6x20 The Chase

[8.0/10] The draw of Star Trek is its diversity. Sure, there’s a reason our main protagonists are usually human. The audience is human. You want people to be able to relate to the players in this extraordinary scenario, even when they’re halfway across the galaxy and centuries into the future. But the thrill of the franchise lies in the endless varieties of people our heroes encounter out in the wider universe.

Vulcans. Klingons. Romulans. Androids. Cardassians. Bajorans. Andorians. Tellarites. Changelings. Borg. Kelpiens. Demigods. Conquerors. Prey. Geniuses. Monsters. The charge of Gene Roddenberry’s original “Wagon Train to the Stars” pitch came from the idea that there was always someone new to meet, something new to discover, at whatever the next stop along the path was. Delving into these different cultures, different psyches, measuring them against ourselves and our prejudice, has fueled Star Trek from the beginning. It is, in many ways, the legacy of the franchise.

And few have done as much of that discovering as Jean-Luc Picard. So when his old archeology professor shows up with the opportunity of a lifetime, but one that would take him away from the Enterprise permanently, he demurs. He cherishes the role he’s achieved, the new planets and peoples he’s charted and chartered, and cannot bear to give them up even if he still feels the pull of a more academic mode of discovery that he abandoned.

What makes an episode like “The Chase” work is that, despite its galaxy-changing reveals, despite its mad dash mystery plot, it’s rooted in that pull of Picard. Professor Galen gives him an ancient artifact symbolizing one individual with a dozen different voices within them. His old mentor calls out to one of those voices, tempting, cajoling, all but blackmailing Picard into joining his quest for archeological excellence.

Their scenes together are dynamite. The legendary Norman Lloyd is a titan fit to share the screen with Patrick Stewart. Professor Galen is a tricky role, because he has to carry a near lifelong relationship between two great men that the audience hasn’t seen but must feel. And you do, in the reverence the Captain has for his former Professor, in the forcefulness, disappointment, and even condescension Galen has the license to show to one of Starfleet’s leading lights, and in the familiar air the two men share with one another. It’s a relationship that shouldn’t work given how brief a glimpse we have of it, but the partnership in miniature succeeds on the strength of two extraordinary performances that fill in the gaps.

Their clear bond gives it meaning when Galen dies in search of the discovery of a lifetime after Picard refused to join his mission. “The Chase” gives us just enough of their backstory -- Galen as the father figure who got Jean-Luc, and Picard as the son figure who understood Galen, in a way neither’s family by blood could. Picard refused the call for a different life, one devoted to academic research rather than as a “roman centurion” trolling the fields for a “bloated empire.” So when he’s forced to do the same once again, to disappoint someone he loves and whose approval he craves, the fact that it ends in his mentor’s death gives him the motivation he needs to put his Starfleet responsibilities on hold to vindicate what the man saw in him.

And hey, that works as a good story engine too! At a practical level, you need a reason why Picard would, without some crisis or orders from Starfleet, investigate an archeological mystery. He protests too much to Counselor Troi, disclaiming the fact that he’s turned his hunt into his Moby Dick as a means of exorcising his guilt over not being there to protect his surrogate father. But the truth is that he hears that “voice” louder than ever, and it works as both character motivation and as heavy machinery for the plot to account for the main business of the episode.

That business is solving a genetic puzzle, which requires working with some of the Federation’s most longstanding foes and truculent allies in the process. It turns out Professor Galen had been accumulating and curating DNA samples from across the galaxy, and put in the right sequence, matched with the right inputs, they could point their way to a weapon or a power source or simply an archeological find the likes of which the galaxy has never known. But it takes cooperating with prickly Klingons and Cardassians to put the pieces together.

In truth, this is one of those “turn your brain off” Star Trek episodes when it comes to the tech and the science. Don’t think too hard about what it would take for various DNA sequences to produce an algorithm that translates into a message, or the chances it would be able to reprogram a piece of technology from unfathomable stretches of time in the future to project it, or how any of this would work in a practical sense.

“The Chase” is an episode that runs on metaphor rather than practicality. What’s important here is that these different species have to work together to make this all work. And even when they do, they backstab and sabotage and must outsmart one another to get to the endgame. Even the Romulans, who don’t show up until the final reel, aren’t helping but instead drafting off of the good work Picard and his alien counterparts have done to find the last piece of the puzzle. The mystery works well enough as a story engine, and there’s some twists and solid peril along the way, but it’s more about the point this installment makes in all of this contentious collaboration.

The answer at the end of this mystery is a speech from an ancient humanoid. She tells the tale of a prehistoric civilization, which rose to prominence and found a galaxy bereft of those like them. So knowing that all societies fall or shift eventually, they traversed the vast reaches of space, seeding bits of their genetic material into the primordial seas of different worlds, so that the species who evolved would carry a piece of them. There is no weapon, no fuel source, just the reveal of a connection that binds nearly all of the major species we’ve met across more than a quarter century of Star Trek.

