This is a gem of an episode that stands out as easily TNG’s all-time best “Planet of the Week” story, and that just impresses on every level. For once, instead of a planet being defined by some one-note gimmick and serving a broadly allegorical purpose, we have a POTW that actually feels like a real place, with real, relatable people—and one whose story function is more about holding up a mirror to the Federation and providing genuine diplomatic intrigue. This is my kind of Star Trek!
I’ve always felt that “First Contact” invites comparison to season three’s “Who Watches the Watchers?” Both episodes involve first contact scenarios in which something has gone wrong that places our heroes in an awkward position, and both are told at least partly from the point of view of the alien society rather than from that of the regular characters. Indeed, “First Contact” is told entirely from the Malcorians’ point of view! This was a brilliant choice that really sets this episode apart from all others. It allows the audience to step back from its normal identification with Starfleet/the regular characters and see them as outsiders would see them. And whereas “Who Watches the Watchers?” (as I discuss in my review of it) leaves questions about the wisdom and propriety of the Federation’s polices around covert observation of alien cultures firmly within the realm of subtext, “First Contact” engages with these questions head-on. Picard being placed in the uncomfortable position of having to justify the Federation’s “surface reconnaissance” to a foreign head of state whose people may not even be prepared to accept the existence of aliens is just really compelling stuff. Honestly, part of me wishes that the episode took this even further than it does; after all, the practice in question arguably represents a violation of Malcorian sovereignty—and in particular, Picard’s acknowledgement that the Federation is aware that Malcorians will likely react negatively upon learning of the covert observation raises problems. I mean, if you know that the locals will likely view this as an act of aggression, but you do it anyway…then regardless of your intentions, it pretty much is an act of aggression, isn’t it? The episode doesn’t fully acknowledge this, but it does have Picard admit that this sort of pre-first-contact secret observation is “controversial,” and show him making (and having to admit and apologize for) errors that serve to undermine his assurances of good intentions. Happily, Chancellor Durken is broad-minded and forgiving enough to prevent things from going seriously awry, but it’s not hard to imagine a situation like this one playing out very differently. And even as is, TNG’s usual idealism is tempered here via the chancellor’s decision, ultimately, to postpone establishing relations. This, to me, represents a rare taste of what “discovering new civilizations” ought actually to look like, and to some extent even prefigures the themes of “building the Federation on the frontier” (and exploring just how benevolent it truly is) that Deep Space Nine would later dig into.
Ironically, being told from an alien society’s point of view makes “First Contact” an example of something that I normally criticize: it’s an episode that is really more about its guest characters than about the show’s regular characters. In this one instance, though, I think it works—mainly because the POTW society and characters here function as audience stand-ins that both enable the show to reverse our usual perspective on the central characters, and simultaneously suggest how a society rather like our own might react to being visited by Federation-like aliens. But also, it helps a lot that the episode’s primary guest characters are extremely compelling and relatable! What Trek nerd could possibly fail to identify with Space Minister Mirasta, the forward-thinking, idealistic, passionate scientist who has spent her life dreaming of venturing out among the stars? Seeing events unfold from her point of view enables us as viewers to vicariously experience her joy and wonder at suddenly being greeted by peaceful visitors from other planets, which is really fun. I only regret that we never get to see her again after this episode, even though she chooses to stay aboard the Enterprise and leave her old life behind. (This character is played by Carolyn Seymour, who also plays Romulan commanders in two other episodes and whose performances I quite enjoy in all three of her TNG appearances.) Chancellor Durken, too, is a strong character, and someone whom I can actually believe in as a head of state. He exudes authority and experience, and exhibits keen perception and shrewd statesmanship, all while also being the kind of progress-minded leader that one wishes were more common in the real world. His exchanges with Picard—in which he is rightly wary, and struggles to balance competing priorities and protect the interests of his world, yet achieves a meeting of minds with our captain in spite of the situation—are a joy to watch. Security Minister Krola, I’ll concede, comes off somewhat less well than the other two Malcorian government officials (and not just because he’s an inherently less sympathetic character), but I at least appreciate that the episode tries to portray him as sincere (and even willing to die for his priorities) rather than as a simplistic villain. If not for the limited time available in what is, after, all, merely a single episode, one would really like for more details of the traditionalist perspective that he represents to have been fleshed out, which would help both in understanding his motives and in substantiating the conclusion that Malcoria III is, overall, not yet ready to engage with other worlds. Still, I find this shortcoming pretty easy to overlook, given the excellence of the other two characters and the amount of good stuff that the episode does manage to pack into its finite running time.
