1x21 Symbiosis

[3.8/10] Drugs are bad. The good people at Star Trek: The Next Generation want you to know that. If you don’t understand it in the form of the After School Special vibe of the episode’s story, then you’ll be forced to comprehend it via hamfisted scenes and scads and scads of overacting. “Symbiosis” is one step short of just shaking each individual audience member by the shoulder and yelling “Never take drugs!” in their faces.

The episode sees the Enterprise rescuing four people from a disintegrating freighter, along with their cargo. Two of them are clean-cut, well-dressed Aryan-looking members of one planet, Brekka, and the other are more rough-hewn space rustics from the neighboring planet, Ornara. The four of them are all grateful for the rescue but locked in a dispute over who owns the cargo. It’s purported to be a life-saving medicine, produced by Brekka to help treat a plague on Ornara, sold to the Ornarains in exchange for everyday goods needed on Brekka.

There’s something solid there. Most Star Trek series have gotten mileage out of having to resolve disputes between locals, with Starfleet officers having to balance the need for resolution with their duty not to interfere. The moral question of whether the Prime Directive justifiably prevents Picard from interfering with whether the Brekkans can withhold a badly needed medical treatment until they receive payment is an appropriately thorny one.

But (get ready for a twist) the “medicine” turns out to be...dun dun duuuuun...drugs. The Ornarans aren’t using medicine to ease the pain of the local plague; they’re unwittingly addicts who are trying to stave off withdrawal. Only it’s even more pernicious than that, with the even bigger twist that the Brekkans know about this, that they’re aware the plague is gone and have withheld the information, let alone their method for getting unhooked from “felicium” (really guys?), because being dealers is necessary for Brekka to extract vital but sundry resources from Ornara -- the titular symbiotic relationship.

Again, there’s something more than a little heavy-handed about that setup, but there’s merit in it. There’s a particular resonance in 2021 to a premise that sees a group of people coded as “from the heartland” trading the fruits of their labors to a group of people coded as more cosmopolitan and polished to receive what’s necessary to feed their addictions. Done in a different way, “Symbiosis” could be a powerful episode about what’s just and what can or cannot be tolerated by a theoretically neutral observer with the power to disrupt the status quo.

Unfortunately, this episode only has one setting: loud, dumb, and overblown. The Ornarans, Romas in particular, do everything in a crazed roar, that makes you think the show could have saved time if it just hung signs on them that said “I’m a desperate addict” and called it a day. Dr. Crusher (and Gates McFadden) goes over the top in her moral indignation, seeming less like someone genuinely shocked at the injustice and more someone meant to yell “This is bad!” at the audience. If that weren’t enough, long expository scenes featuring Picard monologuing lay out in no uncertain (or subtle) terms how obviously terrible this all is. (That’s also after it’s revealed that these aliens have electric powers, a reveal that basically goes nowhere.) None of this amounts to a compelling and realistic look at addiction and those who profit off of it; it’s just a breathless caricature.

Even that isn’t as bad as the thudding scene where Wesley, who for all his smarts must be the world’s most clueless boy, why anyone would ever do drugs. It earns him the usual 1980s speech on the subject from Tasha, delivered in the corniest, most obvious fashion, about how they deliver an artificial sense of satisfaction and then extract a terrible price. None of what she says is wrong, but it’s such bog standard quasi-parental pontificating, mixed with doltish “Why is drugs?” questions from Wesley, that it can elicit nothing but eye-rolls.

Even with all that bluntness and hokiness, “Symbiosis” cooks up a decent Prime Directive dilemma. Should Picard (or others) tell the Ornarans about what’s really going on with their arrangement, given its abject perniciousness, maybe even allow Dr. Crusher to offer them palliatives to ease their addiction, or should he stick to the principles of non-interference and allow these convenient lies to persist?

Of course, he ends up taking a third option. The Brekkans are wise to the non-interference rules and so play things pretty smug with the Omarans, especially after Picard admits he’s bound not to spill the beans. They offer to just give the “medicine” to their neighbors, to remove any possible Federation jurisdiction and preserve the status quo. But Picard has a trick up his sleeve, namely reneging on his offer to help fix the Omarans’ freighters, which allow them to ferry goods and drugs between the two planets, thereby de facto ending the drug trade.

It’s a bit of a sidestep, but so are a lot of these Prime Directive stories. In truth, this is still a decision that will radically reshape the societies of Break and Ornara, but the captain can hide behind a technicality and achieve the result he feels as just. That’s pretty standard Star Trek stuff, and while a convenient out, it doesn’t bother me.

What does bother me is the way that Picard condescends to Dr. Crusher about it afterwards. It’s yet another badly-written and on-the-nose conversation, but I could tolerate it if its point weren’t so ill-conceived. Dr. Crusher explains that it’s hard to stand on philosophical principal in the presence of suffering, a legitimate point. In response, Picard basically makes the usual speech about how no matter how terrible a situation might seem, interfering in the natural development of other species and societies is the height of hubris and liable to lead to disaster.

I don’t even disagree with him necessarily, and I at least respect it as a legitimate contrary view to Dr. Crusher’s own valid point. But “Symbiosis” makes for a terrible case study and also makes Picard look like a self-deluded jerk. He was all prepared to repair the Ornarans’ freighters until he realized that doing so would perpetuate their drug dealer relationship with the Brekkans. Reneging there is a choice! One that will radically reshape their societies and arrangements! That is acting, that is interfering, that is using your position to affect to course of someone else’s development! (Nevermind the lack of humaneness in at least giving the Ornarans some palliatives for their withdrawal, something even Captain Archer copped to in a similar situation).

Look, I can buy Picard playing the “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you” card here as a way to achieve his goals while still remaining within the letter, if not the spirit, of the Prime Directive. But him pretending that hiding behind “Well their freighters would have broken down anyway” isn’t a dodge, but rather some high-minded tribute to Federation non-interference, is utter nonsense.

That’s par for the course in “Symbiosis”, and episode that marries loud aseops about drugs and addiction with making a hash of Star Trek’s favorite sort of dilemma. If you’re going to pontificate to your audience for an hour, it’s best to do so subtly, to demonstrate why your point is worth listening to instead of just shouting it at your audience over and over again. But if you can’t do that, you should at least be right, and while this episode at least succeeds on its overly foregrounded “Drugs are bad” message, it sadly fails almost everywhere else.