7.14 — “Sub Rosa”
Plot: A visit to Caldos Colony for the funeral of Beverly Crusher’s grandmother leads to a spooky, erotic ghost story as Crusher is accosted by a stock pulp romance character who has haunted the women of her family for 800 years. Call it “The Curse of the Haunted Candle.”
Thoughts: I’m of a couple of minds about “Sub Rosa.” My first impulse is to try to enjoy it at face value, as a well-directed episode that takes chances but makes several missteps. My second impulse I’ll get to in a minute.
Taking things at face value, well. I’ve said before I appreciate it when Trek tries something new. A hallmark of TOS was experimentation with different genres adapted to the Trek format. Some of the producer/writer comments quoted on Memory Alpha are interesting:
Jeri Taylor: “Rick [Berman] and Michael [Piller] were very distrustful of this story. They considered it a romance novel in space and felt the possibility for embarrassment was monumental, but I just knew it would work. It’s a different kind of story for Star Trek to tell. It is a romance, but we do have women in our audience and women do traditionally respond to romantic stories.”
René Echevarria: “I can still reduce Brannon [Braga, who wrote the teleplay] to shudders when I go into his office and say, ‘I can travel on the power transfer beam’. But the cast loved it. Every woman on the lot who read it was coming up to Brannon and patting him. Ultimately I think it was worth doing because it was campy fun and the production values were wonderful. The sets look great and everybody threw themselves into it. Gates did a wonderful job. It just got bigger and broader and to the point of grandmother leaping out of the grave. Just having Beverly basically writhing around having an orgasm at 6 o’clock on family TV was great. For that alone it was worth doing. We got away with murder.”
Ronald D. Moore: “I kinda liked it. I thought it was good to try a different genre on TNG and mix things up a little. It’s not a perfect show by any means, but I’m glad we did it.”
Jonathan Frakes (who directed “Sub Rosa”): “I drew a good straw because it wasn’t a Star Trek. It was more like Tales from the Crypt. Gates and I have worked well together and she was never better than in ‘Sub Rosa’ and never looked more beautiful. She looked like a movie star.”
I don’t totally share these perspectives, but I can empathize. It does take chutzpah to film Dr. Crusher being pleasured by an unseen ghost or a swirl of special effects, having umpteen orgasms in prime time. Director Frakes and Gates McFadden pull off the visuals and staging nicely. There’s just a lot stuff in the script, however, that doesn’t work on any level.
That scene where Quint, the Scottish cemetery groundskeeper, bursts in Crusher’s house to yell “That candle has been a curse on your family for generations!” Yeah, no. Ronin’s story is a play on a genie in a lamp, but there’s nothing to explain how Quint would know about the connection between Ronin and the candle, or about Ronin at all, let alone have reason to believe Ronin was harming the grandmother (was he?). The scene where Quint appears in the Engine Room trying to dismantle the primary power conduit of the ship? And then is pronounced dead immediately by Data without any effort at medical intervention? We might have to reach back to “The Alternative Factor” to find anything so incoherent. I think they were trying to do “funny, but not on purpose” on purpose. Everyone involved in putting that on the air should have been fired.
And how did Ronin’s lamp/candle, being a piece of futuristic technology, get to Scotland in the 17th century? Under what circumstances was Ronin born on Earth in 1647? Not explained, writer was too lazy.
Was Ronin malevolent? He killed Quint, sure, but did he harm anyone before then? Let’s say in the future people have an opportunity to welcome symbiotic anaphasic energy beings as lovers and it brings them great happiness. Love who you want to love. A society that can replicate food and tools out of photons can spare the reproductive capacity. This angle could have been potentially interesting, but instead we get the fugazi of the wild cemetery showdown, wondering why Ronin can’t just dematerialize instead of getting blasted by Beverly.
The absence of any other family at grandmother’s funeral implies that this is the end of the Crusher line. Which is sad, especially since Wesley Crusher was a main cast member up through Season Four episode nine, and nobody remembers or mentions him at all.
My second impulse is to look at this episode and be disgusted that TNG can’t think of anything to do with its female characters except sexualize them. I’ve heard this episode described as the one where Crusher gets raped by a ghost, and decides she likes it. The question of consent in the initial encounter is fuzzy at best (she’s sleeping!), and the rest of this romance seems to express a lot of ambivalence about women’s sexuality, whether it’s okay to trust their instincts, or whether they need to be censored or punished for pursing sexual pleasure. There is an awful lot of male gaze, but not a lot of respect for female agency. The high-definition Blu-ray shows the makeup lacquered on Crusher and Troi so heavily it’s as if the producers were trying to paint out the real women underneath. Crusher always looks to me like she’s been dressed for a magazine photo shoot, not a workspace. What do you all think?
1.5 of 5 cursed candles.
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