Nerding Day: Star Drek - Justice (Patreon)

Welcome back to Star Drek! That’s right, I haven’t given up yet! That officially makes this series of columns the fourth-most effort I’ve ever put into destroying something I dearly love - right behind myself, my family and the Winchester Mystery House (no particular order). Last time on Star Drek, we transitioned from The Original Series into Next Generation territory, where the glaring, overt racism of the episode “Code of Honor” sidelined any possibility of fruitful discussion of the show itself. Yes, it was just that racist!

So, knowing it’s unlikely I’ll rip on the same thing twice in a row, let me use this brief caesura as a chance to explain what makes Next Gen special. It’s boring! Joyously, fabulously boring. In fact, unlike the original Star Trek, nearly every single episode of The Next Generation starts with the Captain composing a letter with math in it addressed to his work superiors.

This sort of opening occasionally happens in the original Star Trek, but more often than not you got Kirk striding down a corridor or Uhura intercepting a distress call. For the followup, Gene Roddenberry wanted to lean even more into the original inspiration for the series, which in his mind was “Horatio Hornblower in space.” If you don’t know who Horatio Hornblower is, congratulations, you probably could have bullied Gene Roddenberry in High School.

Horatio Hornblower comes from a series of maritime adventure books. The man himself is a fusty and hyper-serious naval captain inspired by real British Admiral Horatio Nelson, and essentially a seabound Jack Ryan with cannons at his command. As was the style at the time (the 1800’s), all of Mr. Hornblower’s adventures took place at sea and were presented as a series of analog blog posts, or “letters.” This format is called “epistolary,” and you can chain that word to the word “fusty” and heave them both overboard because no one uses either anymore. Nobody, except maybe…this guy!

Patrick Stewart has become such a revered paragon of masculinity in his own right, it can be easy to forget how nerd-coded he was by late 80’s standards. Our leaders in the field were guys like Burt Reynolds, Tom Selleck, and Alan Thicke, who are in fact all the same man with different facial hair situations. So as a departure from the dashing Captain Kirk, who read as a throwback to guys like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Star Trek: The Next Generation went out of its way to cater to dweebs and fops alike. Captain Picard was bald, French, drank tea, had a British accent, loved archaeology, ran his ship like a proper naval sailing vessel, quoted philosophy, and became flustered around women. Oh yeah, and he kept scrupulous, copious notes. Just a real stickler for space-paperwork! This meant we got a proper Captain’s Log to start almost every episode of TNG. I suspect this is also why ninety percent of Futurama episodes start with the gang sitting on the couch watching television. It’s a joke about how goddamn flat and phoned-in the inciting incidents of Star Trek: The Next Generation were!

Case-in-point: this episode’s inciting incident is that the ship’s Doctor says the crew is very tired and needs to go on break, which comes up surprisingly frequently over the course of the series. You could call it a “classic TNG episode format,” which is wild. But how could they not be zonked? They just came from a routine colony drop in the nerdiest-named system possible! Go ahead, try to think of a really nerdy name for a solar system. I guarantee you won’t top…

“Strnad?” FUCKING STRNAD? Get the hell outta town, maximum warp.

Perhaps to counter-balance all the nerdliness, the show hedged its bets by making lots of the alien races just look like sexy humans and expanded the core cast to include even more. And if you were an old-head or jock who needed a Kirk-fix, Riker was also there. Kirk, Riker, Rikirk…get it? They’re the same. It’s fine. He’s ALSO THERE. You’d be surprised how many creative decisions come down to the network execs trying to cover their own cowardly asses.

And, ratings-wise, one real good way to cover your ass is to uncover the asses of your actors, which is just the sort of business we’ll be getting down to in this episode, “Justice!” Strap in!

Could they have called it “Just ass?” FCC fines aside, yes, they very well could have. That wouldn’t have confused too many people watching and fapping along at home. Because I’ll tell you now, it’s going to be a wild ride filled with adventure, tension, and hot alien smooches.

Oh yeah, hey! And a kid will tag along! That’s weird!

