TNG Deathmatch Episode 13: Angel One vs Homeward

Angel One is fuzzy to me. We forgot to record it on the original run back in 1990 (when the episodes first aired in the UK), and when I finally got to see it years later, it was as bad as its reputation suggested. Apparently it was designed as an allegory for apartheid, but you’d never know it from the episode. The Enterprise encounters a matriarchal society in which women are the big strong macho ones and men are petite and decorative. Some humans have crash-landed on the planet and instead of just sending Troi and Yar to talk to the man-hating wimmin rulers, they send Riker with them to get his dander up about how backward the planet is. He bangs the leader because of course he does, though he doesn’t manage to effect a revolution with his penis, as Kirk would have. It’s sexist, boring, and inconsequential. 

 

The only tiny positive element for me is the costumes the men wear, and that Riker wears, on Angel One – nipple-revealing blouses and leather thongs that emphasise the crotch. Not because I find them attractive – I don’t, they’re awful. But I do like the idea that the men of Angel One dress in something so ridiculous and impractical, apparently in order to appeal to the women in charge; fashions for women here on earth are similarly impractical and (if viewed objectively) ridiculous, and in this, the episode offers a tiny shred of valid feminist critique, though I’m sure it was accidental.

 

If apartheid was the intended allegory, the episode fails massively on that score. The fomenting revolution is a non-starter, embodied as it is by the men of the downed Federation ship, who start taking wives from among the Angel One women. It's they who are angry at being mistreated, not the indigenous males of Angel One. We hardly see them. The male citizens are invisible, except for one brief scene in which Mistress Beata’s manservant sneaks a puff of her perfume when she’s not looking. This is presented as a gag. Haha, a man’s being girly. Highlarious. Do they know they're being discriminated against? Do they care? If you’re going to write an allegory for apartheid, why would you not bother to show the people actually being oppressed? 

I should say, this is only as I remember the episode. It's notoriously bad and not even worth the hate-watch it would take to refresh my memory. Homeward is not as fuzzy to me, though it is another episode that feels as if the writing staff was just running on fumes by this time, and didn't have it in them to make this story work.

We finally meet Nikolai, Worf’s foster brother – season seven had a lot of previously-unseen family members show up, one way or another. Geordi’s parents, Troi’s dead sister, Data’s mum, Crusher’s zombie grandmother…they were really reaching. I guess at least Nikolai doesn’t turn out to be dead already, that’s something. The family drama elements of this episode are pretty limp - Nikolai is the rebellious son who made his parents worry about him all the time, and Worf was the responsible one. (We have found out in other episodes that Worf was a handful as a child, beating up older kids and even accidentally killing someone in a soccer match, so god knows what Nikolai got up to that made Worf look like the stable one.)

 

Nikolai wants the Enterprise to pitch in to rescue a village of Boraalans, a primitive civilisation whose world is about to be destroyed. Picard cites the Prime Directive, and says they can’t interfere, so Nikolai secretly beams the village onto the holodeck (in a plot later recycled in Insurrection), intending to resettle the villagers without their knowledge. There are technical issues, the holodeck malfunctions, Brian Markinson escapes. He can’t cope with the reality of what’s being done to his people, the reality of being in space, and kills himself. I guess this is to dramatize why the Federation doesn’t interfere with primitive populations, but if that’s the idea, it really doesn’t work, because if Nikolai hadn’t beamed up the Boraalans they all would have died anyway. Nikolai’s actions may have led to the suicide of one man, but he saved a whole village.

 

The strict interpretation of the Prime Directive in this episode is unpleasant and paints our nominal heroes in a very unflattering light. Non-interference is a good principle when it prevents the Federation from messing up the natural development of a society, and also prohibits some of Starfleet’s crazier officers from trying to remodel primitive societies after their own demented designs, most famously Captain Hitler Had A Few Good Ideas Actually He Just Went About Them In The Wrong Way in Patterns Of Force. But to refuse to save even a few people from a planet that is doomed anyway just makes the Enterprise crew look callous.

 

Then again, the idea that saving this one village will mean anything in the grand scheme of things is also absurd. Nikolai has saved one village, and thanks to typical TNG production restrictions, that village consists of about a dozen people. They’re not going to be in a position to repopulate a new Boraal. They’re going to be dead within a century because there aren’t enough of them to procreate effectively. Nikolai has basically chosen to live out his days and raise his child in a tiny community that’s doomed to rely on interbreeding in order to survive.

 

A better outcome, dramatically speaking, might have been to have Nikolai tell the Boraalans the truth. Think about it: from his perspective, saving the individuals – and his unborn child – would be more important than preserving the Prime Directive. He could tell them, “Hey, guys, the planet is doomed and so are we, and I know this is going to come as a shock to you, but in order to preserve the Boraalan culture and all your lives, we have to switch planets and maybe also start intermarrying with another genetically-compatible species, because there are also aliens and space travel is real and the stars aren't actually just painted on like you always thought”. That raises the stakes a little. I could understand Picard’s objections a lot more if that was on the table.

 

Or, while I’m thinking of it, maybe Nikolai could plan to reveal the Federation’s presence to the entire population of Boraal, so that the whole planet – maybe not primitive villagers, but a 20^th Century Earth analogue, with TV and mass communication – was affected. That way, it makes a genuine difference whether these people live or die – it’s not just a small bunch of people who will probably die in the first harsh winter anyway, it’s a literal civilisation. Maybe Nikolai could attempt to persuade Picard by presenting artefacts of Boraalan culture, their history, their equivalent of Michaelangelo or Shakespeare. Picard has a choice: he can attempt to save the planet from its environmental catastrophe, but to do so will either wipe them out en masse (as with A Matter Of Time) or save them in a way that reveals the existence of the Federation. Alternatively, he can do nothing and they die anyway. When the population starts worshipping the Federation, or holding UFO abduction cult festivals, or committing suicide, it dramatizes the need for the Prime Directive.

 

For all I know, this was suggested but was too expensive. That’s fair enough. A lot of season seven seems to be hamstrung by budget issues. Maybe none of these would have worked. I don’t know. The episode we got, though, is just unpleasant – dull, hectoring and ambiguous in the wrong way, in that rather than show two opposing views that both seem justifiable, we get two opposing views that are each as inflexible as the other. Neither side of this debate is worth rooting for.

 

WINNER: Homeward. For all its flaws, it’s got Paul Sorvino, Penny Johnson, Brian Markinson and a lack of overt sexism, beating Angel One by a mile.