The Masterpiece Society (⭑⭑⭑)

“The Masterpiece Society” is by no means a masterpiece. It’s misguided in various ways, its handling of issues is too easy in several respects, and some of the character relationships don’t work. But it is, in my view, definitely an interesting episode. There’s a lot in play here, and my thoughts and reactions are complex and not particularly easy to sum up. Even though it strikes me as rather muddled, and as kind of a failure dramatically, this is not at all an episode that lacks substance, and at the very least, it succeeds at making me think interesting thoughts.

One such thought is that for some reason, the creators of Star Trek in its various incarnations seem to have felt very strongly that genetic engineering is a terrible idea—and, irrespective of my own (or anyone else’s) potential thoughts/biases on the topic, I find this quasi-dogmatic aversion decidedly odd. I mean, for sure, genetic engineering is a tool that could be abused in numerous horrific ways, and its application to humans, in particular, has strong real-world historical ties to scientific racism, among other things. But then, all technologies can be used in horrible ways…and this is Star Trek, for crying out loud! Trek is built on the premise that human society has largely mastered its darker impulses, and on the optimistic view that powerful technologies can, potentially, be safely deployed for the common good. It’s also essentially secular in outlook, and thus should not have to be concerned with the kinds of worries about “playing god” that often crop up in real-world reactions to genetic engineering. So, wherefore all the hand-wringing?

This episode’s case against (society-level) genetic engineering mostly revolves around the notion that there’s something stilted about it. Riker immediately remarks, upon hearing that everyone in the Moab colony grows up knowing what their role in society will be, that this “must take some of the fun out of it”; Picard, likewise, feels that eliminating uncertainty and self-discovery robs people of their humanity, and declares that he could never accept such a bounded and predetermined life. Additionally, the episode makes the argument that life in a “perfectly balanced” society, in which the unexpected rarely happens, produces stagnation: the Moab colony has not progressed technologically as much as the outside world has done, because (as Geordi remarks) “necessity really is the mother of invention.” Finally, there is the semi-expected critique of the practice of “weeding out” people with congenital disabilities, which is naturally going to rankle someone like Geordi, but which would also seem to entail an anti-abortion stance that I wonder whether the episode’s writers actually endorse in real life. Now, in all fairness, the episode could have been a lot more one-sided and preachy in respect to genetic engineering than it actually is. The colonists’ worldview is handled respectfully, and at least some points in its favor are duly aired—such as the argument that no one in a society like the Moab colony has to grapple with the existential angst of not knowing themselves or their purpose, or spend years of their lives doing jobs for which they are ill-suited. Still, when Captain Picard voices his disapproval, he mostly comes across as expressing the views of the writers—and also, if we take the narrative at face value, it does seem to undermine the viability of the genetically engineered society concept. After all, not only would the colonists all have died if not for the Enterprise‘s intervention, but the stability of their supposedly perfectly engineered society proves so fragile that a little bit of contact with the outside world threatens to utterly unravel it (or so we’re told). Modest gestures toward the colonists’ point of view notwithstanding, this all very clearly represents the episode not playing fair. Portraying the engineered society’s “perfect balance” as so fragile that the slightest outside interference threatens to destroy it is completely ridiculous, for starters. Also, the quick decision by several colonists to leave the structured/stagnant safety of the colony and explore the outside world seems to confirm our heroes’ biases a little too conveniently for my tastes. The episode fails to consider, too, whether the self-contained Moab colony’s slower technological progress, in the face of a lack of need, is actually even a bad thing (!). Plus, the colony’s alleged backwardness is itself somewhat contradicted by the narrative, since the solution to the threat posed by the stellar core fragment actually emerges from a collaboration between a local scientist and the Enterprise folks (Geordi), with the local (Hannah Bates) providing a key theoretical innovation. In short, while I have no beef with the idea that Picard, Riker, and Geordi might hold the negative views of genetic (and social) engineering that they express in the episode (indeed, they mostly seem in character), I dislike the one-sided, facile confirmation of their biases that the story serves up, and wish that it instead would challenge their pat convictions a bit more.

Weirdly, though, I also find myself thinking that had it wanted to, the episode could have offered a more convincing argument against the genetically engineered society idea than it does. After all, arguably, the established world of Trek represents a different solution to many of the same real-world problems that the Moab colony has addressed via its carefully balanced engineering. By largely eliminating need, the Federation has (so we’ve repeatedly been told) freed people from the shackles of meaningless work and the pursuit of wealth, and enabled them to devote themselves to self-actualization. In the real world, dismissing the suffering of those who struggle all their lives to find meaning and purpose, and romanticizing the freedom conferred by getting to discover one’s identity on one’s own (as Picard does in his musings to Troi), runs the risk of being rather elitist…but not in Trek’s world (right?). And in a related point… What disturbs me the most, personally, about the Moab colony, is something that the Enterprise folks don’t really even react much to: namely, the way that it seems to reduce people to their social “functions,” as though they are cogs in a machine rather than whole persons. Perhaps, in saying this, I’m merely indulging my own personal biases, in the same way that Picard indulges his. But when Aaron says of Martin that the latter is “fulfilling his function” by being the voice of conservatism, it really rubs me the wrong way—much more so, in fact, than does the idea of growing up knowing what career I’m destined for. I would gladly have forgone the ordeal of struggling with career uncertainties if a sure, fulfilling answer could have been handed to me in my youth, but I very much balk at the idea of having my entire identity reduced to that of a career, a social function, a “role in society.” And this, too, is a pitfall that Trek’s optimistic future purports to avoid. If the episode really needed to convey the idea that a genetically (and socially) engineered society is an ill-advised idea, I wish that it would have done so more within the context of Trek’s own purported solutions to the social problems that it’s trying to be about. (Also, there are just some fundamental plausibility issues with the engineered society concept as presented. I mean, genetics aren’t destiny; you can’t actually produce the perfect leader, or a brilliant scientist, or a piano virtuoso, or what have you (much less someone dedicated to serving as the mouthpiece of your society’s long-dead founders’ intentions!), merely by designing their genes. And you can talk about social engineering and “balance” all you want, but there’s no way you’re ever going to successfully create a perfectly planned and controlled environment in which everyone grows up to be (willingly and happily) exactly what they were “intended” to be.)

