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| Riker begins a forbidden relationship. |
THE PLOT
The Enterprise assists the J'naii, an androgynous spacefaring race. The J'naii have no males or females. They also apparently have no contractions, as they all deliver their lines like knockoffs of Data. If a viewer tuned in just after Picard's opening voice-over, that viewer could be forgiven for thinking that the visitors on the Enterprise were a race of androids!
Anyway, the J'naii have lost a shuttlecraft in what appears to be a pocket of "null space." This pocket sucks in any form of energy, making it impossible to detect from outside. Riker teams with Soren (Melinda Culea), a J'naii pilot and scientist, to take a modified Starfleet shuttle on a rescue mission. But when Riker develops feelings for Soren, this joint venture threatens to create an incident - for if Soren chooses to act as a female, then she will be shunned by her own society...
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: A glorified extra in this episode, though he does invoke the Prime Directive in order to create some Artificial Tension for Riker at the end.
Riker: Soren comes from a race with no gender. Apparently, to Riker this just represents a challenge to be overcome, since he's all but hitting on Soren from their very first scene together. "What kind of woman do you like?" Soren asks Riker early in the episode. I shout back, "Breathing," as evidence from the past 116 episodes indicates that Riker's standards extend no further than that.
Worf: As predicted, he has fully recovered from his crippling spinal injury, and is up to participating in a tension-free rescue mission with Riker at the end. We also see him doing his best Archie Bunker impersonation for the poker game scene. Here, Worf becomes the voice of bigotry, grumbling about poker with wild cards being "a woman's game" and talking about how the J'naii "bother" him. I'm surprised they don't really hammer it home by having Worf add that he has no problem with the J'naii existing, but that they shouldn't flaunt their androgyny around others.
Hot Alien Space Androgyn of the Week: No males, no females. But of course, the J'naii who attracts Riker's eye is played by the very female, very attractive Melinda Culea. No attempt is made to disguise her obvious feminity, meaning that all of Riker's scenes with her read strictly as "man and woman." Then we discover that Soren actually is female, which allows writer Jeri Taylor to make text the homosexual subtext by making the J'naii race one that brutally represses gender - which also completely nullifies the entire concept of putting Riker into a relationship with somebody genderless. From this point on, Soren is just another space babe for Riker to notch onto his ever-expanding belt.
THOUGHTS
I'm going to start by trying to emphasize the positive. I can think of two good things to say about The Outcast: (1) I've seen worse episodes of Star Trek. I can count them on my fingers, but they're there; and (2) I believe the intentions behind this episode were good.
That said, this is a Jeri Taylor script, so you're pretty safe in betting that everything will be presented simplistically and melodramatically. Even in (heck, long before) the 1980's, there existed gay rights movements, which were supported by many heterosexuals. J'naii society, however, is utterly monolithic in its discrimination against the "gendered," with no evidence given that even a single "non-gendered" J'naii would support the idea of rights for those like Soren. This... is really not believable, reducing our Guest Race of the Week into a race where personality and individuality appear to have been eliminated along with gender.
It would have been far more interesting to have had Soren be truly androgynous, and to have had the other J'naii react to the alienness of her relationship with Riker. But then they might have to put Riker into a relationship with someone less obviously (and by the midpoint, spelled out in the text as) female, which I suspect was not a risk that early 1990's Star Trek was prepared to take, not even for one episode.
The plot involving the shuttle lost in "Null Space" is perfunctory, with most of its complications existing just to put Riker and Soren together in close quarters. As is typical of bad TNG, there is no sense of threat. Despite the opening of the episode providing a strict time limit to rescue the lost J'naii, there is no urgency to the efforts to locate them, no sense that this subplot actually matters to the characters at all.
Worst, of all, with a heavy-handed and uncourageous "message" plot and a perfunctory "rescue" subplot, the episode commits what I consider to be the cardinal sin of any television show or movie: It's boring. The dullest TNG episode since Loud as a Whisper.
Overall Rating: 1/10.
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