The Enterprise responds to an attack and theft by a piratical group known as The Gatherers. Seeking a way to end these attacks for good, the ship proceeds to Acamar, the now peaceful world from which the Gatherers splintered away long ago. Picard convinces the Acamarian sovereign to make an overture to the Gatherers, inviting them to give up their nomadic existence and return to their homeworld. But it will be a difficult negotiation. The Gatherers are violent rogues still grounded in a way of life the Acamarians have left behind: endless, murderous vendettas between rival clans. And a member of the sovereign's own delegation is herself secretly pursuing just such a vendetta.
Back in the first and second seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, episodes that flopped often did so for lack of focus on any of the main characters. It's a mistake not made in the third season until now. This episode is all about the guest stars -- and none of the characters are that compelling. We have an abstract reunification story, complicated by an abstract blood feud. The Acamarian sovereign is positively bipolar; she's compassionate and calm one moment, flying off the handle the next, and constantly vacillating in whether she thinks this peace overture is a good idea. The Gatherers are all just cartoonish "scoundrels," but possess only the odious qualities and none of the charming roguishness. It's hard to care about any of this without one of the main characters providing our access point.
The writers clearly thought they had provided such an access point in Commander Riker. He forms a bond with Yuta, the sovereign's quiet servant who is really a vengeful assassin working to annihilate every member of a specific clan. Riker spends the episode trying to get closer to Yuta, and then is forced to kill her at the end when she won't back down from her quest for vengeance. The drama of the episode is supposed to be that this is a tragic and soul crushing thing for Riker to do, but that drama doesn't really work.
The problem as I see it is that Riker has, to this point, been written as simply too big a horndog. From the beginning of the show, he's been cast in the James T. Kirk mode of bedding every shapely alien female he comes across. (There was even a horrible montage about this in "Shades of Gray.") With that "love 'em and leave 'em" history in place, this episode then has an added burden to convince us that this female, Yuta, is different. And it doesn't even make an effort at this. The episode either needed to devote a whole lot more screen time to the relationship (something it didn't have the luxury of doing, given the time needed to lay out the political landscape), or it needed to have a different character in the central role. Picard, Troi, Geordi, Worf... these are characters who don't fall in love every other week; I feel the story would have worked better for one of them.
Further dulling the proceedings this hour is the fact that the audience is uncharacteristically informed ahead of the characters. Star Trek almost always reveals the solutions to its mysteries in the final act of an episode, the characters showing us what they have discovered. This time, the audience is a witness to Yuta's first murder halfway through the episode, and we spend the rest of our time waiting for the characters to catch up. The attempt to try something different is understandable, but it simply doesn't play out well here.
Without the whodunnit to keep us engaged, the episode falls back on how it was done for the big reveal. And it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It turns out that Yuta is the carrier of a genetically engineered virus that triggers heart attacks in only members of the rival clan she's trying to kill. What's more, her aging process has been slowed so that she can live long enough to carry out her vengeance killings. So her race has access to highly advanced genetics and an apparent means to stop aging? How is this not the most important thing going on in the episode? How is this just a tossed-away afterthought?
But in this rather boring episode, there are a few moments of interest:
- The show continues to be more sophisticated in beginning an episode, just starting us with an Away Team beaming down and leaving us to suss out the story, rather than downloading it in a dense, expository Captain's Log.
- There's an intriguing commentary on Starfleet's values early on in this episode. Though Picard praises the planet Acamar for enjoying a global peace, he still pressures its leader to invite the warlike Gatherers back. It seems that inclusiveness is a higher ideal than world peace. Discuss.
- Rare props to composer Dennis McCarthy, who provides a strange and interesting synth percussion rhythm for the Gatherer ambush on the Away Team.
- Worf gets a great line: "Your ambush would be more successful if you bathed more often."
- Random fact: this was the final episode of The Next Generation to air in the 1980s.
- But getting back to things that don't quite work: the very first shot of the episode looks out a station window at what I thought to be some very fake-looking scenery, uncharacteristically bad for the series. I then happened to read online that this background was actually pulled from storage, having first been created for the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. So that explains the fake quality, I guess.
- The final moments of the episode struck me wrong too. There's a real filler of a button scene in which Riker is mourning in Ten Forward over having to kill Yuta, and Picard comes up to talk about shore leave plans. It shows an odd lack of awareness for Picard, who completely ignores the fact that Riker is so glum, and it's odd for a Star Trek button, which usually offers some commentary on what we've just seen to wrap everything up.
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