The Enterprise is working with an androgynous alien race, the J'naii, trying to help them locate one of their missing shuttlecraft. The search has one J'naii, Soren, working closely with Commander Riker. Soren soon confesses to him: she is one of a small number of J'naii that does identify as gendered. She is female, and attracted to Riker. But the taboo nature of their relationship puts Soren in a precarious situation with her people.
The allegory of this episode isn't subtle; this is a story about gays and lesbians. But before I discuss it, I think it's worth digging into the history of gays and lesbians in Star Trek.
For the original series, it's a non-existent history. Though the show was very progressive in many areas, it never went anywhere near gay issues. Nobody dared to, not even Gene Roddenberry. In one of his final interviews, the series creator admitted that his own attitude on homosexuality had changed over time -- though he'd never been stridently anti-gay, he acknowledged that in the past, "I would, sometimes, say something anti-homosexual off the top of my head because it was thought, in those days, to be funny."
It seemed he wanted to do something about it with The Next Generation. In a Star Trek convention appearance before the series premiere, a fan asked Roddenberry point blank if there would be any gay characters on the new show. His answer did not hedge: it was time to show gay people on the Enterprise. And when Roddenberry subsequently brought the issue up in a staff meeting, one of the writers decided to run with it. David Gerrold was a veteran of the original series who had written a few episodes, including the beloved "The Trouble With Tribbles." He wanted to do something very serious for the new series, an AIDS allegory about blood transfusion which he titled "Blood and Fire." And part of his script, demonstrating Star Trek's future enlightenment, was casual and incidental dialogue identifying two Enterprise crewmembers as a gay couple.
The vultures circled. Even at this early stage in the life of the show, Roddenberry was stepping back from day-to-day involvement, and producer Rick Berman was stepping up. Also filling the power vacuum was Roddenberry's lawyer Leonard Maizlish, who managed to assert himself into the creative process so thoroughly -- and destructively -- that by the end of season one, every original series writer who'd come to work on The Next Generation was driven to leave the show. By all accounts, both Berman and Maizlish were anti-gay, and very much against Gerrold's story. Berman's attitudes in particular are confirmed by a number of sources:
- Star Trek: Voyager's star Kate Mulgrew said in an interview that she lobbied repeatedly for a gay character to appear on that show. She named Berman specifically as resistant to it, but couched her comments in a way that didn't completely throw him under the bus.
- Specifically when it comes to this episode, Berman made a number of coded comments that speak for themselves. I'll provide some examples a bit later.
- Writer Ronald Moore, after a long tenure on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine (and a sudden falling out with Voyager), noted that Paramount always let all three of those series do whatever they wanted -- there was never a studio mandate on anything, much less gay characters. Commenting on their absence in Star Trek, he said: "There is no answer for it other than people in charge don’t want gay characters in Star Trek, period."
- David Gerrold was most blunt of all, calling Berman a "raging homophobe."
That closed the book on gays in Star Trek for several years, until along came "The Host." It was a generally average episode of the series, but it briefly flirted with the subject of homosexuality in a final act twist. This actually smacked of a rather expedient and disingenuous way of addressing the "gay issue" in a way that seemed to hope it would now just go away. Instead, it only got some fans asking questions again. And so, in an interview with The Advocate magazine, Roddenberry answered -- he said that the upcoming fifth season of the show would depict gay characters. Then, sadly, he died just a few months later. Rick Berman's hands were rather effectively tied. In practically his dying interview, The Great Bird of the Galaxy had promised gay characters on Star Trek. So Berman allowed the writers to go through with an allegorical take on the subject.
And therein is the biggest problem with "The Outcast." What the handful of insistent fans had been asking for, what Gene Roddenberry had promised, was actual gay characters on the show, not an allegory. The original Star Trek did an allegory about race in one of its last episodes, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." It was pretty awful: a preachy, on-the-nose fist fight through time and space between a man with a half-white half-black face and a man with a half-black half-white face. It's probably safe to say that Star Trek didn't open a single pair of eyes with that one.
