Homeward (⭑⭑)

“Homeward” is, on one hand, a throwback to early TNG’s penchant for often-inept attempts at prime directive stories, and on the other, a continuation of season seven’s obsession with introducing previously unknown family members of main characters. Neither aspect works.

There are plenty of examples of ideas introduced in the original series that TNG went on to refine and improve upon; alas that the prime directive is not one of them! Seriously…TNG could totally have taken what TOS had set up and run with it, elaborating it into something that a) was consistent and made total sense, but also b) was nevertheless sometimes challenging to interpret, and could have explored its ramifications in all kinds of interesting ways. But it didn’t; instead, it blundered around from day one without ever establishing its parameters clearly, and bungled almost every episode involving it. Most of these episodes were made during the show’s earlier years, but I guess we couldn’t get through the final season without one final ill-conceived take on the issue! Sigh. So: This is hardly an original or revolutionary stance, but let me just say for the record that while I both like the concept of the prime directive and regard it as a sensible guiding policy for Starfleet to follow, I do not see it as entailing an obligation to let whole civilizations perish due to natural disasters that you have the power to prevent. When non-interference is about letting “less advanced” civilizations chart their own course until such time as they achieve at least a basic level of parity and thus the ability to interact on an equal footing, it makes sense; to do otherwise, even with good intentions, is just way too likely to lead to undesirable outcomes of various kinds. But when the choice is between unduly influencing a less advanced culture or allowing it to be wiped out by events outside its control, it should be a no-brainer that the former is preferable to the latter. “Homeward,” though, begins with the premise that the “proper” thing to do is to let the Boraalans die. It’s (unfortunately) consistent with how various previous episodes have treated the issue, but that doesn’t make it make sense, either within the story or from the outside. I mean, dramatically speaking, what’s even the point of this? The setup forces the characters to wrestle with something that shouldn’t actually be hard, and mostly rewards them for breaking the rules, all without actually suggesting that the rule itself is wrong. What should the audience’s take-away be, here? On top of being ethically reprehensible and dumb, it’s also dramatically muddled and thematically incoherent. (Also: At the beginning of the episode, when Worf wants to beam down and look for Nikolai, why does Picard insist on him going alone and surgically altered, to minimize cultural contamination? At this point in the story, the assumption is that all of the inhabitants of the planet are going to be dead in a few days. What does it matter if a few of them encounter some inexplicable strangers shortly before they perish? Again, it seems like the concern over “contamination” overrides all common sense.)

On a smaller scale, too, the setup is just poorly constructed, because despite Nikolai’s self-righteous indignation at the idea of letting “these people” die, the fact is that they do let almost all the inhabitants of the planet die—and he seems to be totally fine with it! His actions save a village, not a species, and it’s completely obvious that his motivations are personal and emotional, not ethical; he simply wants to save individual people whom he has come to know. (This becomes even more obvious with the reveal that he’s in love with one of them and that she’s bearing his child. The episode doesn’t drive this point home, but doesn’t this revelation imply that he’s actually been living among them for some time, and not just since the atmospheric dissipation began? He claims that he only violated the prime directive to prevent the people he had been observing from dying—but that’s a lie, right?) Moreover, Nikolai’s sins are shared by the episode itself, which clearly wants to be a feel-good story about a guy saving a village, and doesn’t actually care much at all about either the fate of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants or the ethical issues surrounding the prime directive. If it were otherwise, surely someone would call Nikolai on his bullshit, and the focus in the early part of the episode would be on whether or not there was anything that the Enterprise could do for the Boraalans as a whole. And maybe there could have been an interesting episode in that. Do we attempt some kind of tech solution for the planetary crisis? Should we somehow “evacuate” as many Boraalans as we can (knowing that it will only be a tiny, and arbitrarily selected, fraction of the planet’s population)? Are measures taken in secrecy absolutely to be preferred over anything that involves revealing ourselves to the Boraalans, given that a) covert measures might still be noticed and/or later discovered by the locals, and b) direct interaction permits the Boraalans more agency and self-determination? There’d be plenty to dig into here. But, no, instead we beam the inhabitants of one village into the holodeck, and pat ourselves on the back for saving a few lives, while mostly ignoring the thousands that we let die without even discussing whether there were any alternatives. (And of course, actually, it’s a guest character who makes the decision to save the villagers, not the regular characters; they just have the situation thrust upon them.)

I will grant that the episode does make some efforts to address the actually interesting issue of how outside influence might affect a people like the Boraalans. One senses that it does so primarily to try to justify the prime-directive-posturing about how wrong it supposedly is to interfere in any way or for any reason, which is dumb. But still, Crusher’s ruminations about all the various and unforeseeable possible outcomes that secretly relocating the villagers to another planet could lead to have merit, and the plight of the Boraalan who wanders off the holodeck and learns the truth of what’s going on is engaging. I find myself empathizing with his inability to see a viable way forward, and his suicide seems very believable. So believable, in fact, that it seems horribly negligent of the regulars to not see it coming and take more care to prevent it! Seriously, they just leave him sitting alone in a room to stew about the mind-blowing shit that he has just learned, and the life-altering decisions that he has a few hours to make!? Dumb. But anyway, his anguish does at least succeed in dramatizing the dangers and complexities inherent in any interaction between cultures with such wildly disparate levels of awareness. And yet, Picard’s lament that if they hadn’t interfered, the guy would at least not have died alone, still rings hollow and seems like bullshit; again, the motive here seems to be to drive home that it really was “wrong” on some level to intervene, thus justifying that the prime directive, even interpreted to mean that whole populations should be allowed to die, is still somehow good and right. Bleah.

