7x14 Sub Rosa

[2.0/10] The fans love to debate whether something is or isn’t “Trek” enough. Does it follow Gene’s Vision*:tm:? Does it feel like the era of the show they fell in love with? Does it conform to the rules diehards concoct in their heads for what a story absolutely must do in order to qualify?

The truth is that Star Trek has always been malleable. There’s serious episodes. There’s funny episodes. There’s optimistic episodes. There’s darker episodes. There’s cerebral episodes. There’s action-heavy episodes. When you’re doing twenty-plus installments a season, variety is key. And while there’s still some core tenets I’d like to see the franchise adhere to, there’s a wider aperture for what Star Trek can be than most fans give it credit for.

This, however, feels nothing like Star Trek. I’m not even talking about the ghostly premise which, oddly enough, has much in common with “A Wolf in the Fold” from the 1960s series. I’m talking about the tone, the atmosphere, the approach to these characters and their world. Half of “Sub Rosa” feels like a cheap DTV horror movie and half of it feels like a prelude to softcore pornography. None of it aligns with even the most generous version of the vibe *The Next Generation had established over six and a half seasons.

That’s ultimately it’s biggest sin. Granted, it’s hard to imagine a version of “Sexy Scottish Candle Ghost” that could work, even with the best execution. If you look at what are widely-considered the worst episodes in all of Star Trek -- “Spock’s Brain” from TOS, “Code of Honor” from TNG, “Threshold” from VOY -- there’s some sci-fi hook which could, with better choices, become something decent. But there’s no alternative take on “Beverly Crusher shtups the same phantom her grandmother did” that could work.

Maybe it’d have a chance though if the whole thing didn’t play out so ridiculously. It’s hard to take Beverly’s cartoonishly erotic writhing, or her painfully tin-eared “girl talk” sessions with Troi about “arousing” dreams seriously. TNG goes for steamy here, and it feels out of place for a series that certainly aims for passion, but rarely for titillation. More to the point, it just comes off as silly.

When it’s not stumbling into the Skinemax reject pile, “Sub Rosa” plays like a ten cent harlequin romance merged with schlocky ghost story. The melodrama is so thick you could slice it with a laser scalpel. Ronin, the apparently hunky ghost, who’s seduced women in Beverly’s family for generations, is a one-man cheese factory, and the high volume reactions from Dr. Crusher do nothing to situate this story in anything recognizably human.

In every review, I try to find the good. Even in the cruddiest Trek outings, there’s usually some redeeming factor. But honestly, I’ve got next to nothing here. The best I can say is that I like the recurring motif of the color green. There’s green flashes when the storm hits Beverly’s family home; the ghost appears as a translucent green mist and uses green-tinged electricity, and the women from the Howard line who are possessed by the ghost developed green eyes. It’s not much, but I appreciate the color consistency there to convey the ghost’s presence in a variety of ways.

Also, it’s a trifling point in the episode, but I appreciate the glimpse we have of one of the Federation’s earliest terraformed colonies trying to recreate the Scotland they knew on earth, right down to importing cornerstones from their home country. The truth is probably that the whole thing was an excuse for TNG to do the Scottish-set ghost story without venturing back to Earth. Still, the notion that people would go so far to try to evoke the scenery and sensations of home while settling a colony is an intriguing, if largely unexplored one. We also get a little more color on Beverly's relationship with her grandmother, whom she’s mentioned in early episodes, which is mildly pleasant.

That’s it. That’s all I could think of. Everything else in this one is bad-to-terrible. The performances are dreadful (especially overblown Ronin). The dialogue sounds like Brannon Braga has never heard two people have a conversation before, let alone two women. The narrative is practically nonsensical. The attempts at horror are uniformly unfrightening. (Give or take granny beckoning to Beverly.) The pacing is atrocious. It’s the total package of crap.

Somehow, none of that is the worst part. That turns out to be the uncomfortable undercurrent of rape and, at best, fuzzy sense of consent to all of this. In one scene, Dr. Crusher is wailing loud “Nooooooo!”s while the ghost seems to be imposing his will on her, and in the immediate next one she seems smiley and pleased to have had another saucy dream. You can write it off as Ronin using his ambiguous magic powers to posses or influence her, but that’s almost as bad, since the episode never addresses mesmerizing and sexually exploiting someone as the violation it is.

The episode even ends on Dr. Crusher basically saying, “Well, that ghost may have overridden the agency of me and my whole maternal line, and gotten sexual with me unbidden, but he sure made my grandmother happy!” with a wistful tone. It’s gross as all hell.

And look, “Sub Rosa” didn’t start this exactly. The episode’s playing on venerable tropes utilized by works like Phantom of the Opera in a genre cultural commentators like Lindsay Ellis have dubbed “My Monster Boyfriend.” There’s something to be said for having a safe place to express these fantasies, and for channeling certain longstanding stories into a new setting. (Star Trek would try this sort of unsettling romance again in Enterprise, of all things.) But presenting it uncritically like this weakens an episode that’s already on life support.

There may be worse Star Trek episodes out there. With 800+ and counting, you’re going to end up with some clunkers. But it’s hard to think of one that evokes more of a sense of “What the hell were you thinking with this?” I don’t know what the writers of TNG were trying to accomplish with this one. I don’t know how or why they thought this would fit with the tone of the show or the characters.

Unlike pretty much every other bad Star Trek outing, I don’t know what a good or successful version of this story looks like. At best, it’s an episode of another show, one more suited to the Gothic romanticism “Sub Rosa” wants to layer in, one that doesn’t portray itself like softcore pornography without the love scenes, one that doesn’t present unrecognziable versions of these characters. Whatever it is, it isn’t Star Trek.