TNG Deathmatch Episode 21: Symbiosis vs Firstborn

I can tell you the winner right now:

WINNER: a tie! Because I really don't care enough about either of these episodes to pick a favourite.

To be fair, Symbiosis' reputation has been sullied by the godawful Just Say No speech that Yar gives Wesley. Bless both actors for trying their best, I won't revisit it.

That scene aside, it's a decent enough little outing. The crew comes to the rescue of a disintegrating freighter, and when they finally manage to talk its incompetent captain through the transport process, he beams over a crate of his cargo before any of the people aboard. Two crewmen die, but the Captain (whose name I forget, but is played by Merrit Buttrick) doesn't seem to care about anything but the cargo.

The rescuees are two Brekkians and two Ornarans. The Ornarans claim the cargo is theirs, because they paid for it; the Brekkians claim it's still theirs, because the goods they received as payment went down with the Ornarans' knackered old freighter. (Both races have the ability to zap people with electricity from their bare hands, but this detail doesn't really add up to much in the episode except that Jonathan Frakes makes the most hilarious face when being electrocuted.)

Turns out the Ornarans' homeworld is suffering from a virulent plague, and the cargo is a highly potent medicine. Without it, they will die. The Brekkians have no other industry but producing the drug that the Ornarans need, and thus, the two worlds exist symbiotically.

It quickly becomes obvious that the Ornarans aren't suffering from any kind of plague: the drug is addictive, and cured their plague years ago. The Brekkians know this because they once suffered from the same plague, and it's they who are keeping the Ornarans locked in their cycle of addiction because they need the Ornarans to keep producing all their goods and food for them.

I mean...it's a big old stretch, to think that the Brekkians produce literally nothing else on their world except this one drug. It's a further stretch to think that the Ornarans are capable of producing anything worth buying: they sent out a wrecked old freighter to pick up this most precious cargo, and the captain doesn't understand how to fix the simplest problem on it. Would you buy anything from these people? The Brekkians must be idiots, because they do. If I were Brekkian and saw the state of the freighter that came to pick the medicine up, I'd be making plans to start producing my own food and clothes ASAP. (It's never clear why the Brekkians need to be on the freighter at all: why didn't the Ornarans just fly to Brekkia, pick up the medicine and fly home? Instead, they seem to have picked up the medicine and a couple of Brekkian merchants and flown their dilapidated ship into the gravity well of a star to make the trade. For why?)

Crusher is horrified, anyway, by the exploitative nature of the relationship, and begs Picard to put a stop to it. He cites the Prime Directive and says he can't interfere.

The Prime Directive is a weird thing. As it was originally defined onscreen in TOS' Bread And Circuses,  it ran, "No identification of self or mission; no interference with the social development of said planet; no reference to space, other worlds, or advanced civilisations". At other times, the PD has been invoked over and over as a general rule against interference of any kind. The episode's resolution hinges on Picard's interpretation of the Prime Directive - it's supposed to be a gotcha, a satisfying moment where the Captain's cleverness ensures that all loose ends are tied up and everything will turn out okay. It's too hairsplitty and specific to work dramatically.

The Brekkians and Ornarans are clearly already aware of space travel and advanced civilisations, so the Enterprise didn't break the Prime Directive in helping. We can presume both races are somewhat less developed than the Federation since one of them is a world of oppressed junkies and the other lot are just lazy drug-dealing bastards. So: Picard initially agrees to help the Ornarans fix their remaining freighters so the trade can continue, then they find out about the Brekkians' exploitation of the Ornarans, then Picard decides that because of the Prime Directive, he cannot inform the Ornarans that they're being taken advantage of, because to do so would be interference. 

Crusher objects on the grounds that to say nothing means letting the abhorrent situation continue. Picard says his hands are tied. Then he rescinds his earlier offer of assistance because apparently now the Prime Directive forbids it? The logic being that the Brekkians cited the Prime Directive to stop Picard from interfering, and now he's citing it right back to ensure that the two merchants end up stranded on Ornara with a population forced to go through painful withdrawal. 

