7.13 — “Homeward”
Plot A distress call (what else) brings the ship into contact with Nicholas Rozhenko, Worf’s human foster brother. Nicholas has saved a village of primitive aliens from extinction from a planetary disaster, which is bad now, apparently. The distress call wasn’t for them! When Nicholas concocts an madcap scheme to deceive the survivors, Picard and the Enterprise reluctantly go along. But will Worf come to terms with his troubled relationship with his brother? You know he will!
Thoughts: Several weeks off, and I return to an episode that is… bad. I don’t have anything nice to say! Not only is the writing terrible, but constant readers know that the TNG writers’ persistent inability to understand the Prime Directive is one of my big pet peeves. One of the most interesting ideas created by TOS, yet constantly dragged into disrepute through misinterpretation.
To review: the Prime Directive prohibits the Enterprise from interfering with the natural course of technological development of primitive cultures. It does not forbid interaction with the cultures, or even trade with them (see “Friday’s Child”). When a culture faces extinction, there is no natural course of development, so the Prime Directive doesn’t apply. It exists to shield the crew from temptation in situations where there is little possibility that their interference will work out for the best. It is a moral policy, that protects life. It’s not some bureaucratic inconvenience that forces characters to commit immoral acts.
I can’t be bothered to look back, but I’m pretty sure Picard wiped his hindquarters with the Prime Directive in early series episodes like “Angel One.” Certainly various iterations of the Enterprise have evacuated other primitive cultures from dying worlds on numerous occasions. TNG 3.2, “The Ensigns of Command,” comes to mind.
It’s surely because of the material, but these are some of the worst performances I’ve seen from two fine actors, Michael Dorn and Patrick Stewart. Either Dorn or the director isn’t trusting the audience enough to pick up on contextual clues indicating when Worf is lying, because Dorn shifts his eyes and twitches uncomfortably as if to telegraph every untruth to the back row of a large theater. Every. Time. Gah!
The technobabble is unusually bad. Geordi can’t fix the Holodeck without Ctrl+Alt+Del! sunny jim points out the crew should just gas the Boraalans to sleep until they reach their destination. Or God forbid they just explain they’ve been evacuated to another world. What do they think would happen?
The kidnapping of the Boraalans places them in the same predicament as the travelers in “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.”
There are so many false notes–but Worf hugging his brother? Have we seen him hug anyone, ever? How can he have a nebbish relationship with his human brother, and such a different relationship with his Klingon brother? Never mind, I’m thinking about this harder than Naren Shankar must have done when he wrote the teleplay.
I’m almost afraid to flunk this episode so hard, because I know the famously bad “Sub Rosa” is next. But I still have to give it 1 out of 5 intense plasmonic reactions.
Leave a Reply to Kevin Black Cancel reply