5x12 Violations

[4.3/10] I don’t know if the Star Trek: The Next Generation team ever watched Twin Peaks, the surrealist small town crime drama from David Lynch and Mark Frost. That series ended about eight months before this one aired, leaving plenty of time for Michael Piller, Rick Berman, and others to be influenced by the tale of trauma, both liminal and literal, imposed by a dark force on a seemingly idyllic place.

I say that because “Violations” feels like the closest approximation to a Star Trek version of Twin Peaks. There is, true to the title, a horrible violation at the center of the tale. There is a supernatural element at play which complicates finding out who perpetrated it. There is also an impressionsitic, dream logic representation of those abuses, using funky tricks from the T.V. production toolbox to convey the sensation and atmosphere of those transgressions in a way that’s more visceral and off-putting than playing them straight would be.

And, like much of Twin Peaks, it’s also impressively ambitious while being ruefully limited by some thudding writing and mid-nineties cheese. “Violations” is a low-point for post-Piller TNG, an episode with a compelling enough premise and some efforts at creativity in terms of direction and production, but which is simultaneously so lurid, obvious, boring, and borderline offensive that the whole thing quickly falls apart.

Oh yes, that’s right, Star Trek is tackling sexual assault, so buckle up. The franchise has a lousy track record with such things, from Yeoman Rand in The Original Series to T’Pol in Star Trek: Enterprise. And that’s just the on-screen depictions. God help you if you dig into the behind the scenes stories and learn what skeevy producers, up to and including the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself, were up to.

By that standard, “Violations” is actually pretty good about its depictions. It’s an indictment of the show’s writers than on the rare occasions Counselor Troi gets something major to do, it often involves some kind of rape or other violation (a trope that, unfortunately, stays with this cast through their final adventures).

But even as the episode plays Troi’s psychic rape at the hands of a “mystery assailant” for some cheap horror, the story and characters recognize it as something horrible. Picard acts to protect Troi’s well-being in the aftermath and ensures she consents to any further investigation. And even the Ullians treat what happened with the gravity it deserves, promising to have their best doctors help our Troi, Riker, and Crusher recover. It is, sadly, about as good as you can hope for from Star Trek.

Even if the depiction of such grisly things were the gold standard and handled with all due to sensitivity, it still wouldn’t come close to saving this episode. “Violations” is yet another throwback TNG episode where the answer to the mystery is obvious. When horrible things start happening to members of the crew, I don’t know how the writers expect to wring intrigue and ambiguity from the situation when we’re given every reason to believe it’s the scowling alien guest star whom we witness invading everyone’s memories.

I honestly don’t know what “Violations” is going for here. The audience is strongly led to suspect that Jev, the youngest member of a great family of alien psychics, is perpetrating the attacks, practically from the cold open. The Enterprise crew doesn’t know this, but there’s no dramatic tension in their investigation since it’s not like they come close to ensnaring Jev only to fall short for some reason. We just see two parallel tracks: a mostly fruitless inquest and a continued series of attacks, without much interaction between the two, leaving me to wonder what the point of it all is.

Maybe the point is just to create an excuse for director Robert Wiemer and his team to go wild with the visuals. I do admire “Violations” going big with the nightmare sequences. Troi’s confrontation uses an almost stop-motion-esque filter. Riker’s uses a fish-eye lens and slows/lowers the vocals. Crusher’s utilizes some unique angles and cuts. And all of the play with repeating lines, a rush of the same images done slightly differently and out of time, and inserts Jev into the proceedings in ways that are lightly unnerving, communicating the liminal space in which his titular violator is operating.

The problem is that all of this is being done on a 1990s T.V. budget and weekly television show schedule, so many of these sequences feel more campy than terrifying. You can feel the series going for that Lynchian sense of elliptical terror, particularly when it comes to a terrifying figure making its presence felt in dreams and visions, but as bold as the attempt is, the execution elicits as much chuckles as it does screams.

(Though hey, flashing back to Crusher having to see her husband’s dead body, replete with her being accompanied by the rare non-bald Picard, gives Beverly more depth in her emotions and experiences than we normally get, so that’s something!)

Apart from the nightmare sequences though, so much of “Violations” is just boring. We see Geordi and Crusher doing most of the investigating, but it winds up as long reams of Treknobabble with minimal, if any, progression in the plot or gathering of further clues. They just fumfer around fruitlessly until the very end when they manage to find other coma victims from previous planets visited by the Ullians, where the only common denominator is Jev. It’s not a bad way for our heroes to figure out the answer to the whodunnit, but business doesn’t pick up until very late in the episode, and owes little to all the dull technical garble that stretched on to that point.

The only genuinely interesting part of the plot is the headfake, where it’s suggested that Jev’s father, Tarmin, is the perpetrator. There’s enough hints there that I almost wish it were the actual reveal rather than a red herring. We see that Tarmin’s the most talented psychic of the Ullians. We see that he has fewer qualms about prodding someone’s mind even without consent. And there’d be a weird poetry in him psychically ‘“dressing up” as his under-talented son to perpetrate his crimes rather than donning his own guise.

Instead, “Violations” goes with the obvious choice. Jev was setting his dad up out of bitterness/jealousy, couldn’t control his own urges, and gets caught just before hurting Troi again. That reveal might have more punch if Jev weren’t the blaringly obvious culprit from minute one, and if we got more in the way of his deranged motivation to help add color and comprehension to these acts beyond their outre awfulness.

I have my problems with Twin Peaks, another show that, like TNG, acted as a forerunner to the modern era of television while still evolving from the prior era. But the series was at its best not only when giving itself over to Lynch’s ability to convey mood and fear through his pretzel logic imagery, but when those images conveyed something more profound about abuse and those who turn a blind eye to it, or worse, enable it. “Violations”, on the other hand, has nothing below the surface of its fearscapes -- just a gossamer thin mystery and a whole lot of wheel-spinning before it’s solved. If this episode is any indication, The Next Generation should stick to science fiction, and leave the psychic horror to its competitors.