Not just Wesley Crusher, either. Another differentiating aspect of The Next Generation was that it softened the Enterprise from a strictly military-coded vessel into a sort of all-purpose “base” where Starfleet’s officers and support staff could also stow their partners, children, and - no joke - several live dolphins. TNG’s Enterprise boasts an elementary school, an arboretum, and enough replicators to produce over a hundred child-size coffins in under an hour…now that’s spacefaring! The kind where you don’t even have to write letters home, because if the diplomatic talks with the Sheliak break down your peeps are going to die right beside you. Not to mention any of the other MANY problems posed by having children onboard a ship full of hard-fightin’, alien-fuckin’ enlistedpeople. I don’t even have to go into them; it’s a misstep so obvious a blind man could see.

See?

Si, si, si! But hey, maybe get the kids out of the room before we continue this discussion. Oh, Wesley stepped out for a second? Okay Riker, dish! Do the aliens have any safe words? Stigmatised kinks? GAG REFLEXES??

Holy cow, they fucked his beard clean off! Or maybe it’s before he grew one, I forget. The point is, these aliens sound ripe for the fuuuuuuuh, hi Wesley welcome back! Pop a squat next to your Mom. Captain Picard was just saying we should evaluate the planet…you know, as a place for young people to relax. That’s…all we were saying. Back me up, Captain.

Okay, hopping out of my “doing a bit” writing voice and back into my “setting the scene” omniscient narrator voice…so we’re in space, yeah? And it’s the future, ya dig? And Captain Picard has just gotten a report that they’re in orbit around a fuck-themed planet. Naturally, he turns right to his own love interest Dr. Crusher, then a liiiiiittle further to her adolescent son, to ask him if he’d be willing to tag along with the team beaming down to Planet Coitus.

Since this was written in the late 80’s, I suppose the charitable interpretation here is that Picard is hoping to “make Wes a man” on this trip by getting him laid, thus continuing his “reluctantly taking Wesley under his wing” arc. Imagine it: a whole planet of people who’d have sex with Wesley Crusher. What a trippy sci-fi offer!

Of course, the “real name” of the fake made-up planet isn’t Planet Coitus, but it may as well be Flickabeen IV.

Rubicun? I’m hardly in diplomatic relations with her!

Next, we’re treated to a very ass-level-shot of a nice ass, under a credit that makes you impulsively wanna shout “more like Brenda GOT Bakke, amirite?!” So you do, and everyone claps, and they lift you up onto their shoulders and carry you up steps to set you upon a marble Joke Throne, and you wake up and realize it was all just a dream…the first good dream you’ve had since she left. That was three weeks ago. God. Three weeks. Feels like an eternity. The next credit is for Jay Louden.

Hey, what if we kissed in front of the San Diego Convention Center? They’ll pay us and put us on TV, we just have to pretend we’d be willing to fuck Wesley Crusher. It’s a real career-killer, is what I guess I’m trying to say. So hard pass? Hard something, anyway. What’s the word I’m looking for, Riker?

Oh yeah, “dick!” You’re being a dick in front of Troi.

Also, you’re fully erect while on a first contact mission with an alien race, but technically that’s been allowed since 2788 when that one really sexy song came out, because now when you get hard or wet in inappropriate situations you can just say you were thinking of that song and everyone has to let it go.

The girl with the permed hair and temporary butt (aren’t they all?) takes the lead for the Edo, wrapping herself around each member of the away team in turn with an unashamed moan. This seems, again, to really antagonize Troi, not to mention make Wesley look more than a little anxious and the veins on Dorn’s forehead throb.

I linger on this point because in the last episode we discussed, Troi was very open about using her empathic abilities to pry into the minds of her crewmates specifically to keep tabs on who’s horny and for whom and how much. Seems like a real abuse of power for a counselor, especially if you’re gonna then go to the crew orgy and be all jealous and prudish about it.

Of course, you can’t spell “Rivan, Liator,” without “iRrational V!”

Liator, the dude version of the lady version of him, instinctively understands and abides by the cis-het conventions of 1990’s America, meaning he’s here to throw sex at the lady-shaped Trek actors but is also senitive to the fact that if you do that too fast it’s called “rape.” Your boy has the perfect solve though, which is to treat Troi and Yar like spooked horses who really need a good hug-and-moan but just don’t know it yet.

Liator’s all: “Here’s a palmful of oats. I’m going to rub my nipples on you now, okay?”

Tasha, unlike Troi, basically attacks the dude like a dog humping a furniture leg, and we love that for her. Lots of people talk about Tasha and Data hooking up; precious few give her the roses she deserves for blowing the minds of everyone on this entire planet in between scenes.

