Wesley maintains his sweater this week.
And we almost get to kill him.
This is the ‘famous’ Wesley-gets-the-death-penalty-for-falling-in-flowers episode. It’s the paradise-planet-with-a-secret episode. It’s the planet-of-the-blonds episode. It’s an episode I actually like a lot. And while it’s silly, I found it less silly than I used to.
To begin, to summarize: after dropping off the settlers the Enterprise explores another M-class planet, one with friendly humanoid inhabitants who live on a virtual paradise with gardens and no crime, and the crew contemplates (at Crusher’s urging) some shore leave, so an away team visits, and, in the process, Wesley gets the death penalty. Meanwhile on the Enterprise an alien ‘thing’ sharing an orbit with our galaxy class starship seems to be there and not be there at once, and its level of technology seems to dwarf that of our Federation ship. How will Picard save Wesley without breaking the Prime Directive and without pissing off the alien presence that turns out to be the ‘god’ of the world of blond?
To jump ahead: Susie and I both enjoyed mocking the planet of the blonds. So, so 80s. So, so So-Cal 80s. So, so much skin for 1987. And Wesley’s “fellow teens” are just a bit more physically … developed … than our Acting Ensign.
But to leave mockery aside, at least for now: this episode engages many of the same themes as the previous episodes, but does just about everything right that those get wrong. The humanness and alienness of our race-of-the-week is more shown than told (relative to the Space-Africans™), our encounter with a powerful, alien force (see also: ‘The Last Outpost,’ ‘Lonely Among Us’) is more fully developed, and the two ‘stories’ (A & B, so to speak) are integrated (compare/contrast with all previous episodes) … in a way there is only one story. The matter of the Prime Directive and a Roddenberry Ethos™ provides more or a real conflict than a mere stumbling block, as it did in previous episodes, and our crew is admonished for their use of ‘evolved’ and ‘progressed’ or ‘advanced’ when comparing their ethics with those of the blonds on the planet.
We still have some ‘issues,’ mind you. Picard decides, given no better solution or resolution, to beam away and see whether the ‘god’ of the Edo will stop them. When it does, he provides a brief but supposedly profound speech about Justice, stating that as long as laws and/or punishment are absolute, there can be no justice. The god of the Edo agrees and they get to beam away … the end. This moment was not ‘earned,’ so to speak, as we have had no thematic development concerning ‘absolutes’ to this point … neither regarding the Enterprise and/or Picard, or the god of the Edo. The only ‘absolute’ we have had deals with the blond Edos (singular Edo, plural Edos?) themselves, but it’s not with them that Picard argues here, and there has been no real debate on the matter in any case.
Likewise the Edos’ reverence for their god comes a bit out of nowhere, midway through the episode, when convenient for the plot. I rather like Picard taking one of the blondes to the ship above where she sees her god and falls into a fearful fit of prayer and subservience; as silly as this is, in a sense, it is also treated seriously but not pompously in the episode, but, rather, as ‘sincere.’ But this is the part of the story, in a way, that bites off more than it can chew. From Data we have a reference to Arthur C. Clarke and the idea that any sufficiently advanced technology would seem to be magic, or, in this case … god. We have the idea that the ‘god’ of the Edos perhaps ‘seeded’ this planet and others, a version of the ‘alien astronaut’ theory and theme one finds in van Daniken, but also Kirby (the New Gods, the Eternals), Battlestar Galactica, Star Gate, and even—seasons from now—in ST:TNG. And as with so many of these episodic early episodes, this planet and, especially, these advanced aliens are never to be seen again.
Once ST:TNG becomes more serial (Cardassians, more Romulan stories, the Borg …) the universe becomes more menacing but also less mysterious.
