3x09 The Vengeance Factor

[6.2/10] “The Vengeance Factor” deploys two Star Trek tropes that never sit well with me: (1.) a loud blaring message about some broad societal ill and (2.) Commander Riker shtups his romantic conquests to freedom. The former cause me to want to yell back at the T.V., “We get it! Thing bad!” and the latter make me want to roll my eyes.

The episode never really pulls out of the tailspin as to its ham-handed tale about the dangers of tribalism. The Enterprise runs across a heavily brutalized outposts and discovers that the culprits are “The Gatherers”, a group of marauding nomads loosely affiliated with the planet Acmar III. It leads to a snobs versus slobs conflict, where to prevent such incidents from recurring, Picard tries to mediate a peace between the urbane, dignified Acamarians and the brutish, uncouth Gatherers.

The whole point of the storyline, and indeed of the episode as a whole, is that tribal conflicts are bad. That’s not a bad theme to inject into your story and one that’s still relevant today. But “The Vengeance Factor” hits only the broadest, most cliched notes in trying to convey that message. The Acamarians see the Gatherers as savages who’ll never accept civilization. The Gatherers see the Acamarians as stuffy overseers who want to squanch their freedom. There’s very little nuance to it, just upper crust stereotypes clashing with discarded extras from a Mad Max movie.

The lesson is clear -- despite these seemingly insurmountable differences, there is common ground between the two groups, which could be found if only they’d let go of their century-fermented resentments over old tribal feuds. Picard helps them reach that common ground and gives them the needed nudges toward peace and understanding that would benefit them both. In the end, a truce is forged and a rocky but hopeful way forward has been forged.

On paper, it works. There’s just no realism to the depiction. The Gatherers are cartoonish brutes. The Acamarian sovereign is an exaggerated haughty high class ruler. Their mutual barbs lack any specificity, but just play the standard “You upper class twits are too sneering to fully accept us!” “No, you slack-jawed ninnies wouldn’t know what to do with civilization if it smacked you in the face!” routine. The decades-long ice between them seems to melt all too quickly with Picard’s intervention, and only a scene between Wesley and one of the Gatherer captains adds any shading to the personalities involved.

This is all enough to pass muster, but not enough to elevate the story into something memorable or unique. And it’s certainly not enough to communicate the moral of “age-old tribe-based schisms are bad” with any force or any subtly.

If the Gatherer/Acmarian plot thread stays steadily middling throughout, the Riker storyline starts out badly, becomes markedly intriguing in the middle, and then crashes and burns at the end. As usual, the ship’s Number One takes an interest in the pretty face of the week. Here, that’s Yuta, the chef and servant to the Acmarian sovereign. Yuta seems timid and cowed, but also wide-eyed and polite, which makes her the unfortunately perfect target for Riker’s advances.

These sorts of stories are tiresome. Jonathan Frakes charm makes them work better than they have any right to (and here’s a hot take for you -- better than Shatner was ever able to pull off), but there’s just something about the “seduce your way to liberation” plots he gets involved in that feel so embarrassing in hindsight. It makes you wonder how many aliens the second-in-command would have let stay in relative servitude and not try to teach them about self-determination if they didn’t happen to have a pretty face.

But at the midpoint, “The Vengeance Factor” pivots to two ideas that are far better and more engrossing. The first comes when Yuta shows up in Riker’s quarters at the behest of her sovereign, expressing her willingness to do whatever he wants her to. Will’s immediately put off by the supplication, gently explaining that he prefers to socialize with people as equals. When Yuta asks quizzically if that includes areas of romance, he smiles in retorts that it’s “especially” important in those situations.

I don’t want to fawn over what should have been common expectation by 1989, but it’s heartening to see the Enterprise-D’s resident casanova turning down sex when he can’t be sure it’s being freely offered. There’s strong notions of consent, on Yuta’s pleasure and happiness being worth just as much as Riker’s, that are frequently absent in Captain Kirk’s more questionable conquests. I grow tired of Will’s lothario routine, but there’s some positive masculinity being modeled here -- one that doesn’t puritanically demonize sexuality but which also acknowledges that attraction doesn’t excuse abuse.

To the same end, there’s a just-as-compelling idea embodied by Yuta herself, where she’s lost her ability to feel pleasure and happiness and been all but stripped of her individuality and self-determination, to become a weapon. It’s revealed that she is the last of an Acamarian clan that was wiped out by a Gatherer clan, and she’s been genetically altered to transmit a “microvirus” only fatal to that rival clan. Her mission (for decades apparently) has been to seek out that clan’s last survivors and exact her people’s revenge, even at the cost of her own joy and identity.

There’s real meat to that idea. The sense of tribal violence as pathology and grudge-holding as a dead feels pretty hollow in the interactions between the Gatherers and the Acmarians. But individualizing that, showing what this feud has taken away from one person trapped in the tangles of cultural squabbles that long predate her, gives it life. Yuta’s situation is a tragedy, a person whose had everything about them sanded off simply in the name of inflicting payback for crimes committed half a century ago.

Unfortunately, the way the episode reveals those details and resolves the issue is both cheesy and stupid. Aside from the implausible, breathless way in which Data and Dr. Crusher uncover the truth about Yuta (which is half-forgivable due to narrative necessity), the climax of the episode suffers from baffling decision-making. The crux of Yuta’s plot comes when she’s poised to assassinate the Gatherer leader (who just happens to be from the rival clan Yuta’s hellbent on eliminating), which would disrupt the tender steps toward piece both sides have taken.

Riker beams in, announces the truth, and kills Yuta when she refuses to let go of her hate and relent. The episode wants to make a big emotional deal about Riker having lost someone he cared for and had to do the deed himself in the name of duty. But it’s not at all clear why he had to other than that it made the story more dramatic!

Surely one of the stun settings on the phaser, used for longer, would have deterred Yuta from attacking the Gatherers. Or even if, somehow, her genetic alterations gave her a resistance to Starfleet phasers, then at a minimum he could have ordered Chief O’Brien to transport her directly to the brig or some other transporter-based remediation. I’m not one to nitpick story choices where technology the audience has already seen could probably have more easily saved the day. But this is just asking the show to use phasers and transporters in the way we’ve seen them used a million times before, and resorting to lethal force when there’s other options available scans as contrary to the Federation principles of peace that are hammered so hard here.

That thud of a landing brings “The Vengeance Factor” down several notches. The ham-fisted dramatization of how tribalism sucks already puts the episode at a disadvantage, no matter how laudable that message may be. But what makes this outing a shame is how it moves a stock story of Starfleet seduction into something more profound and tragic for a scene, and then loses all the goodwill in one ill-conceived finish. Coming up with interesting ideas is easy; turning them into compelling stories and characters is hard, and this episode just isn’t up to the challenge.