5x13 The Masterpiece Society

[4.8/10] Star Trek has a long history with genetic engineering. Going all the way back to 1967’s “Space Seed”, the episode that introduced Khan, the franchise has dabbled with the notion of “augmented” human beings carrying great potential and also great peril. There’s something engrossing about weighing man’s efforts to improve himself against the risks of going too far and producing something harmful to individuals and society as a whole.

But you need that sort of balance to make it interesting. “The Masterpiece Society” tells the tale of another group of genetically engineered human beings. Only these are not superhuman strongmen, but rather, people designed to inhabit a particular role in service of a perfectly balanced community. You could explore that concept in interesting ways, testing the benefits of a preplanned harmony in a seemingly idyllic society versus the right to self-determination and the joys of finding your own way.

This episode purports to do that, but only does so at the most superficial level. Instead, the inhabitants of Moab IV and their community are made into a strawman, a self-evidently wrong way to live. Maybe that’s right! I can see a ton of immediate red flags and drawbacks to living in a place where you’re bred for certain tasks and the entire society is interdependent to the point of fragility. But it doesn’t make for good or interesting television.

The benefit of Star Trek’s clash of civilization stories is that they allow us to measure our society and culture against somebody else’s. There’s plenty of othering that takes place with Klingons or Romulans, but also a sense of trying to understand why they believe what they believe and why their ways of life works for them. There’s an ecumenical quality to the show, scene in superlative episodes like “Half a Life”, that give the other side the most generous hearing even when tipping its hand as to how the writers and producers feel about the cultural topic du jour.

The Moabites get no such generosity. The episode pays some lip service to the idea that these people have no regret for the path not taken because they get to do what they would choose to do. But pretty much everyone we meet except for one stick-up-his behind jurist seems to secretly pine for an alternative to their care-free but simple existence, and ultimately recognize their nation’s limitations, and in some cases its pathologies.

The episode aims to follow the same division as “First Contact”. You have a leading scientist who is anxious for more contact with Starfleet and eventually wants to leave with them. You have another potentate who’s skeptical to the point of xenophobia about interfacing with these outsiders. And you have a leader in the middle who’s nominally pulled between those two polls.

But the events of the episode put too much of a thumb on the scale. The scientist, Hannah Bates, ends up working with Geordi, who would have been excluded as an embryo if he were conceived on Moab IV. Not only does Geordi figure out how to solve the problem of an impending planetary fragment that’s threatening to crush the Moabites, but it requires (in a pretty cheesy “Aha!” moment) the same technology that his VISOR uses. It’s commendable the way TNG continues to champion the personhood and capability of people with disabilities, but the whole setup is too on the nose and contrived as written to make that point with any force.

It’s emblematic of “The Masterpiece Society”’s broader approach to this civilization. Picard slags them for neutralizing the ability to experience the unknown. Bates has another ponderous conversation with Geordi where they posit that the Federation is so much more advanced than the Moabites because of the whole “necessity is the mother of invention” chestnut. We see time and again how rigid and fragile their community is, to where even switching things up with one person leaves them vulnerable. There’s no pros and cons here, just a practically Kirk-ian instance of our heroes showing up to prove to people they’ve never met before how their way of life is wrong.

Still, the worst and tritest of these strawmans is the one about...wait for it...love. Sure enough, the leader of the Moabites, a man named Aaron Conner, falls in love with Counselor Troi. Their romance is undercooked even by TNG standards, where weekly soulmates are, if not as frequent as they were on TOS, then still very much the norm. The Troi/Conner connection is dead on arrival. Performer John Snyder (who plays Conner) in particular seems miscast, giving off an air of smarminess when he’s meant to be charming, though neither he or Marina Sirtis comes anywhere close to being able to sell this deflated attempt at romance. Worse yet, the episode attempts to chalk their attraction up to Conner being attracted to “imperfection”, another lazy and shallow way to expose the flaws in the Moabites’ society.

The only truly interesting part of the episode comes when Bates wants asylum aboard the Enterprise, along with other unnamed Moabites tantalized with other possibilities due to the ship’s arrival to their otherwise closed society. That prompts an interesting clash of individual vs. collectivist values. Should Bates and her like-minded countrymen be free to pursue their own individual wishes even if their departures could destabilize the society they left behind? Should a society be able to use the weight of its own collective good to restrict people’s freedom to seek out what will make them happy and their right to self-determination?

There’s no easy answers to these questions -- something that makes for good television. But “The Masterpiece Society” doesn’t get into them until very late in the episode, leaving insufficient time to explore them with any depth or meaning. Instead, we just get Picard airing on the side of individual liberty with a grimly portentous speech about how this problematic scenario demonstrates the value of the Prime Directive, even when visiting a society built by other humans.

That speech might have more weight if this episode did more than the barest of bare minimum to suggest that the Moabite society was worth saving. Instead, it gave us a raft of straw men and abject boredom. I don’t know why TNG chose not to extend the others-of-the-week the grace it’s extended previously. Maybe it’s because you can map their community and social planning onto a Communist country, something that’s still a bete noire in the West today.

But whatever the politics of it, the result is an episode of television that lacks intrigue because, ironically, it lacks balance. There’s nothing particularly interesting about watching our favorite space heroes show up and show characters framed as obviously wrong that they are, in fact, obviously wrong. You can find plenty worthwhile to examine about the pitfalls of genetic engineering and societies that give themselves over entirely to human design rather than natural development. But by attacking a cardboard cutout version of those ideas rather than a more robust and realistic version, the arguments, and the story, fall flat.