Television: 'Star Trek The Next Generation: Family' (Episode 4x02)

(Prepared long ago. Away in Amsterdam.)

As I sit here typing frenetically and producing cover material for the Muffin over the next few weeks, I am overshadowed by a massive number of Star Trek novels. Star Trek was a massive influence on me, massive, and on revisiting much of non-Original Series era be underwhelming or feel a little hidebound.

'Star Trek: The Next Generation', henceforth to be referred to as TNG, had a number of problems. There's not much point in going into the problems in depth, but amongst them there was the problem of writing truly meaningful or dramatic episodes within a purely episodic structure where there could be no consequences. It was a show that started in the 1980s after all, with all the trappings of that era. TNG actually succeeded for the most part despite itself and its own structure, and part of that was because occasionally it could do episodes like 'Family'.

'Family' was the follow-up to the preceding two-parter 'The Best Of Both Worlds' in which Picard (Captain Jean-Luc Picard, false Frenchman and tea addict) was taken and assimilated in a fashion into the Borg and used to power and mastermind an invasion into the United Federation of Planets. Of course by the end of that story he was reclaimed and restored to the Enterprise-D (which doesn't look like a giant duck at all, oh no) and in the normal Star Trek scheme of things that would have been that. On this occasion there was 'Family', though, which allowed consequences, which were unheard of outside the still-recent movies II, III and IV.

Consequences did not occur much in Star Trek then as mostly things get forgotten by the next episode, but 'Family' was one of two notable TNG episodes (along with 'Lessons' which refers to 'The Inner Light') to show consequences to a given story. That changed everything. Picard got a whole episode, in concert with less impressive but thematically similar B and C stories, to recover from what would be one of the most traumatic things to occur to a character in Star Trek ever. It was and is quite the magical show as Patrick Stewart showed every inch of his acting calibre and sold the idea that Picard might not come back to the ship, that the world is different now, and that some trauma doesn't go away. And then he gets to fight in mud with Jeremy Kemp (brother Picard) and remind us all that he is the guy with the most rounded and human character on the ship by far. I think fighting in mud with Jeremy Kemp should be the overwhelming feature of every trauma recovery in Star Trek really, but that's just me.

It is one of the landmark episodes, a show without a space mission or a problem to be solved via science or neutrinoes or some silly deus ex machina. The only stories are personal stories, and they all land, and when Picard does eventually return to be captain again - get back in your own seat, Number One - it is because he has worked through his problems himself. The introduction of stories like this is what saved TNG, what powered DS9 completely at times, and then disappeared somehow as Star Trek went away again into the dark. Of course that is the way it goes, and that was the way it went. At least we got one of the best episodes ever when TNG was on air, and it was called 'Family'.

O.