I guess he hopes that they'll confess their part in the deception and... yeah, what exactly? The end result is the same. The Ornarans, one way or another, find out that they've been had; the Brekkians are forced to stop exploiting them and carry their own damn weight again. This is exactly what would have happened if Picard had just told the Ornarans the truth, with one key difference: Crusher had offered to help the Ornarans deal with their withdrawal symptoms, which are apparently painful and prolonged. Picard has ensured she is unable to help them. The Enterprise crew was interfering the minute it showed up, the minute it offered to help the crew of the freighter. It's arbitrary and ridiculous that Picard should invoke the Prime Directive at this point when to do so only makes things worse. I kind of wish Crusher or Yar had just defied orders and told the Ornarans what was really going on.

And that was an awful lot of verbiage for an episode I don't much like. I think I have a problem with Prime Directive episodes in general: Picard has broken the Directive enough times without consequence that it's really hard to take all the hand-wringing seriously. As an allegory, it's of limited use: as an anti-colonialist measure, it's great, nobody would argue that we should be barging into less-developed cultures and buggering them up, but when the episode's dilemma comes down to "we can't break the PD even though this entire wolf will be destroyed by storms / eaten by bees / hoovered up by the Doomsday Machine", it's difficult to sympathise. It's hard to argue that the destruction of an entire race is worth Picard's all-or-nothing moral purity.

Anyway, Firstborn has James Sloyan in it and that's about the best thing you can say about it. It's another episode about Worf As Father, and Worf As Father is a disaster. He is depressingly bad at parenting. It always bothers me that a child who was raised by humans, yet given endless latitude to explore his Klingon heritage, should be so rigid in his insistence that his son must do all the typical Klingon warrior stuff. It also bothers me that he so completely ignores K'Ehleyr's wishes - "He is also my son, and I am half-human. He will find his own way." Never mind that Alexander literally saw his mother die a bloody death at a very young age before being packed off to live with the grandparents he never knew he had, a trauma that has never really been addressed on the show. 

(It also also bothers me that Worf, who supposedly loves his human parents, pretends they don't exist most of the time: his is son of Mogh, he joins the house of Martok, and Sergei and Helena get forgotten. Alexander honours them by using their surname, but Worf's perpetual thirst for Klingon validation just erases them.)

So I guess it's good that Firstborn goes some way to correct this a little bit, but it's sad that Worf was never able to figure it out on his own until now. Worf is trying to prepare Alexander for some Klingon bar mitzvah or other, and decides to take him to a Klingon arts festival to immerse him in Klingon culture. Alexander's kind of enjoying it when they are attacked by assassins and then rescued by K'Mtar, a friend of the family, who happens to be passing by. Apparently Worf's brother has sent K'Mtar to see how Alexander is doing, because there are concerns about his development; Alexander may one day lead the House Of Mogh, so he has to be up to snuff.

Long story short, K'Mtar is actually Alexander from the future, and he's come back in time to change his own life's course. One day in the future - about forty years in the future by the look of him - Worf will be murdered and Alexander will be unable to stop the assassins, and because he feels guilty about that, he's come back to force his younger self to take seriously the business of being a Klingon warrior. The upshot of all this is that Worf comforts Future Alexander and allows Present Alexander to find his own way, as his mother wanted. It's nice that Worf finally accepts Alexander's wishes too, and stops pushing him to be a Klingon stereotype, but it's unfortunate that it took the intervention of his future self to do it. (It's also unfortunate that DS9 reverses this by having Alexander come back older, resentful, and determined to be a soldier. It would have been refreshing if the understanding establish in Firstborn could have stuck.)

It's not terrible, but the plot is tortured - why doesn't Worf call Kurn to establish that K'Mtar is who he says he is? Why didn't he wonder why Kurn didn't contact him in advance? Why is Kurn allowed to interfere in the raising of Worf's son? Worf is the older brother, after all. 

Going back in time forty years to change your entire life is a bit of an overreaction on Alexander's part, isn't it? Is time travel really that accessible? If it is, why not go back to before the assassination and warn Worf? And I get that Alexander was heartbroken after seeing both parents brutally murdered, but Worf must have been about 75 by that point and Alexander was a grown man - would he be so devastated that the only way to deal with it was to go back in time forty years?

It's as if the story originally concerned a fight for Alexander's right to party determine his own destiny, and the writers decided there had to be a sci-fi twist. There really didn't. The episode's chief value is that Worf and Alexander actually, properly bond, and Worf stops being such a swine to his own child and lets him be what he wants to be.