And as you’d expect, all the sex in the episode is between scenes - strictly implied. The studio carefully scrubbed the episode of all but the most subtle sexual innuendo.

See? Subtle as Christ! You don’t think about her vagina opening to accommodate Worf’s weird Klingon dick hardly at all!

Riker’s way too into it, which is going to be his default setting for the rest of the episode.

Wesley’s setting for the rest of the episode, however, is more like a…well, a kid you dragged to an orgy! Really reasonable responses from Wes. First, extreme discomfort…

…which then settles into a sick mix of shame and lust. Like, you know, he’s not secure enough to be overtly sexual, nor is he going to make moves in front of his older crewmates…but he’s not ruling sex out. Losing his virginity to one of these jogging aliens is something Wes doesn’t want to completely take off the table.

“See Mom, I didn’t ask for a blowie, I just said ‘whatever you usually do’ and she went to town!” And, lest you think the comedian in me is cherry-picking moments to make the episode seem hornier than it is, here’s the part where Riker asks how many people are allowed to come down to visit Sex Planet and if there’s a limit, something that’s never been asked of an alien race on either Trek series before. That’s just before the Edo straight-out try to initiate some welcome sex right on the spot.

THE WET SPOT! Sorry, I had to hold onto that for the space of three images, it might have come out too emphatically. The point is, the Edo’s lawns are uniformly lush and obviously watered regularly, probably by automatic sprinkler. Also jizz.

Liator almost literally asks Troi “Do I make you horny, baby? Do I?” and this prompts Wesley to ask if he can dip out so the adults can have the fun they so obviously want to.

Ever the skilled diplomat, Rivan realizes they’ve put the minor in an awkward position. Her solution?

“Hey, you should go on ahead! There’s some hot kids there you can fuck! Or at least do hand stuff with, right? You DO do hand stuff, yes? Am I saying this right in Earthling? A handy for the making of cums?” Wesley demurs.

For some reason this makes Liator chuckle a little derisively at him, so I suppose Wes should have gone ahead and had horrible sex for the sake of relations with these aliens. The exact same way a dude at a swingers’ event who JUST tried to cross the line would, he then covers for his attempt to shame a virgin boy into sex by swearing that they never do that kind of thing here.

Okay man! Whatever you say! I’m seeing a lot of uncomfortable looks from some of these folks, but what do I know? I’m just an UNDERAGED BOY FROM SPACE, PLEASE STOP THIRST-TRAPPING ME.

This trend continues as the group jog to a nearby civic center and stop for a quick hug break before going inside. Wesley still seems uncomfortable, so Liator helpfully points at some passing children and vaguely intones the word “children…” as if to say “hey, there’s some kids, fuck off and play will ya? You’re killing the vibe.”

Eager to escape, Wes agrees and trots over only to find that the indicated people are more like “barely-legals” than children, and that there’s apparently such a thing as V-neck shorts.

We mercifully cut away, but only to follow the rest of the crew inside where they take in a scene carefully crafted to imply a culture full of people who have orgies all the time but just don’t happen to be doing one right this minute. They’re between orgies, for the sake of the censors - but you get it. There’s dudes chilling together stroking their instruments…

…”[MOANS AND SIGHS OF PLEASURE]”...

…and big greasy legs used to frame a shot.

Wow, now I definitely either want to have sex or eat tubed meat! But, much like an Earth orgy, the small buffet of real food is there just for show, forever untouched.

Also like an Earth orgy, even the chick who seemed totally down minutes ago gets a weird look on her face when confronted with the reality of who actually showed up.

Yar’s like “oh, I had assumed they sent Liator to greet us because he’s the town pipsqueak, but actually all these dudes are pretty Brockway.” Meanwhile, onboard the Enterprise in orbit, Data’s sensors have sensed something that can’t be sensed! The illogic of this part infuriates me too much to unpack, so let’s just power through.

Although if you haven’t made the connection yet, this chunk really hammers home that while Riker is “the Kirk” of the show, Data is “the Spock.” This is the same kind of twisted word salad he’d diarrhea out to explain The Alternative Factor.

Picard rightly gives Data a look of “enough phone tree shit, let me talk to a goddamn human,” and sends Geordi down to scan the thing from a window using his VISOR.

But I guess it’s not a scan, just a “looking at,” since the big front viewscreen is actually a monitor and Geordi’s looking through a true window.

