"The Visitor"

Revisiting Star Trek:  TNG has renewed some of my perspective on the Trekverse as a whole, and really cemented DS9 as my favorite part of the whole.  Quark, Gul Dukat, Garak, Worf-and-Jadzia, and Odo are probably the best things in this whole "world" - and the depth of storylines is most appealing to me.  One of the aspects I like best is the realignment of optimism - allowing war and even conflicting loyalties into a canon so heavily focused on "humanity perfected".

Even if I were able to believe in the Whig-history idea that evolution is a force of ultimate improvement, actually guiding our species to eventual excellence (which - I can't), the fact is it makes for insufferable storytelling.  TNG has pretty bad whiffs, at times, of an intolerable self-superiority which not only isn't much to my taste, it's frankly dangerous.  It posits an impossible and imaginary societal high horse, from which bigotry really isn't very far removed.  I know Rodenberry's idea was to present an ideal society and culture.  But in the practice of storytelling, the fact is that members of any community so vaunted and wonderful can come off as prigs, and sometimes (speaking as a genuine bleeding heart) the "enlightened" attitudes  are just about enough to make you choke someone.

This context also tends to lead to presumptions about best-outcomes, and even best-practices which are shortsighted at best.  The prime directive is one of those things, it could be argued, that permits and fosters certain levels of blindness and even a lack of responsibility in some ways.

So, indeed, does breaking it, but that's a cookie crumbling.

In the ep referenced in the title of this post, though, the PD really isn't an issue, in that an alien planet isn't our Item of Concern - but it perhaps could have addressed the problem at hand.  Which is time travel.

And changing the history of the entire Alpha Quadrant because one single person in it can't manage a bereavement.

The thing about "The Visitor" is that it goes down so easy.  Tony Todd is so good in it, and he's a pleasure to watch in any case.  Even Cisco comes close to dragging a tear out of me, in the midst of my frustration with the sequence of events.  The history laid out in the story is INTERESTING - even if the venue (an episode framed entirely on Earth and in a rainy bayou) takes the audience out of the Trek universe in the first place.  Some of the ways this story is told are alienating in themselves, but much of what it presents is kind of intriguing.  And certainly, it seems that the makers of the series are proud of an love this particular script.

So it's INCREDIBLY irritating that (a) the story first presents a whole lot of dark and fascinating ideas and then (b) not only does a big old take-back on all of it, but actually presents the selfish act of reversing history itself as a triumph.  Presents the indulgence of one single person's self-pity, by relieving it at the expense of fifty or sixty years of time (and, not for nothing, utterly negating the experiences of all the billions or trillions of sentient beings who lived through that time), as something quite wonderful.

If there were a Prime Directive of time:  surely, it would have a judgment on the appropriateness of usurping the history of the universe for the sake of an author who quit after one book.  In almost every ep, since TOS, touching on time travel, there's an explicit prohibition on tampering with the timeline.  But in "The Visitor" - a guy unable to deal with loss suddenly is a hero, for obsessively trashing a couple generations of chronology.  Heck, for some species, maybe hundreds of generations.

It doesn't even matter how long a time is chucked for the resolution.  The point is that, even in a series controversial for its relative "darkness" in the ST canon, the ending in this case is an utter departure from this entire universe - and this is presented as a good outcome.

Picard can be a presumptuous nit from time to time.  Bashir, of course, is the very soul of unwarranted arrogance (but this is used to propel his storylines, and it works).  TOS was saved from its liberal-elite superiority by the fact that Kirk was a pugilist with a reliable weakness for the scantily-clad and curvy.  Trek as a whole is a bit sure of its morality at times.  It can be a pleasure to watch them turn this on its head, and DS9 has a record of doing this, perhaps, better than any other piece of the overall puzzle.

So "The Visitor" hiding out in the midst of this series is really frustrating.  It makes me want to growl at the screen - not least because of all the virtues I mention it possesses.  I even believe a creative screenwriter might have found some less weak-willed way around the progression.  Some way to "save" the day without just throwing away years - and, frankly, the entire Trek scheme of morality.

Oh, gravy, I actually find myself tempted to write fanfic rectifying my irritation with this story!  Hee.  That can hardly be healthy of me.


***


In most things, there is that "exception that makes the rule" or some anomaly playing against an overall.  The imperfection in a good thing that makes it the more beautiful somehow.  "Expensively flawed" my dad might have joked, about the way a treasure is enhanced by some minuscule - but visible - anomaly.

The good in "The Visitor" is one of those things that makes me appreciate the whole of DS9 so much - it displays the stuff I love, even when it falls short.



The lives of the many outweight the lives of the few - or the one.  Except Jake Cisco.