Okay, so that’s a bunch of philosophizing—but how well does the episode work on a more down-to-earth level? Well, parts of it are interesting, but other parts of it are quite dull, and the story unfortunately relies a bit too much on overused tropes and overly convenient plot contrivances. This is one of several Trek episodes featuring a planet of the week whose locals are reluctant to accept help from the Enterprise even though not doing so will result in their certain death, and while such a setup can work (see “The Ensigns of Command”), most such episodes struggle to make the stubborn locals’ attitudes believable. Also, every time Trek presents us with a long-lost human colony, the results are disappointing; the idea of coming across a group of humans who have been developing independently of humanity at large for centuries strikes me as being full of intriguing potential, but this potential never gets mined to any significant degree. (I mean, just for starters: Even though their engineered-society ways are supposed to feel alien and different, the Moab colony’s humans seem awfully similar to Federation humans in almost every way, and a few token oohs and ahhs from them upon seeing the Federation’s transporter technology don’t go very far toward mitigating that.) And then, too, we have the all-too-common crutch of our characters overcoming a seemingly insurmountable problem by dreaming up, on demand, the perfect brilliant technobabble solution—and without its having any visible ramifications beyond the current episode. (Will the enhanced tractor beam that Geordi and Hannah devise here, which allows them to save the colony and not have to evacuate it wholesale, become a permanent feature of Federation technology from this point onward?)

On a character level, I have basically two different sets of observations to make. The first, which never occurred to me until this latest re-watch, is that the three main colonist characters here bear a remarkable (and somewhat depressing) similarity, in terms of roles, to the three main Malcorian characters in the previous season’s “First Contact”: we have the appealing, relatable female scientist with the progressive worldview who ends up leaving her home planet with the Enterprise; the curmudgeonly male voice of tradition; and the (also male) wise leader who has to steer a course somewhere between those urged on him by the other two. Unfortunately, on top of the fact that these parallels make this episode’s characters feel a bit like retreads, they each also suffer from being less well-realized than their “First Contact” counterparts. Hannah Bates is the only one of the three that I particularly like, and even she is no Mirasta. This brings me to my second set of observations, which is that of the two basic character pairings that carry much of this episode (Aaron/Troi and Hannah/Geordi), one works and one doesn’t. Hannah is an appealing enough character, and watching her and Geordi work together is probably the most straightforwardly enjoyable thing about the episode. Aaron, however, I have always found to be terribly dull, and he and Troi have essentially no chemistry together at all, romantic or otherwise (par for the course when it comes to Troi’s romantic liaisons, unfortunately). The episode doesn’t go for a romantic angle with Geordi and Hannah, but I feel like if it had, that might actually have worked…although, maybe the reality is that they would have been written differently if this had been the intent, and it would have fallen flat as a result. TNG almost always sucked at romance. It’s as though the writers suffer from the same affliction as the archetypical romantically challenged male nerd (such as, you know, Geordi?), who can talk to a woman just fine when he’s “not trying,” but becomes someone else entirely (someone cringe-inducing and bland, to be precise) when trying to be romantic. Sigh. Anyway, about the only moment of Troi’s character arc (if it even is one) that works for me is the scene in which she confesses her dalliance with Connor to the captain in the turbolift. She’s all serious and worked up, and Picard is his usual compassionate self, and it makes me smile.

In the end, the episode tries to grey up its too-neat indictment of the Moab colony’s engineered-society misguidedness by having Picard fret a bit about the spirit of the Prime Directive, and about how, whether he agrees with the colonists’ worldview or not, it’s regrettable that the Enterprise‘s interaction with the colony may have irrevocably damaged it. And I guess that’s appropriate, although I’m also glad that Riker pushes back against his captain’s hand-wringing over having saved the colonists from certain doom (and that Picard acknowledges the point). I also appreciate the acknowledgement that, even though the Prime Directive technically doesn’t apply to a human colony, its spirit and purpose are still relevant. On the other hand, for this issue to only come up in the episode’s closing scene is kind of odd, and contributes to the overall sense of this being a fairly muddled story that isn’t quite sure what its purpose is. And yet…as I said at the outset, this is for sure an episode that gives me ideas to chew on, and there’s value in that.