Violations (⭑⭑)

“Violations,” I’m sorry to say, is an episode that has “Jeri Taylor” written all over it (she co-wrote the teleplay with an intern, but I inferred her hand in it before looking that fact up). It’s another way-too-obvious and very poorly constructed attempt at a political statement/issue episode that turns out to not actually have anything to say, and yet nevertheless goes ahead and sacrifices any potential nuance, complexity, interesting character dynamics, or story logic in order to try to say it. Science fiction can, as we all know, be used effectively to explore or dramatize real-world issues by re-contextualizing them, but Taylor, it seems to me, often operated on the belief that any story that employed some kind of sci-fi metaphor for a real-world issue would automatically be profound and interesting (even if it has no particular point to make). Needless to say, I dissent from this view.

This episode fails as a rape allegory partly because its metaphor is way too on the nose, and partly because it has nothing any more profound to say about rape than that it’s, like, bad. I mean, on that simplistic and abstract a level, you won’t find many people who would disagree! Sure, there are those who don’t take the idea of genuine consent very seriously, or aren’t clear about how real and problematic forms of coercion that stop short of all-out physical violence are, etc. So perhaps a sci-fi treatment that dramatized an experience that was somehow analogous to date rape, or something—while also being something that the average viewer could readily identify with, because it was removed from familiar contexts about which they have too many interfering preconceived notions—could make for a powerful story. At the end of the teaser, “Violations” gestures in this direction by having Tarmin commit a “minor” intrusion into Dr. Crusher’s thoughts and jokingly excuse it on the grounds that he “can’t help himself” when faced with a beautiful woman…which everyone laughs off and lets him get away with, even though it’s super creepy. But there’s no follow-up to this, and of course Tarmin doesn’t even prove to be the mind-raping culprit in the end. The actual “violations” in the episode consist of the perpetrator forcing himself into people’s memories in a way that they have no control over, and psychically traumatizing them until they lapse into comas. It’s very direct and unambiguous, and nothing about it is going to challenge or sneak past anyone’s preconceived notions. So what’s the point of telling this story about it?

(The episode makes a token effort to add up to a “point” by having the captain deliver a kind of moral at the very end, when he observes that we must be alert (however enlightened we may be) for the “seed of violence” lurking in us all. But this seems very much tacked on as an afterthought, rather than emerging in any organic way from the story. Also, it doesn’t even strike me as a particularly apt or insightful way of framing the idea that all of us, under the right (wrong) circumstances, are potentially capable of doing bad things.)

There could, of course, still have been value in “Violations” if it had at least done something interesting with one or more of its characters, or even if it simply made for a compelling mystery…but alas, it doesn’t do any of those things, either. Father-son friction is established between Tarmin and Jev, and we get the beginnings of a connection between Troi and Jev, but then Jev telepathically assaults Troi and puts her in a coma, where she stays for most of the rest of the episode. Jev proves all-too-typically (and boringly) defensive and affronted when Riker initially questions him…only to then serve as the moderating voice of reason in every subsequent scene featuring his dad being overly offended at being questioned. The episode shows us up front that Jev is the one assaulting Troi, then tries to misdirect us into thinking it’s really Tarmin, but of course ultimately it really is Jev, and…yawn. I don’t care about either character enough for this to do anything for me, and the episode boringly spoon-feeds us all the reasons to lean first one way and then the other. Data’s and Geordi’s investigation is not interesting in any way. Oh, and by the way, all three Ullians dress identically (just in case there was any danger of one of them emerging as a distinctive individual.) I mean…if Tarmin had been the guilty party, and the episode had gone all-in on making us think it was Jev throughout most of its running time, except for that telltale bit in the teaser that ought to have raised questions about his father from minute one…and then if the final discovery of the truth had been clever or surprising in some way… Those, at least, would be the minimally required elements for a semi-well-crafted mystery. But no. And in the end, we’re shown Geordi and Data learning the truth via dull, straightforward research, and then we’re also shown a boneheaded Jev unambiguously assaulting Troi in person despite having, as far as he knows, successfully framed his dad for his previous actions (I guess just to create a climactic action scene?). What, exactly, was I supposed to find entertaining about any of this?

There’s also a lot of weirdness about the actual, titular “violations.” First, and expanding on what I already said about the rape metaphor being too literal: the initial assault on Troi is a mind rape, but it takes the form of making her experience an imaginary literal rape (!). If you’re going to go there, then why even bother with a sci-fi metaphor at all? Especially considering that then, at the end of the episode, Jev seems to be attempting an actual, physical rape anyway. Just what was the thinking behind all of this? But then, Jev’s other two assaults (on Riker and Crusher) are entirely non-sexual in nature, and seem to consist of making them relive actual traumatic memories. At the end, Jev is portrayed as being hung up on how beautiful Troi is, which makes it seem like his assault on her must have been more than just “incidentally” sexual in nature…but there’s no apparent personal or specific emotional motivation associated with the other two assaults. So does he just generally get off on traumatizing people, or is this about something more specific? Or does he merely attack Riker and Crusher in a deeply moronic and ill-considered attempt to interrupt their investigations into the initial assault? Or could the writers just not think of any other way to traumatize the show’s resident female sex symbol character than via something approximating a literal rape? And finally, as discussed by my favorite commenter on Jammer’s site (William B), there’s something very unsettling about the lack of parallelism in the fact that the assault on Troi features an attempt by Riker to rape her (something that, surely, we’re to understand as entirely invented), whereas the the other assaults invoke real memories.

There are various other things that I could nitpick (the Federation has no legal mechanism for prosecuting Jev’s crime? Really?), but only one that I particularly want to dwell on: What’s up with the scene (before the mind-raping starts, importantly) in which almost all of the regular characters are super-reticent about the idea of undergoing a memory probe by one of the Ullians? Their reluctance strikes Tarmin as unusual, so we’re presumably meant to understand it as a statement about our characters in particular, as opposed to people in general. For a moment I wondered if it was the writers’ annoying gender assumptions at work, since Keiko seemed fine with it, and all the characters who explicitly decline are male—but dialog later clarifies that Dr. Crusher hasn’t done it, either, despite the impression one may have gotten from the end of the teaser. And while Picard’s and Worf’s reactions both seem in character, I don’t know that I buy all of them being such sticks in the mud. But the real question is, what is the writers’ purpose in suggesting that they are?