4x12 The Wounded

[8.1/10] One of the great but tricky thing about Star Trek is that the people, places, and things in its fantastical world are flexible when it comes to metaphor. They allow the show to tackle politics, prejudice, and other hot button issues without having to do so head-on. But that ambiguity can also lead to problems when the metaphor becomes murky or overextended.

Case in point, in “The Wounded”, there’s a lot of prejudice exchanged between the Cardassians and the Starfleet officers who’ve fought against them. The central metaphor The Next Generation seems to aim for with this is the same one it turns to often -- a clash of civilizations. The Federation and the Cardassian represent formerly warring countries having to navigate peace together, at the same time many are unwilling to let go of their grudges from a time of war.

That includes Captain Maxwell of the U.S.S. Phoenix, who lost his wife and children in a Cardassian raid and is now on a one-man mission to prove that the Federation’s former foes are up to their old tricks. He and Chief O’Brien, who served under Captain Maxwell earlier in his career, both tell Captain Picard that you can’t trust Cardassians, that their word should be taken as a prelude to backstabbing rather than honest commitment. This episode interrogates those feelings, and uses them as fodder to explore the need to let go of old war-worn sentiments and make room for a different future.

The catch is that Maxwell is right! His speculative, or at least under-sourced claims that despite a peace treaty, the Cardassians are rearming and preparing to launch a new assault on the Federation is correct! Picard knows it’s correct in the tense final showdown of the episode and relents anyway, adhering to the peace treaty and even taking Maxwell into custody to preserve the Federation’s arrangement with Gul Macet and the Cardassians rather than let things devolve back into armed conflict.

Taken through that lens, there’s great power to Picard’s choice. Much is made of trust in this episode, and Picard show’s a hell of a lot of it. He’s willing to play ball, to take in one of his own officers, even when that officer’s correct about his seemingly wild conspiracy theory, because it’s a price he’s willing to pay to preserve the peaceful relations between his people and Gul Macet’s. He tells his counterpart that Starfleet will be watching, but ultimately it’s a gesture to suggest that avoiding the bloodshed of violent conflict is worth extraordinary compromise and grace.

The catch is that it only works if you simply look at the Federation and the Cardassians as warring civilizations. There’s something more pernicious, or at least more complicated, if you read Maxwell’s and O’Brien’s resistance to warmed relations with the Cardassians as a reflection of racism. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. For most nations at war, their mutual resentments are rooted in tribalism and the losses each mourns, but often take the shape of racial prejudice. But it puts Maxwell’s suspicions of his onetime enemies in a different light, and makes the show affirming his prejudices about the Cardassians feel uneasy, even as Captain Picard rises above them.

But all that aside, “The Wounded” takes the approach I appreciate from TNG: making the A-story some type of decision point while the B-story is a more personal reflection or internal story about how the situation affects someone individually. Here, the decision point (for Picard, naturally) is how far you go in neutralizing one of your own in the name of maintaining a broader peace. And the personal reflection comes from none other than Chief O’Brien who, with Cardassians aboard, has to reckon with his own lingering resentments from when he was on the frontlines fighting against them.

Those are both incredibly compelling setups. The former is an introduction to the Cardassians in Star Trek, who would go on to become one of the franchise’s most important and impactul species, and it’s a hell of an entrance. There’s a tenseness to every moment Picard tries to manage their expectations while his crew bristles at having these curt, former enemies aboard.

The fraughtness of that is compounded by the fact that maintaining peace with the Cardassians isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a practical one. Admiral Haden tells Picard that Starfleet can’t handle another war right now, presumably after the devastation of the battle with the Borg. It puts pressure on Picard to stretch further, to allow more when it comes to the Cardassians, than he might otherwise.

That becomes particularly salient when Maxwell and his ship start shooting down Cardassian vessels. It’s enough for Picard to give Gul Macet the Phoenix’s transponder codes and, more importantly, to threaten to imprison and even fire on Maxwell and his vessel if they don’t relent. Every choice is weighted with the fragility and necessity of maintaining good relations with the Cardassians, navigating this minefield of diplomatic and practical graces. Seeing Picard balance the exigencies of the moment with his deeply held principles is as much of a delight as it always is.

What’s less familiar, though, is seeing Chief O’Brien grapple with the need to resolve his old resentments against the Cardassians with his acknowledgement of the need to move on. It’s cool to see him finally get his own story after being a day player on the series since season 1. (I’m guessing because there was more focus available due to Wesley’s departure?) But more to the point, he works well within the confines of the story, as someone with no hate in his heart who’ll do his job and follow orders, but who struggles to fully shake off the anger he harbors from his time fighting the Cardassians.

The episode spends a lot of time building up that sense of resentment in O’Brien, paired with his lingering loyalty to Captain Maxwell. There’s a famous (likely apocryphal) quote from former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that she could forgive her enemies for killing her nation’s sons, but not for forcing her people to kill their sons. O’Brien seems to land at a similar point, apologizing for some rude behavior to a friendly and welcoming Cardassian aboard the Enterprise, only to later admit that part of his difficulty comes from an impulse to blame the Cardassians, and the conflict between them and the Federation, for turning him into a killer.

There’s a lot of complicated humanity to how O’Brien is written there. He’s aware of his prejudices, and even fighting to overcome them, but can’t fully let go. It makes for an interesting story of a good man, weighed down by what he’s seen and experienced, trying to rise above it and not always succeeding. It’s the sort of moral complexity TNG commendably gives us from time to time, like when Worf couldn’t bring himself to donate genetic material to save a Romulan. These choices feel true to life, simultaneously understandable and regrettable, which speaks to good writing and narrative framing.

And yet, despite his misgivings, it’s O’Brien who ultimately talks Captain Maxwell down from insisting on a confrontation. He urges his former commander to let go, to realize the harm that would be done from reigniting this conflict, to demonstrate that it’s a lost cause and you can honor those you’ve lost without continuing to seek vengeance on those who caused that loss. It’s a wholesome, sad, triumphant moment for the Transporter Chief, one that gives him a depth and a characterization that would serve him well in the weeks and years to come.

In the end, O’Brien accepts that no matter his lingering ill-feelings from the war with the Cardassians, he needs to move on and accept that it’s over. He believes his former commanding officer is still a good man even if he couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of his remaining grief from war. And with his nerves of steel and diplomat’s grace, Picard averts reigniting war with the Federation’s new allies, valuing the merits of peace above all, in the hopes that his forebearance will send a message to the Cardassians, and a seemingly like-minded soul in Gul Macet, that both sides should be serious about their armistice, for the good of all.

The reveal that Maxwell wasn’t on a wild goose chase, that his prejudices were justified, muddies the water there. To be frank, it left a sour taste in my mouth for an episode that otherwise seemed to hinge on the merits of leaving cultural biases leftover from bygone days in the past where they belong. But it adds another shade of gray to the increasingly murky world our heroes inhabit, one that makes the show’s assortment of metaphors and allegories that much more able to capture our own tangled, complicated world.