In fact, regardless of this and other limitations, I find “First Contact” uncommonly immersive, and the POTW society that it depicts amazingly well-realized. There is an impressive sense of Malcoria III as a whole, and very real, world, even though all we really get to see of it are a few government offices and a hospital. The hospital scenes have genuine life to them, though, and while watching them, I get caught up in them in a way that feels more like watching a movie than a TV episode. Even here, several relatively minor guest characters prove surprisingly effective. As a flip side to my very positive reaction to all of this, of course, one could certainly argue that Malcoria feels “real” at the expense of seeming genuinely “alien” in any meaningful way. This would be a fair criticism, even if it’s one that doesn’t bother me much personally. It’s probably true that the society depicted here feels as real as it does partly because it is very similar to our own real world—but I also think that the writers just take it more seriously, and treat it with more respect, than they do with most of the POTW societies that we’ve seen before on the show. They do also have fun dropping small details into the dialog that underline the not-Earth-ness of the planet, such as altered medical terminology and a reference to a 29-hour day. Even so, I admit to wishing that the professional culture among the hospital doctors didn’t seem quite so identical to Earth norms, right down to the head doctor literally citing his obligation to “do no harm.” (Still, though: this is an episode that actually bothers to make even the minor characters staffing the hospital on its one-off alien planet into believable characters who exhibit a professional culture in regard to medical ethics.) Elsewhere in the episode, when Chancellor Durken remarks to Captain Picard that “conquerors often arrive with the words ‘we are your friends,'” I appreciate that he is at least phrasing a familiar idea in slightly unexpected terms (i.e., he doesn’t reference the phrase “we come in peace”). At a minimum, I would have liked for the doctor’s line to emulate this pattern (token gesture though it would have been). But I’m nitpicking small details here only because of how effective I find the portrayal of the society overall.
Final comment: It seems that the memorable scene with the nurse who offers to help Riker escape if he will make love to her is controversial, which I suppose is understandable. Personally, I find it quite entertaining and am not inclined to take it too seriously. Is it cool to demand sex from someone as payment for helping them out of a dangerous predicament? Of course not. But we’re not particularly given to understand that Riker feels exploited or violated, so I’m not too troubled by it. Much more could be said about this (and the scene is vigorously debated in the comments on Jammer’s site), but I’m not going to delve into it any further myself.
Three stars for me, I think. I know you care much less than me about this, but have a serious issue with the abysmal failure of imagination in this episode with respect to an alien culture. These are just white Americans with lumpy foreheads and hand deformities; there is more cultural diversity within two houses of me than is depicted between two unrelated evolutionary processes taking place light years apart here. I know you can only expect so much given budget limitations, but if you’re going to write an episode the ENTIRE POINT of which concerns the challenges of cross cultural contact, it seems to me that giving a few minutes thought to making the aliens different is the very FIRST thing you ought to do, and the episode suffers greatly for the lack of it IMO. Only when you create difference to begin with does it start to get interesting to create parallels between them and us–seeing the “I want to seduce an alien trope” in reverse here would have worked much better to me if the culture weren’t already the same as our own. (And for the record
I also wouldn’t say that the culture seems real to me unless you exchange “real” with “familiar”… The alien culture’s government is depicted far too simply, with very few players, all seemingly acting sincerely out of personal belief, with no hint of larger institutional pressures or cultural forces shaping them. The episode is much too devoid of any sense of realpolitik/how democracies really function for my taste. I grant it would be tough to explore this in 45 minutes, but… I don’t get the sense they were even trying.
I agree strongly how cool it might’ve been to have the episode explore the violation of Malcorian sovereignty. Maybe too much to ask, but would have made the episode much better.
Re: “and for the record,” there IS a lot to say about the alien seductress scene, but it doesn’t bother me.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that you like this one less than I do, but it’s still a little hard to wrap my brain around just because I really do like it a lot.
“These are just white Americans with lumpy foreheads and hand deformities; there is more cultural diversity within two houses of me…” So if I’m reading you correctly, there are kind of two concerns here: 1. Malcorians are not different enough from humans, and 2. Malcorians are not different enough from each other. And I mean, from a strict realism standpoint, both are certainly valid points. My thoughts on #2, in part, are that on a show that doesn’t even tend to imagine internal cultural differences for the major, ongoing alien races that are part of its universe, expecting the same for a one-episode alien race seems pretty “off the table” to me. (I mean, if you want to talk about the real-world issue of all the guest actors being white, that’s fair—but otherwise, this just seems like coming down hard on one episode for a franchise-wide shortcoming.) As for #1: First, yes, the not-alienness of aliens in Trek is an issue that has just never really bugged me as much as it does you, so naturally we’re going to feel differently about it here. But also, I would argue that this episode is ultimately less about “the challenges of cross cultural contact” and more about a) the paradigm shift required of a planetery culture being made aware that it’s not alone in the universe, and b) seeing the main characters, and the Federation/Starfleet world that they represent, from out outside perspective. Like I talked about in the review, I think the Malcorians are depicted as very human-like partly because they’re meant as audience stand-ins. And the takeaway from the episode is not supposed to be “I guess these guys are just too different to be able to relate to humans/the Federation”; the point is that even though they’re very relatable and seem quite compatible, the leap from being at the center of their own universe to being just one planet in a crowded cosmos is still too big for them to make all at once. You know—just as would certainly prove true if a Federation-like interstellar conglomerate came knocking on 21st-century Earth’s door.