Oh god. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.
I mistakenly believed that the previous episode was rock-bottom. But this, this was... I don't have words for what I've witnessed. Here is the trailer for the episode:
In case you didn't watch said trailer, it looks like a typical cheesy 80's tale. Fine. But what I watched was another level of awful, the likes of which I doubt you've seen before. It was so racist I had to check if the director was a member of the Clan (I don't know if he was, but he did quit in the middle of the episode, that's weird, right?).
In all, there is almost nothing redeeming about this episode in any way. But you know, it's Star Trek, so I have to tolerate it.
The synopsis, if I can unlock it form the vault I've locked it in inside my mind, is that this planet of black people have a vaccine that the Federation has no way of replicating, and so they allow these black people to kidnap Tasha Yar and refuse to take any action to save her and get the vaccine. Picard and the crew pander to them, cajole, sorta threaten... but they won't give up Tasha.
So, of course, Tasha admits that she's really turned on by this.
*Sigh*
Where was I? Oh yes, so Tasha agrees to fight this other person to the death for the hunky man that kidnapped her, or something. Of course, just so I can see how dangerous this fight is, the spiked boxing glove the ladies are sparing with goes flying off someone's hand during the fight and immediately lands in the lap of a spectator, killing him instantly.
Whatever, Tasha wins by killing the lady, then they beam them both to the enterprise, where the formerly dead lady is resurrected and tells off her man that she fought for and through some quirk of the law there, being dead for a few seconds means you can get divorced, or something, so she give the Enterprise the vaccine, maybe, I forget now, but they leave and I assume everyone was fine.
Some thoughts:
- This sucked. Hard. I rage-hated this episode. It's not the 'so bad it's good' variety. This was awful.
- Tasha, as a character, is moronic. I read that Denise Crosby left the role because she wasn't really happy on the show. I get it, if I was an actor and was given crap like this to perform, ugh. I think this episode was blissfully free of 'rape gang' talk.
- According to Wikipedia, the director didn't quit, but was fired, supposedly because he was racist, so, that makes sense now. Even if it isn't true, it fits.
- I'm thinking of watching future episodes twice, you know, making notes and stuff, because I really can't recall any of the things in this one that I might otherwise comment on. Also, I did watch it several weeks ago. But there is no way in hell I'm sitting through this again.
- Oh yeah, Picard did give the main dude a gift. It was a thousand-year-old piece of art from China. So, was that really his to give? I mean, is he just gonna give the Mona Lisa to the Cardassians next week? Seems criminal.
I haven't been keeping this one very close to the vest. This
Rating?
0 out of 5
Crosby actually left because she thought she was better than the show (I suppose it's not hard to be better than Tasha, though), but she also left because she thought she was movie star quality. So she did Playboy, assuring that the she could never go back to Trek (although they did bring her back for episodes here and there) and went on to do some kind of softcore-ish stuff and fade out of sight. Or something like that.
ReplyDeleteShe did Trekkies.
DeleteAnd I don't want to defend her too much, but Tasha was a god-awful mess of a character in the early episodes. I'd think some kids with a camcorder could have done better. I just don't get a fledgling actor turning down a series. But I guess egos are strange things and can lead to bad decisions.