But meanwhile, for all three years of its run, Star Trek had been showing its fans skilled professionals of all sorts of backgrounds, working together as if those differences didn't matter at all -- because they didn't. We had Nichelle Nichols' Uhura, participating in television's first interracial kiss, which aired at a time when, just a few years earlier, a marriage between her and a white man would have been forbidden in 17 U.S. states. We had George Takei, a Japanese-American who as a child had been unjustly placed in a World War II internment camp, playing helmsman Sulu, an accomplished officer proud of heritage. (Though not nearly so proud as Chekov -- who as a Russian was America's then mortal enemy in general, and in space travel in particular.) A mere analogy for racial integration could have began and ended with the presence of Spock, but the original series walked the walk with a truly diverse cast.
By contrast, The Next Generation (and "The Outcast" in particular) missed the point when it came to gay people. I'll use Rick Berman's own subconsciously bigoted words, from a subsequent interview, to illustrate: "We thought we had made a very positive statement about sexual prejudice in a distinctively Star Trek way, but we still got letters from those who thought it was just our way of 'washing our hands' of the homosexual situation."
To Berman, prejudice was a situation to be dealt with once -- in a Star Trek way -- and then to move on from. But the fans who'd asked to see a gay character on the show wanted to see that there was a place for them too in this wonderful future. They wanted a role model, as Whoopi Goldberg said she found in watching Nichelle Nichols. They wanted a representative, not something merely representational. Sadly and shamefully, even three subsequent Star Trek series, totalling 18 more seasons of television, would not offer it. (Another exhibit in the case for Rick Berman's bigotry.)
But enough of what might have (should have) been. Time to focus on what actually was, the episode itself. Interestingly, although "The Outcast" was intended as a metaphor for gays and lesbians, it's actually a much better metaphor for transgendered people. Indeed, it's not really a metaphor at all -- in a society where most people are comfortable with the gender identity they are born with (one in this case: neutral), a small percentage of people come to identify with a different gender (in Soren's case: female).
Unfortunately, in its depiction of an androgynous race, this episode equates "androgyny" with "boring." The production could have taken some pointers from a few line-blurring musicians like David Bowie or Annie Lennox. Apparently afraid to present any emotion or personality that might be construed as male or female, the episode makes all the J'naii so flat that they seem joyless. This extends even to Soren, whose romance with Riker really never produces any chemistry. It's hard enough when a Star Trek episode asks a main character to have an entire romantic relationship with a stranger in the course of 60 minutes minus commercials. It's harder still when the object of affection is wooden and dull.
The flatness of the J'naii seems like a production or directorial decision to me, but it's also possible it was just bad casting. Jonathan Frakes himself suggested as much, saying in a later interview that they should have cast men rather than women to play the J'naii. He felt that would have driven the message home more effectively. But Rick Berman never would have gone for that. He gave an interview in which he dismissed that notion: "Having Riker engaged in passionate kisses with a male actor might have been a little unpalatable to viewers." (Note that he didn't say "some" viewers, which no doubt would have been true. He assumed all viewers would share his sensibilities in finding such a scenario "unpalatable.")
Even with strong casting, though (male or female), this episode would have been hard-pressed to make the romance convincing, because it actually gives Riker and Soren even less than "60 minutes minus commericials." A lot of time is eaten up resolving the sci-fi plot involving the missing shuttle. Most of what's left is understandably devoted to explaining the gender taboos of J'naii society. That leaves little time for actually falling in love. Riker's most emotionally resonant scene isn't even with Soren, but with Troi, a nice character scene where he realizes his new relationship is serious enough that he wants to secure Troi's "permission." (Though that seems a little strange, since we very recently learned that Troi explicitly closed the book on anything between her and Riker.) Time is so tight that we're even denied a scene that in any meaningful way shows us Riker's heartbreak after the relationship doesn't work out.
But now that I've seemingly torn to shreds everything about this episode, let me walk it back a bit -- because there are some good things about it. Chiefly, for every bit that Rick Berman just didn't get it, it seems to me that the writer of this episode, Jeri Taylor, really did. Perhaps being a woman in the male-dominated world of television writing made her especially sensitive to the plight of a minority. In any case, she wrote a tremendous amount of strong dialogue in this episode.
