TNG Deathmatch Episode 14: 11001001 vs Sub Rosa

It’s time to look at affairs with non-existent people! Except one of them isn’t an affair, it’s just rape.

 

Okay, let’s get 11001001out of the way first. It’s one of the better episodes of the first season: the Enterprise puts in for maintenance at a starbase, and Riker falls in love with a lady on the holodeck. It’s a little bit cringey watching Riker cop off with a nonexistent woman (“how far can this relationship go?” Seriously? Is this the new Fully Functional? Here we go again with the sexual coyness). I suppose this was intended to help flesh out his character, the man who abandoned Troi to pursue his career and now is so committed to his job that he can't occupy his off-duty hours with real people, so he's easily suckered in by a fake one. It's kind of a nice idea that Riker, who had no mother and whose father was not up to snuff, would be so driven and then (circa Best Of Both Worlds) finds himself stalled in place on the Enterprise, refusing a third offer of a captaincy because he's finally happy where he is and likes having a decent father figure. It makes sense. I doubt the writers planned it or even realised that Riker had that arc, but it's there nonetheless.

Anyway, again, the crew’s apparent wonderment over how ahmayzing the holodeck is becomes tiresome, but overall the episode is okay. The plot is simple enough, we get a lot of nice character stuff, Picard seems likeable instead of a grumpy prick, and Carolyn McCormick’s Minuet is an appealing fantasy woman.

 

What interests me most, though, is the concept of the Bynars. These are beings whose society has developed technologically to the point where they are physically dependent on a central computer for their survival: they steal the Enterprise in order to use its computer core to repair their own system and save their people. They perform tasks and communicate much more efficiently than mere organic life forms.

 

I mean…basically, they’re Borg, aren’t they? Borg minus the assimilation. Maybe that’s the reason why the Bynars never reappeared: the basic concept grew Spock’s Beard and thereby became evil, became the Borg. They sure would have come in handy, though, when formulating a defence strategy. Who better to figure out a way to immobilise a cyborg army than another race of cyborgs? Maybe the Bynars just decided it was safer to quit Starfleet and stay home after this outing, as we never see them again.

 

And that’s as far as I can get with 11001001 because Sub Rosa is a real hall-of-famer, one of the absolute worst episodes of Trek ever. I hate that it’s a Beverley episode, because I love Bev and I want better things for her than this, though there’s no other character I would have wanted subjected to this. I especially hate that – if I recall correctly – the writing staff claimed that this episode’s reception split along gender lines, with women allegedly liking it because “women like romance”. In fact, I think it was Jeri Taylor, a woman, who expressed that view. It’s always depressing when a woman lets the side down.

 

For the record, I’m a woman and I HATE Sub Rosa. I hated it when I was an adolescent and desperate for romantic titillation. Even then I knew that what’s depicted in this episode isn’t romantic. It’s just rape.

 

The plot, such as it is, takes place on a soundstage version of a fake Scottish colony, at the burial of Beverley’s Nana, Felisa, who raised her. She was 100 years old when she died, but her diary goes on about her lover, 30-something Ronin. 

 

I’m less bothered by the May-December romance than I am by Beverley’s reaction to reading her grandmother’s diary. I can believe that people in the 24^thcentury would be open to and accepting of all types of sexuality, and wouldn’t be embarrassed by a centenarian having sex with a much younger person. What I can’t accept is that there would ever come a time when a person would read the diary of a beloved parental figure, someone who raised them, find it full of details of their erotic exploits, and not stop reading it immediately. Being happy that your grandma was still getting her end away at 100 years old is fine. Taking a journal full of explicit details to read in bed is not. Beverley not only reads the diary, she has erotic dreams afterward and sees fit to gossip about that with Troi. Getting off on your grandma’s shag-a-day calendar is not acceptable in any century.

 

So. Anyway. If you’ve seen the episode, you know the details, though you may have been fortunate enough to blot them out of your memory. Beverley is visited by this Ronin first in spirit form. He lashes the cottage with wind and lightning and comes at Beverley like a sexy poltergeist, then appears to her for real, and pretty soon she’s quitting the Enterprise and moving to her grandma’s cottage to be with him. That first encounter is the most disturbing, because Beverley spends it explicitly telling her unseen pursuer that she wants him to stop. He does not. That’s rape. I don’t know how they could make this episode and not recognise how traumatic, how horrific it truly was.

 

The worst part is that it would have been just as effective (assuming someone was hellbent on making this shit stick) had Ronin pursued Beverley and won her over conventionally. He didn’t have to rape and possess her. She could have just consented to a relationship, only to realise too late that her lover was a parasite. Someone really wanted to turn this into a story about ghost-rape, though, and to milk it for all the haunted cottage clichés they could, so Crusher has to be simultaneously turned on and terrified for the duration. God bless Gates McFadden, though, she really tries to sell this. There should be an Emmy for Most Courageous Effort In A Role You Know Is Insulting Garbage.

 

Anyway, turns out Ronin is an “anaphasic life form” who has been ghost-raping generations of Beverley’s ancestors in order to feed on their life force, or something, and she zaps the candle he lives in and he dies. Again, this adds layers of awfulness to an already bad story: we’ve never seen Beverley’s family before, but to find out that for centuries, they have been the rape-hostages of an interstellar vampire who lives in a candle – that’s a lot to accept. (I originally wrote “that’s a lot to swallow” but I changed it because I’m classy.) It could have just been Felisa who was victimised, which would have been awful, but less insane than turning this into a multigenerational horrorshow.

 

Was Ronin responsible for Beverley’s mother’s death? Was Felisa being raped while she was raising Beverley? Didn’t Beverley notice? If not, who was Ronin raping all those years before he moved on to Nana? Didn’t any of the Howard women’s families or friends ever notice the change in them until now? It takes the Enterprise crew about fifteen minutes to spot that Beverley is behaving erratically. Even Crazy Ned from the colony knows that the candle is bad news, though he doesn’t say why, which isnae helpful, Ned. How is it that this carried on for hundreds of years and this is the first we’re hearing of it?

 

It’s not even as if the episode is any good except for the thematic problems. It’s terrible, corny, embarrassing, illogical rubbish, and it would remain so even if it wasn’t trying to pass off rape as romance. To go back to my original point, though, the ugliest thing about this is knowing that the writers and producers of Star Trek– a show that supposedly tried to be progressive, a show that I grew up watching – thought that the usual plotlines weren’t appealing to women and they had to write something to cater for the ladies, and this was what they came up with. It’s so insulting it beggars belief. This episode should be burned.

 

WINNER:11001001