7x13 Homeward

[7.1/10] I’ll always take an overstuffed episode of Star Trek over one that’s threadbare. Maybe it’s just the differing rhythms of 1960s television, but time and again with The Original Series, I winced at the prospect of half an episode’s worth of incident stretched out to a full hour, an approach that The Next Generation was not above. So given the option between an episode that bites off more than it can chew, and one that gnaws on the same underwhelming morsel for forty-four minutes, I’ll take the former every time.

“Homeward” is definitely that kind of episode. You have Worf reuniting with his never-before-mentioned brother, Nikolai. You have the two siblings resolving longstanding issues of the free spirited vs. the duty bound. You have a Prime Directive story about helping a doomed but comparatively primitive people whose planet is dying and who Nikolai surreptitiously transports to a holodeck replica of their village to bring them to safety. You have a technical challenge in whether the holodeck can maintain the illusion despite ambiguous “interference” causing a problem. You have one of the locals realizing the whole thing is a farce and that he’s on a starship. And if that weren’t enough, you have the reveal that Nikolai has not only grown attached to one of the locals (Penny Johnson!) but that they’re going to have a child together.

That’s a lot. Too much for a single episode really. “Homeward” doesn’t have time to dig into the moral implications, personal tangles, and practical challenges of all of that in a single outing. As a result, every part of this feels underfed and underrealized, if only for the sheer fact that there’s not enough time to delve into all of it with the commitment it warrants.

But I still like those elements! You could probably cook up a movie based around this episode’s premise. (I suppose it would be a cross between The Final Frontier and Insurrection, which, woof.) It’s fascinating to run into a friendly character who’s so philosophically and ethically opposed to the Prime Directive. There’s juice in a crazy but feasible scheme to transport residents of this village to a new home without their realizing. And it could be heartening to watch doctrinaire Worf resist but ultimately come to understand why a loved one would disobey orders for personal reasons, with all the tangles that create.

It’s that last point that suffers the most here, though. Apparently season 7 of TNG is the season of family members we’ve never seen or even heard about before who are suddenly very important. Worf’s a fairly private person, a la Spock, so maybe it’s not out and out crazy that he has a foster brother he’s never talked to anyone about before. But at the same time, it strains credulity that in his conversations with Kurn, or with his parents, there would be no mention of this absent sibling or their relationship whatsoever. As with Dr. Tainer in “Inheritance”, it feels like a shortcut.

To some extent, you can understand why the writers of “TNG* would take that shortcut. It’s hard to make the audience care about a new character! It’s just as hard to then build a relationship between them and one of the show’s regulars. It’s much easier to declare some unfamiliar face a parent or sibling or confidante to an existing character, and let the audience fill in the gaps with their own lifetime of experiences with family members.
Sometimes it pays dividends. (See: Lwaxana Troi.) Sometimes it falls flat. (See: Kyle Riker.) But you get the combined oomph and challenge of introducing a character who’s important to someone the audience already knows, for reasons they intuitively understand.

Nikolai Rozhenko falls somewhere in between success and failure. Paul Sorvino does a commendable job as Worf’s brother, bringing a steadfastness in his beliefs that reflects Worf himself to some extent, while also evincing a willingness to color outside the lines that’s entirely beyond the duty-bound Klingon. The two have good chemistry together, with smiles and hugs after long absences feeling real and warm.

But the dynamic between them is stock and facile. The kid who behaved and did what was expected versus the kid who followed their own path and caused trouble is a cliche. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You can find new angles on that familiar story. Unfortunately, “Homeward” doesn’t. Instead, all we get is repeated renditions of the “I do what’s asked of me” versus “I do what’s right” with rote, too-easily-resolved conflicts between the brothers over their different demeanors. Sorvino and Michael Dorn almost make it work through performance, but there’s not enough real substance there to support it.

In a weird way, the same’s true for the Boralaan part of a story. On a purely technical level, the idea of trying to transport a less advanced people to a new home without them knowing is a cool challenge. (I especially love the idea of Geordi programming the holodeck to make the terrain gradually change between their old planet and a new one.) From an ethical perspective, having to face the human cost of non-interference is bracing, and an activist who refuses to be bound by such an “abstraction” is intriguing. From a personal lens, how to deal with a local who learns the truth, and what it would feel like to have your world turned upside down is fascinating. Plus hey, what to do when a loved one’s rejection of “non-interference” leads to “mating” with a local, something which may have influenced his willingness to break the rules to save his partner’s tribe, is an appropriately thorny, complex issue to resolve.

Sadly, given the time constraints, “Homeward” breezes through most of this stuff. We barely get any time Vorin, the alien who inadvertently escapes the holographic masquerade and must adjust to the truth before he’s killed himself from the tension between keeping what he knows a secret and giving up the only community he’s ever known. The moral implications over whether losing that life is worth saving the rest of his compatriots through such deceptive means is right or just are glossed over. Nikolai’s attachments and biases in marrying a member of a less advanced society and then using advanced technology to save her people when things look dire are hardly even mentioned.

There’s rich material here! Each of these points could sustain a whole episode on its own! This installment cheats in certain places, introducing convenient plot points and straightforward resolutions to knotty problems. But the issues it’s wrestling with are interesting or worthwhile.

I think that’s why I rate it more highly than the crowd. You can imagine a version of this episode that would live up to the potential of the concepts at its core. That episode may have had to be two and a half hours long, and it may depend on The Next Generation mentioning Nikolia earlier than two minutes before we meet him, but there’s something there!

I will take that -- too many good ideas than one episode can hold -- over the converse. Sometimes, Star Trek in general, and TNG in particular, hits that sweet spot of just enough story and premise to fit the time allotted. But more often, the variability of storytelling and the rigid demands of network television require the creative to air on the side of too much or too little. “Homeward” definitely gives us the former, but too many quality concepts for one installment to hold isn’t the worst problem to have.