Although isn’t it still “digitally,” since the VISOR is a sophisticated sensor array in itself?

Oh, and he also just says exactly what Data said in his own words, making this whole beat pointless! And I cut out a long shot of Geordi just walking! Look!

We’re probably supposed to spend this time imagining all the wild sex happening down on the planet right now. Eventually, the “thing” transmits a message that accomplishes exactly nothing but extending the sequence for one more interminable moment.

THAT’S WHAT WE’VE BEEN DOING! Finally, just as the away team are presumably syncing their orgasms hundreds of miles below, a little spectral ball comes a-ballin’ through the halls of the Enterprise and confronts Picard on the bridge.

If you have the subtitles on it’s already spoiled, but turns out the ball considers itself the benevolent protector-God of the childlike Edo. They are a race of infantilized fuckdolls, and it is the great peeping eye in the sky watching and going “mm-hmm, yes, oh yes, hahaha, yeah baby!” Naturally, it doesn’t appreciate the crew trying to horn in on its private camshow.

Below, its children are freely frolicking and jogging, as is their wont. One of their number prepares to “pop a pussy on a handstand” as they say.

The group elects a representative to seduce young Wesley…

…or do they?

Ohhhhhh, it wasn’t sexual at all! Maybe we’re the perverts for projecting such ribald thoughts onto one kid simply trying to explain to another kid the most slow-paced and complicated ball sport ever devised.

The alien girl seems to instinctively understand baseball, judging by the look of irritated boredom on her face. So yeah, sorry, I was probably just reading into things…no sexual innuendo here!

To be clear, in that last image “MAN 1” is the guy talking to Troi in the background. Apropos of nothing, he just leans forward and tells her to smell something despite her extremely closed-off body language and refusal to make eye contact. See, she’s too distracted eavesdropping on Riker’s conversation with Worf about how he wishes he could fuck his female crewmates but he’d probably kill ‘em with his hip thrusts!

You know, work stuff. Diplomacy.

And look, I’m no prude…later in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 Worf enters into a consensual fuck-till-we-break-bones relationship with not one, but two women hosting parasitic alien worms in their bellies. That’s great, that’s good - hey, tell me more about that! But what we have here in the episode “Justice” is a bunch of late-80’s TV writers trying to imply hot hot sex without ever going past TV-PG, and it feels like watching someone hump a Teddy Ruxpin playing a tape of 9/11 news coverage. No part of it is illegal, but…we shouldn’t be doing this, right?

Good news, that’s done now! No more sex. As abruptly as the onset of post-orgy shame, a casual conversation Yar has with Rivan and Liator reveals the Edo have a draconian justice system by which anyone committing even the slightest infraction is immediately put to death. It’s the least chill orgy planet EVER.

Tasha then asks: “What, even something simple, such as disobeying the rule ‘keep off the grass’?” It’s a wonder of restraint that she doesn’t wink directly at the camera before they then hard cut to Wes diving for a ball and falling butt-first into a big flowerbed. D’oh! Fatality!

Two dudes I sincerely believe were cast for their elegant long feet and ability to make serious expressions with their nipples out jog over, ready to execute a child at a moment’s notice and for almost any reason.

The rest of the Enterprise crew run up just in time to intercede, and Riker takes a pause to ask the security team what I think is a pretty solid question.

Yar avoids blame with an answer that has puzzled me for decades, and may in fact be one of the last things I noodle on as my brain shuts down.

…and you didn’t ask? What did it say then, just a list of rules? The alien delegation sent you a list that just said, like, “don’t step on flowers, no murder, reacharounds appreciated” and you asked no further followup questions? What did you think first contact with an alien race would entail?! Anyway, they kill Wesley with poison.

Just kidding! Would be dope though. Instead, we’re launched into the final act of the episode, which poses a classic Star Trek moral question: is it right to meddle in another culture’s legal tradition if, by your own culture’s standards, what they’re doing is grossly unjust? It’s Justice versus Mercy! Sexy Death Cult versus Space America! Kill Wesley versus Don’t Kill Wesley!

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT, AND INDEED LAST? To find out, you have no choice but to patronize 1-900-HOTDOG for the rest of this column!!!!! Or watch a 37-year-old episode of television widely available everywhere, I guess. I’m sorry for inflicting this choice upon you.

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