Okay, so then we have the other aspect of “Homeward,” which is that, hey, did you know that Worf has a human foster brother? I didn’t! Which…argh, okay—I was totally going to call it a retcon, but it turns out that it technically isn’t. I had totally forgotten this, but Worf does actually mention a foster brother in season one’s “Heart of Glory.” That, however, was the one and only mention up until this episode. And for the Rozhenkos to have had a biological son who grew upon alongside Worf is a fine idea, in itself; it’s just that, if Worf had a contentious relationship with a foster brother while growing up, this fact should have come up before now in more ways than just a single passing reference. It’s the sort of experience that shapes a person, and affects how that person relates to other people, and gets talked about when that person’s adoptive parents come to visit, etc. In short, dredging it up now still feels like a huge retcon, “Heart of Glory” notwithstanding. Also, frankly, I have trouble buying into the idea that young Worf was the dutiful, obedient son who was eternally frustrated with, and critical of, his wild, rule-breaking older (human) brother. Yes, the Worf we know is disciplined, values duty, respects authority, and believes in following the rules. But it makes much more sense to me that he learned to be this way (with some difficulty!), as he matured out of a childhood in which his rambunctious Klingon-ness often created problems for his adoptive parents and perhaps even endangered his peers. His characteristic restraint works better, conceptually, if it’s something that he imposed on himself out of guilt over the ways that his own early behavior “made his mother weep,” and if it speaks, on some level, to a degree of childhood self-loathing about his different-ness (even as it, ironically, ended up making him different from other Klingons). So, the relationship established here just kind of doesn’t make sense to me as part of Worf’s background. Rather than adding interesting context or insight to what we already know about Worf, it (in my view) just muddles his character. Also, I don’t like the bit where Picard assigns Worf to accompany Nikolai into the holodeck and Worf tries to get out of it. The Worf of TNG’s early seasons might have reacted in this way, sure—but the Worf of season seven, I feel, has grown beyond that kind of response through his experiences with previous situations in which he had that instinct. Also, if I’m to take seriously the idea of Nikolai’s existence and of his and Worf’s history, then my sense is that Worf would feel responsible for the mess that his foster brother has made and would want to be the one “on site” keeping an eye on him. So, bad character moment there, in my view. And finally, the episode pulls the all-too-common dumb move of having Nikolai and Worf at odds through most of its run time, only to reconcile at the end for no obvious reason, just to try to end on a feel-good note. Nope…sorry, but the whole Nikolai thing just doesn’t work for me at all.

A few other assorted nitpicks before I wrap this up: The idea of having Nikolai and Worf lead the villagers on a great “migration” to their new home, with the holodeck gradually changing the terrain as they go, is clever and nifty. But it doesn’t mesh well with the race against time imposed by the holodeck’s tech troubles. Riker says that the Enterprise can reach the planet chosen as the villagers’ new home in 42 hours at maximum warp, and prior to that, Data says that the analysis necessary to select a planet in the first place will take 9 hours. So the villagers’ epic migration to a far-off land where there are no storms, and where “even the stars may be different,” takes them…a little more than 4 days? And they don’t find anything fishy in this? (They could hardly be expected to travel even 100 miles in that amount of time!) And then, when they reach the site of their new village, the “storms” that forced them to relocate in the first place appear to return, and they begin to panic. But Nikolai tells them not worry, because Worf the Seer has the power to banish the storms forever, if they’ll all just hunker down in their tents for a few minutes. Okay, but, uh…if Worf could do that, then why did they have to migrate to a new home in the first place? And when the so-called storms cease on queue, and Worf declares that they will not return…everyone just accepts this without question? How dumb are these people? Also, about Nikolai: Wouldn’t you think that if the Federation is going to have a lone (!) researcher stationed on a “primitive” world as a cultural observer, they’d make damn sure to select and train someone, and maintain communication with them, toward the end of ensuring that they don’t “go native”? And then, of course, we have his decision to stay with the village permanently, which, while logical enough within the context of the episode, is pretty tough to swallow if you think too much about it. I mean, for starters, just the ease with which we’re asked to believe that people can decide to up and abandon their whole civilization, and modern technology, etc., to go live in some isolated primitive village in the (total) wilderness, is a bit much (and somewhat undermines the point about how the one Boraalan couldn’t “bridge the gap” between worlds). But it also raises other questions: Are the surgical alterations that make him appear Boraalan…durable? Does he have no physical characteristics or needs that will, over the long haul, give away the fact that he’s of a different species? And what of the half-human, half-Boraalan child? And finally: What the hell is up with Worf asking to take the village’s old chronicle with him at the end, and Nikolai agreeing!? I thought this record of the village’s history was crucial for helping the Boraalans to hold onto their identity—and all the more so now that they’ve left all they ever knew behind?? Granted, it was Vorin, the chronicle’s keeper, who seemed to care most about it, and he’s gone. Does no one else care at all, though? Was it really just one guy’s pet project, as opposed to the repository of cultural memory that he made it out to be? This was a total WTF moment at the end of the episode!

Yeah…this one has some interesting ideas, and maybe there could have been a good episode based on the broad outlines of its premise, but the episode that we actually got just really doesn’t work.