My minorest of minor beefs is that this is an in-universe solution to a question whose true answer lies in behind-the-scenes realities. Why are the vast majority of the species in the Star Trek franchise humanoid? Because a combination of television budgets, the expense of special effects, and the ability for the audience to connect with characters all dictate it. Sure, we get aliens like Lt. Arex from The Animated Series where such limitations are loosened, and the occasional rock monster or silicon floor mat in other live action outings. But for the most part, doing a weekly series means Michael Westmore and team put together a few forehead appliances or other make-up flourishes and apply them to real humans who’ll work for scale. In some ways, drawing attention to the commonality of alien biology cracks the willing suspension of disbelief necessary for such conceits to work.

But it doesn’t really bother me because I love the thematic point of this reveal. So much of Star Trek is built on measuring the differences between humanity and these often antagonistic aliens. Romulans and Klingons and Cardassians are all, at least partly, allegories for other nations and societies that the USA has bristled over the years. They’re metaphors for our conflicts and prejudices with other peoples, within our communities and especially from without. The project of Star Trek, from the first conflict between logical Spock and passionate Bones, was to highlight the asymmetries, but also to find the common ground, the things that unite us despite those divergences.

“The Chase” is the ultimate vindication of that idea. For all the wars and resentments and cultural divides among those assembled through Star Trek, they come from a common root. They share the same genetic history. The very structure of their anatomy carries with it an ancient union of their peoples spilling out from the same source. It stands in for the idea that for all the racial prejudice and international strife that persists in the world, all of humanity emerged from the same place, the same source. We are one, no matter what differences have arisen since. This episode, in some ways, closes the loop on the animating allegory of the Federation as a stand-in for the United States and “Western Civilization” more broadly, giving it a common base with its enemies and allies much as we do with ours.

Therein lies the irony. The ancient humanoid tells the assembled that if they’ve unlocked the message, they must have settled their differences and proceeded in harmony, when in fact, of course, this achievement is the result of trickery and mistrust. Her speech about reunion becomes aspirational rather than descriptive, at a time when harmony seems like a pipe dream, in Picard’s world and our own.

And yet, there is hope. Jean-Luc’s Romulan counterpart is at least a little humbled by the message they’ve received, and expresses a reserved sort of hope for better relations and closer connections in the future. Without spoiling episodes that happened anywhere from a few years to a few decades later, subsequent Star Trek stories would make good on the notion that the relationship between peoples can evolve, friendships and mutual understanding can emerge, and the things that bring us together can overcome the things that drive us apart.

But there is one last wrinkle. The primogenitors who laid out this puzzle weren’t trying to sew harmony. They were trying to leave a legacy. Their hope was that even when they were gone, some piece of them would live on in their children across the galaxy, continuing their traditions, their way of being, in some sense beyond the immediate.

It brings them in line with Picard himself, who is not just interested in solving the mystery du jour, but in both preserving and carrying on the legacy of the man who meant so much to him. Professor Galen is dead. But the archeological find that he spurred will echo throughout history and, more than that, reawakened that voice in his one-time pupil, who will bring forth the spirit and wonder at excavation and investigation that Professor Galen lived, encouraged, and stirred up in Jean-Luc once more.

So too does the legacy of Star Trek live on in all of us. Returning to this series after so many years, it’s amazing both how much I forgot and how much I remembered. I’m not sure I could tell you the finer details of most of the episodes I devoured as a kid. The names of planets and species and titles had all long since left my brain. But the values of The Next Generation, its devotion to empathy, to altruism, to principle, and most all to seeing The Other as just as worthwhile and real as we see ourselves, stuck with me long after the details faded away. The thrust of these stories persisted for so many fans, even those not foolhardy enough to jot down their thoughts episode after episode.

The symbolism of the artifact Professor Galen gives Picard is that within each of us is a number of different facets, different pieces of ourselves with distinct demands and pulls. But broaden it out even further, and the reverse is also true. All of those different voices, all of the different communities and peoples and tribes that we forge out on the endless frontier, are a part of the greater whole. That has long been the ethos of Star Trek, and one that will outlive even this venerable franchise. It remains in the hearts and minds of all those touched by these stories, who spread its messages to the wider world, in ways subtle and direct, simple and sublime, uniquely individual and hearteningly universal.

I think this story is based on a great concept. Being an atheist I love that it completely takes god out of the equation. Unless you consider those aliens to be god. It also resembles on a larger scale our own planet with different races and cultures and our origins. And like it happens today in our time the different races, Klingons, Cardassians and Romulans reject the idea and are even appaled by it. Of course it also explained why all those alien races had a similar anatomy.
But this episode is interesting, or better has become so for me, because of two facts:
Salome Jens playing the alien that looks kind of similar to The Founders who she also portrayed. Of course this is pure fantazising on my behalf as this was never picked up upon on DS9. But it would certainly be an interesting angle.
But here is another one I was just able to recognize now. When the Romulan commander talked to Picard at the end he implicated that in the future, maybe, there could be a time of understanding. This, at the time rather insignificant, conversation get's a new meaning if you look at the plot of Star Trek: Picard now and (please don't read this if you haven't watched this show) Picard's involvement with the rescue effort of the Romulans and how he even sacrificed his career for them. Am I reaching too far ? Could be, but it jumped right towards me.