4x15 First Contact

[8.0/10] On The Original Series, Captain Kirk seemed to have a pretty reliable method for first contact: barge into a new planet, decide that the way the locals live is wrong, and totally upend their society. (Don’t worry, Federation supervisors will arrive after us to guide you and help clean up this mess.) It’s a paean to 1960s progressivism, with a hint of the attitude best embodied by Bender from Futurama: “The whole world must learn of our peaceful ways...by force.”

It’s neat, then, to see how the approach has evolved nearly a century later. By the time of The Next Generation, first contact is a much more nuanced and deliberate process. It involves some questionable intrusions in the hopes of averting former conflict. It requires great autonomy and deference be granted to the society on the cusp of joining the interstellar community. And most of all, it requires balancing the thrills and possibilities of becoming part of a larger universe with the potential upheaval and distress that learning you’re no longer the center of that universe may bring.

In that, “First Contact” is the sort of Star Trek episode I love, one founded on the intellectual, cultural, and philosophical questions about how communities connect with one another, built around a series of intriguing thought experiments. At base, the episode is about the Federation making official contact with the Malcorians on the eve of their first warp flight. But on a higher level, it’s about the pace of societal change, the interaction between technological advancement and cultural friction, and the right way for two different peoples to forge a relationship with one another.

The best choice “First Contact” makes in exploring those topics is to center the Malcorians’ perspective in all of this. There’s plenty for Picard, Troi, and Riker to do here, and brief moments in the sun for Dr. Crusher, Data, and Worf. But for the most part, the protagonists of this story are the leader of the Malcorians, Chancellor Durken (George Coe, aka the voice of Woodhouse, for any Star Trek fans who enjoy the antics of other screw-ups named “Archer”), and their top scientist, Mirasta Yale.

It makes for an unusual posture for TNG, one that takes out of the familiar POV of our heroes and forces the audience to confront how it would feel to be visited by them as alien interlopers out of the blue. We know, from the past eighty episodes, that Picard and company are good people and have the best of intentions, even if they’re far from perfect. But Durken and Yale don’t, and a clown car of writers take the implications of that uncertainty seriously, showing the Malcorian leaders grappling with the promise of this next great step and offer of help with the fear that it could destabilize their society and that these strangers could be the heralds of an invading force.

“First Contact” frames up good avatars for those considerations. Yale is the technophilic optimist here, recognizing the arrival of the Enterprise as a sign of advancement and the chance for Malcor III to take its place in the galaxy. The Malcorian Security Minister, Krola, represents the small-C conservative opposition, one who harbors concerns not only that the Federation visitors could be duplicitous invaders, but that all this progress is moving too fast and will cause people to forget the venerated old ways. These positions are a little caricatured, but represent genuine divisions in communities of all stripes when confronted with developments that are exciting on the one hand, but which promise great, potentially troubling, changes on the other.

In the middle of the two of them is Durken, who’s sympathetic to Yale’s enthusiasm for what the future my hold, but understandably wary of these visitors and concerned about how the news of their arrival might affect citizens already concerned that things are changing too quickly. He’s an honest broker, one with a presence and measuredness to feel like Picard’s equal in matters of state. He asks fair questions, the right questions, considers his options quite reasonably, and deals with the situation fairly yet cautiously. I don’t know how I feel about his ultimate, bittersweet decision, but with his “I’ll tell my family this was a good day” speech alone, he feels like a worthy avatar for the considered leader caught in the middle.

What’s interesting, in hindsight, is how this episode feels like a dry run, maybe even a blueprint, for topics that would be with Star Trek as a franchise to the present day. Not surprisingly, the film Star Trek: First Contact examines what it meant for humanity to go from believing we were the only life in the universe to learning that we were just part of a broader interstellar community. While the execution from Star Trek: Enterprise left a lot to be desired, the show is a series-length meditation on the friction that comes when technologically advanced visitors arrive and give the impression that they’re not telling you everything. And the first season of Star Trek: Discovery is at least partly built on the idea that a bad first contact can create trouble for centuries, and features a character joining Starfleet partly out of a desire to explore and progress faster than their hidebound species and culture is willing to.