First, there's an early scene in Ten Forward, where Soren expresses great confusion to Riker over the concept of gender. We'll learn in short order that this is a sham, that in fact she knows quite a lot about one gender at least. But the dialogue is perfectly polished to reflect how skillfully a person learns to hide in the closet, the tactical ways to probe for a sympathetic ear from the people they meet. In particular, Soren's reaction when another J'naii walks in on their discussion, the instantaneous clamming up, is an incredibly authentic depiction of what it is to be closeted.
The episode also nails the "coming out" moment... at least on the page. When Riker and Soren are alone in the shuttle, and she reveals her true nature to him, the language she uses is absolutely perfect. Unfortunately, the scene itself is undermined by those flaws I spoke of earlier -- bad casting, and the decision to mute J'naii emotion. You get a sense of what the scene should be when Soren tells the story of the school boy from her youth, but really, that terror (multiplied many times over) is what even talking to Riker should be.
Best of all is the episode's second "coming out" moment, when Riker tries to lie for Soren, and she instead responds by revealing herself to her people. At least, once again, it's great on the page, a triumphant declaration of what it is to be gendered (gay), and how there's nothing wrong with it. The speech itself is the best writing in the episode, but its delivery doesn't capture the pure euphoria of finally being honest with the world, with everyone. It's too measured, like a debate presentation. But listen to the words themselves, and you'll see: Jeri Taylor does understand this.
Taylor also took the opportunity to inject a little gender commentary into the episode. Beverly Crusher makes a wonderfully funny and insightful observation on how men go about making themselves attractive in comparison to women. But she goes as far in almost-criticism as any of the human characters on the show would be allowed to go.
This is why the more boorish behavior is given to the alien, Worf. His comments on women being weak are belied by basically every Klingon woman we've ever seen on The Next Generation, Worf's own mate K'Ehleyr most of all. It also contradicts Worf's own comment (in a first season gender-themed episode) that "Klingons appreciate strong women." Still, this is commentary on sexism that really needed to get in this episode somehow, and Worf is redeemed in the end when he offers his help in going after Soren. (An offer which makes a lot of sense, after Riker just talked him out of ritual suicide in the previous episode.)
Where I think Jeri Taylor could have done better still, while still working within the limitations she had, would have been to change Soren's past a bit. When Riker asks her if she's had any prior relationships with male-identifying J'naii, she answers yes. This seems to serve no purpose to me other than imply the rather insulting question: "well, are you sure you're female?" She certainly didn't need to be with a man to define herself as a woman, and I think the dramatic stakes would have been higher if contact with another species, and with Riker in particular, had been the thing that compelled Soren to act for the first time on what she'd known for so long -- if this had been her first "coming out."
The other change I would have considered would be the ending. Obviously, the episode can't end with Riker taking a permanent girlfriend with him (J'naii or otherwise). Still, it's quite unfortunate the way this episode resolves that problem: having Soren undergo "psychotectic treatment." So-called reparative therapy (also known as ex-gay or conversion therapy) is a real thing people undergo -- and that some teenaged LGBTs have forced upon them by their parents. But the reality is, those therapies don't actually work. In this episode, however, we're given no reason to question that this technique does work -- and that's a terrible message to be sending. I would have given serious thought to having Soren be killed instead -- possibly during the rescue attempt, or possibly in her own suicide.
Other observations:
- Wildest pickup line ever: "Commander, tell me about your sexual organs."
- Geordi LaForge sports a beard in this episode. Reportedly, Levar Burton really liked it. Obviously, given how fast it went away, the producers didn't.
- A deleted scene on the Blu-ray remaster shows a conversation between Soren and Riker overheard in Engineering, the moment where they essentially get caught
- I'm not sure there's really a way the episode could have addressed this, but it occurs to me that gender-identifying J'naii could probably closet themselves more easily in their society than gays and lesbians can in real-world society. A same-sex couple can't publicly show any affection toward each other if they want to keep a low profile, but I would think that whatever passes for public affection in J'naii society isn't going to look any different between two gender-neutral J'naii or a male and female J'naii. To some extent, this might be a metaphor for bisexuality; a bisexual person feels added pressure and momentum to remain closeted when he or she happens to be in an opposite-sex relationship, and can generally move through life "unnoticed."
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