Symbiosis (S1 ep 22)

Oh boy - just when I’m starting to think we’re starting to turn a corner something like this comes along. Good god. What a mess.

Seriously, what a disaster.

But first, I’ve been continuing to figure out the muddy timeline of when, exactly, I watched Star Trek, The Next Generation for the first time. After really racking my brain over this, I’m pretty sure I never saw an episode before I moved into the new house we’d built. A house I didn’t move in to until the summer before my senior year in high school. I think.

I say, ‘I think’ because it’s a very fuzzy memory for me. I honestly don’t remember exactly when it was that I moved into the house. It’s possible that we moved when I was off in Texas visiting with my father (my real father, not the fake one I was living with most of the year).

Except, well, I’m not sure. I remember bits and pieces of that time. I remember waking up at a friends house, probably near noon, to a knock at the door. It was my mother telling me that my father was waiting for me at the airport, in TEXAS and I wasn’t there.

Turns out I had the dates wrong for when my trip was. So I shot out of there like a bullet, with my mom, threw some stuff in a bag and was at the airport in less than a couple of hours.

So strange, my dad just told the airline what happened and they moved me to another flight. They just did it. I’m not sure, but I seriously doubt they would do anything like that now. They’d just apologize and ask me to pay for another flight.

But then again, flying commercially before 9/11 was a radically different experience than it is today. Back in the 80’s it was about like taking a bus. If that.

But, my point, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t have when I started, is that that was the summer I moved into the new house, I think. I’ll be damned if I know. It’s just that I lived in the house when I worked at Taco Bell, but that was before I went to my father’s. So that isn’t right.

Wait. I worked as a construction worker on Saturdays before I worked at Taco Bell, and I lived at the new house then too.

Goddammit. I have no idea. It’s frustrating to me because trying to reconstruct a memory is a tricky thing. The mind really loves order, and it will create a narrative for me if I don’t remember the real one. So I’m trying my best to piece together things I know about that time frame and put it all together into one cohesive timeline that is actually accurate.

So I may not have even seen Encounter at Farpoint before ’89, which is two years after it actually premiered. I do remember something quite clearly about that time though. First, I remember reading about the premiere episode in the paper just before it came out. I recall because I was very excited about it. And second, I didn’t see any of TNG before I lived in the new house.

Which means either the my local station didn’t carry TNG until two years after it premiered, or that I’ve gone crazy. Seriously, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past month or two (since whenever I started this blog, I’m on the verge of having nightmares about it) and I just can't piece it together.

So, getting back to this particular episode. Yeah, it reeks of the worst kind of shit. The big problem, I believe, is that it isn’t really a metaphor for anything, it’s just a straight up drug addiction episode. How bad was it? Well.. Check this out -

>


- So, yeah, that’s an actual clip from the actual episode I watched, in its entirety. On purpose. For the sake of continuity with my other posts, I’ll try to do a recap anyway. Here goes:

Picard and the crew are really into watching these solar flares in this solar system. It’s dangerous, but they’ve never seen anything like it (weird, as it looks a whole lot like stock footage of solar flares as seen from earth, but whatever) when they get a distress call from a ship that’s in big trouble.

Picard and the gang try to help talk them through the repairs, but the crew aboard the alien vessel all seem a bit moronic. Or, to be specific, they sound like Chong from the old Cheech and Chong movies from the early 80’s - “Heeeyyyy maaaaannnnn. That’s not cool.”

After some frustration, they beam aboard a canister of stuff before finally getting the crew of the vessel aboard just as the alien craft explodes. Turns out that it isn’t Cheech or Chong, but the cast of Star Trek II. Which is really weird. I can understand the one dude (the dealer who played as one of Khan's genetically superior underlings in the movie) but not Kirk’s son, he was clearly noticeable as David Marcus, so I had to wonder, at first, how Kirk’s son ended up so far in his future as a drug addict.

But quite quickly I realized he was an alien, not Kirk’s son, mere coincidence. So, the crew of the Enterprise believe for much too long that they are dealing with morons instead of drug addicts. If that was supposed to be a plot twist it was the worst one in the history of storytelling.

Eventually, Picard and Crusher figure out what’s going on, then Picard trots out the Prime Directive as an excuse to just drop the people off and leave, he and Beverly argue a bit, Picard moralizes (good god, will he ever stop with that?) and eventually, it was might be a slightly clever, if very contrived, twist, Picard refuses to help the drug addicted aliens obtain any future supplies of their drugs through a technicality of the Prime Directive.

The end.

I’m sure that the writing staff eagerly awaited their Emmy for best dramatic series after that baby. Sigh.

Some thoughts on the episode:

• Tasha waved goodbye to the fans in one of the final scenes of the episode. I actually think that was pretty cool 
• Picard and his nonsensical Prime Directive talk. Seriously, considering he was already knee deep in with those aliens, I’m not sure how he can be so hands off while he’s in the middle of interfering with them anyway. 
• Wesley and Yar’s drug talk was difficult to watch. At least if I’m trying to take this show seriously. 
• Riker has gotten zapped by an alien two weeks in a row. Poor guy has become a punching bag for whatever happens to be going on. 
• Speaking of aliens with zappy powers, so, two races, from two different worlds in the same solar system, supposedly have evolved to look identical and have identical powers of zappiness and nobody thinks that's a bit weird. I only bring it up because Tasha said she'd like to know how zappy powers evolved. From there it's a black hole into how ridiculous the whole concept of these people even existing are. She really should have just kept her mouth shut about it.

So, in the end, I don’t know much about the behind the scenes with this, writing wise, like who wrote it, conceived it, or ok’d it. But I feel like I’m watching a 75 year-old man trying to connect with kids in a way that’s cool. Or something. It’s just 45 minutes of being preached at by something that’s supposed to be entertainment. It’s pretty hard to watch. I hated it.

My rating?

1 out of 5