4x06 Legacy

[6.2/10] Tasha Yar casts a long shadow over Star Trek: The Next Generation for a character who wasn’t on the show very much or for very long. It’s almost impressive. Denise Crosby left the show due to a lack of development for her character. Tasha died with minimal fanfare and ceremony. And yet, TNG kept chasing that tail for season after season despite her abrupt departure. In a weird way, Tasha meant more to the show once she was gone than when she was around.

Maybe that just reflects human nature. Lt. Yar wouldn’t be the first person, in Star Trek or real life, to be deified in death. It’s not crazy for her life to take on added meaning for the crew of the Enterprise, and the show’s creatives, after she was gone. If anything, I admire the TNG writers for episodes like “Legacy” and “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, which try to add greater meaning to Tasha’s service and passing than the show could manage in its first season.

But I still struggle with an episode like this one, which is founded on residual goodwill and connection to Tasha that I’ve just never seen or felt. The crisis of the week sees Picard and company head to Tasha’s home planet. There, they discover two Starfleet crewmen stranded on the hostile planet and being held for ransom. The ship’s effort to rescue these Federation citizens grows more emotionally complicated when our heroes encounter Tasha’s sister, Ishara.

Let’s be real. Ishara’s existence is a little convenient. But lord knows that if there’s a trope Star Trek would go for again and again, both in the past and in the future, it’s previously unknown siblings. So I’m not apt to slate TNG too hard for the obvious retcon.

The problem, though, is that Ishara is more of a device than a character. She exists to raise complicated feelings in RIker, Picard, and especially Data, rather than to be a character in her own right. That leaves her feeling hollow and underbaked, especially since she has to carry all the titular legacy material involving Tasha for most of the episode.

Some of that just comes down to performance. Beth Toussaint doesn’t do a terrible job as Ishara, but there’s very little life in the character. Tasha’s sister is flat, reserved, and not especially emotive despite a raft of theoretically emotional moments. She’s supposed to be brimming with resentment for her sister, hiding her true motives from the crew, and growing closer to friends like Data despite herself. But the acting conveys little of his, albeit with a script that does all involved no favors.

That’s the closest thing Ishara has to a character though. The double agent routine is a tired trope, but a venerable one for a reason. This isn’t the best execution of the idea, but there’s hay to be made from someone sent to manipulate her allies, only to find herself drawn to them. Ishara holds a grudge against her sister for leaving, but understands her better by experiencing the welcoming trust and kindness that Tasha found aboard the Enterprise. It leads Ishara to waver in key moments and eventually fail in her mission. The emotional throughline there works on paper; “Legacy” just fails to make it sing.

Worse yet, she mostly exists to give other characters the feels over Tasha, feelings which the show never really earned. Look, I was one of the few people nonplussed by the end of “Skin of Evil.” Tasha’s professions of appreciation for her colleagues fell flat to me because we’d barely seen it up to that point. So having Riker and Worf show such reverence for her, seeing the show tell us rather than show us how close they supposedly were to her, rings false to me. It’s easy for me to understand those officers venerating their fallen comrades, but hard for me to genuinely feel that connection the episode’s making so much of.

That’s particularly true for Data. The crux of the episode is founded upon the budding friendship between him and Ishara, with the ghost of his friendship with Tasha looming in the background. But outside of one sexual experience, we never really saw that former friendship in bloom. It makes sense that Tasha’s memory means a lot to Data given that the two of them shared one of the most human of experiences together. But “Legacy” tries to retroactively ascribe a level of meaning to that the show only found in hindsight, not when Denise Crosby was an actual castmember.

“Legacy” also tangles all of this up in some uninvolving plot mechanics. The core crisis -- needing to rescue some captured Starfleet officers -- works as a plot engine. But the setup on the planet of the week feels very TOS. The notion of the world having been divided up into two rival clans, with each keeping the peace through personal explosive proximity sensors scans as cheesy and implausible. The writers don’t give either side of the conflict much characterization beyond “They hate one another and will do anything to tweak or even wipe out their opponents.” Nothing about the setup plays as realistic, and I could go a thousand seasons without having to hear a Star Trek character utter the words “rape gangs” ever again.

The business on the planet is mostly an excuse to unravel the plot and throw our heroes into a few duty vs. emotion decisions. Riker goes after Ishara in a tight spot because he feels responsible for Tasha’s death since he was the commanding officer on the away mission. Data feels honor-bound to stop the results of Ishara’s sudden but inevitable betrayal despite his affection for her. Ishara uses the Federation’s involvement as an in to undermine her planetside enemies but can’t bring herself to destroy Data. There’s meat there, but like a lot in “Legacy”, it’s underdone.

The redeeming element of the episode, however, is that essential notion of friendship. However tortured or thudding “Legacy’s” rendition of the concept is, the show posits that it’s durable, even unavoidable, as something that affects two people who’ve grown close to one another. Data’s description of familiarity breeding affection rather than contempt would come back down the line. And despite his ability to recognize a bluff in the cold open poker game, it clouds his judgment of Ishara, revealing that despite his mastery of some elements of humanity, he’s still subject to some of our more emotional mistakes.

It is, once again, very human to project our relationship with one person onto another, especially the relative of someone we’ve lost. Having that fact blind a theoretically unfeeling android, and move a theoretically by-any-means-necessary freedom fighter, is a strong idea. But “Legacy” rests all of it on the, well, legacy of a character, and a story, that can’t sustain it.