availability is - well, there shouldn't be a link, is what I'm thinking.)

 

There’s a germ of a good story here. The idea of a seemingly idyllic planet where any infraction leads to a death penalty, and you never know if the cops are going to be patrolling your street that day? A paradise controlled by the fear of death? There’s something there. A civilisation that wonders why we, as humans, have preferred to die for our freedom than sacrifice it to live in peace. A society that simply doesn’t realise how totalitarian it is because, on the surface, they have peace and love and oily massages. It's easy to see the terrors of totalitarianism in a 1984, but if the constant fear of capital punishment actually led to something like the Edo have, only less dumb - that muddies the water a little.

 

Justice is too ridiculous to get into anything so heavy, though. It’s too focused on boobs and perms and God-beings and debates about the Prime Directive – debates that would have been a lot more meaningful if the crew hadn’t decided to beam down to this primitive, pre-warp society just to get its end away in the first place. What was the Enterprise doing, trying to holiday on Edo? Is there a clause in the Prime Directive that excuses interference if the people on that planet are hot?

 

Then, halfway through, the episode stops ogling the bimbo-children and gets bogged down in fuzzy debate about the Prime Directive and my eyes, they glaze over. We know that Picard won’t let Wesley be executed, the interest should be in how he manages to convince the Edo-god or the bimbo-children or else trick them into letting Wesley go. What actually happens is that the Edo-god refuses to let them beam out, Picard pontificates, and then they can beam out. There’s no clarification, no recognition that he made a damn good point. The episode just ends. It’s as if the Edo-god got as bored as I did.

 

Dark Page, or “the one with young Kirsten Dunst”, is much better, though obviously that’s not saying much. It suffers a little from its proximity to Phantasms, in that both feature sequences in which the characters wander about in someone else’s mental landscape, and those landscapes happen to look exactly like the Enterprise; it doesn’t exactly feel like the freshest approach to the material. It tries to add a little depth to Lwaxana Troi’s character by suggesting that her overbearing monster-mommy act with Deanna is actually overprotectiveness borne of grief – she lost a daughter, Kestra, when Deanna was an infant. Deanna had an older sister and never even knew it.

 

It doesn’t quite work for me, though. This is definitely a your-mileage-may-vary issue, but personally, I find it a little reductive and boring to make Lwaxana’s personality the result of trauma. Love her or hate her, she is designed to provoke a reaction, to be abrasive, and I feel like it adds a little texture to the TNG universe to have someone like that around – and that Deanna could love and hate her too. It’s nice that, on this ship of perfect people with no interpersonal conflict (ha!), people can be annoying and still be liked and accepted in their own weird way. Lwaxana didn’t need explaining or excusing. It almost ruins all the other episodes she was featured in, if we now have to rewatch them knowing that we’re seeing a woman struggling with the trauma of a drowned child.

 

(Please insert your own jokes as to whether Lwaxana’s episodes were ruined to begin with, simply by virtue of having her in them. Personally, I found her intolerable as a child and she’s grown on me as I got older. I have no idea why. I liked Wesley when I was a kid, now every scene he's in makes me want to eat my own eyeballs.)

 

It’s also just such a big fudge to ask the audience to accept that a Federation ambassador and her Starfleet husband could or would successfully erase the existence of their child from the records. It’s hard to believe so little evidence exists, and the episode would have worked just as well had Troi managed to put some of the pieces together in the waking world; entering Lwaxana’s mind would still have been necessary to help her mother heal. Besides which, Lwaxana is a telepath, she lives on a planet where everyone reads minds. TNG never really got into the details of what the implications of that might be, what life on Betazed would really be like, but I can imagine a society that literally cannot have secrets would, of necessity, be very open about dealing with trauma. In short, it’s really hard to imagine a Betazoid repressing anything.

 

On the whole, though, Dark Page at least has a coherent story. Maybe not the most original or necessary or thrilling, but it’s solid.

 

WINNER: Dark Page