These are rich notions that The Next Generation doesn’t necessarily have time to fully explore in forty-four minutes. But it contends with each of them in meaningful, albeit necessarily quick ways, in a fashion that sets up the franchise to dig deeper in later installments. Clashes of civilizations have been the block and tackle of Star Trek from the beginning. But the combination of “First Contact” and “Who Watches the Watchers” feels like a more distinct playbook for what it means to engage with new warp-capable societies taking their first tenuous steps into a wider galaxy, and the concerns and risks involved on both sides of the table.

Of course, it wouldn’t make for good network T.V. to have an hour long show consisting of nothing but diplomatic bigwigs weighing options. So there’s also some jeopardy at play here. Riker’s cosmetically altered himself to be able to surveil the Malcorians, and a rough go in the midst of a local riot leaves him battered, unable to contact the Enterprise and, most perilously, exposed to his unwitting hosts.

The tension in the episode comes from whether our heroes will be able to rescue their infirmed colleague in time, or whether the hardliners (and, to be fair, understandably fearful members) of Marlcorian society will further harm or even kill him knowing what he really is. It’s telling that even on that front, there exists a divide that reflects the broader tensions in Malcorian society. The head doctor has his feathers ruffled over Riker’s lies and evasive answers, but resolves that, at the end of the day, Riker’s his patient and his job as a physician is to treat him. Others worry about what he represents or could do, something complicated when Durken finds out that Picard kept this from him.

And, well, there’s even those who want to schtup the visiting alien. Look, it’s a little weird that, in a fairly serious episode, we get a comic interlude where one of the locals agrees to help Riker but only if he’ll fulfill her fantasy of mating with an extraterrestrial. But (1.) it furthers the strangely deep connections between Star Trek and Cheers as Lilith comes to town, (2.) it reflects a bizarre but true-to-life strain of UFO enthusiasm that existed at the time, and (3.) it lines up surprisingly well with later comments from T’Pol on Enterprise that humans, as newcomers to the interstellar community, can see interspecies relationships as a novelty. The way “First Contact” goes about it here is questionable, but it at least touches on something real and potent.

It leads, directly or indirectly, to the conclusion for all three poles in the Malcorians’ response. When Riker’s escape attempt is thwarted, Krola tries to use a Starfleet phaser and some subterfuge to make it seem like Riker killed him, in order to turn public sentiment against the aliens. It fails, and it’s a little cartoony, but it’s a solid way to show how far people will go to avoid the earth-shaking changes that would come with such an arrival.

It’s enough, it seems, to convince Chancellor Durken to hold off on proceeding with the planet’s space program and on forming relations with the Federation. He’s worried that there are more as fanatical as Krola, and that those resources would be better spent on culture and education to prepare the citizenry psychologically, not just technologically, for this sort of great change. But Yale gains leave to stay with the Enterprise and see the galaxy, a sign that some of the Malcorians are ready and can’t be held back, even if not all of them are.

There’s something a little bold in having the planet of the week turn down the Federation’s invitation and choose to stay grounded due to a cultural immaturity. There’s plain commentary on whether real life humans were mature enough in 1991 to face those sort of globe-shaping developments. And it’s interesting to see Picard do his diplomatic best to justify Starfleet’s well-meaning intrusion and extend the hand of welcome, only to fail.

But it speaks to a grand chance in the perspective of the franchise over the course of twenty years and the departure of Gene Roddenberry. Durken asks if Picard will make good on his promise to go away if asked, and the captain acquiesces. First contact, and Star Trek as a whole, was no longer about imposing the right values on wrong civilizations. It was about respecting cultural and political autonomy, about accepting that we don’t always have the right answers, and that it’s each community’s choice how and whether to face the future in their own time. Humanity still had (and has) a long way to go, but maybe that shift in our stories was a small sign that we were a little closer to being ready for that big change ourselves.