Star Trek: The Next Generation: Justice Review (S1E08)
★★☆☆☆ Wesley’s mostly rubbish sex planet trip poses some interesting ideas
The Enterprise’s encounter with a world of peaceful pleasure-seekers takes a dangerous turn when Wesley Crusher unwittingly breaks one of their laws.
Unwilling to let his young crewman be put to death but bound by the prime directive, Picard’s dilemma is further complicated by a mysterious object in space, an orbital presence the planet’s inhabitants claim to be their god…
Sex and Star Trek are things that go together with alarming regularity. Its creator — of Star Trek, not sex, just to clarify —originally envisaged the show as a conduit to openly explore multiple progressive facets, the horizontal tango clearly being one of his favourites.
Fast-forward to the late eighties, and sex was a staple in mainstream culture, the comparatively prudish values of twenty years ago now a distant memory.
But like the bulk of The Next Generation’s first season, much of this episode feels out of time. An awkward throwback, a show out of step with its era, feeling like something scraped from the time-aged barrel of Trek’s unrealised ideas.
About two-thirds of Justice consists of content best described as “unbearable”. Early scenes establishing the Edo and their idyllic homeworld come with toe-curling images depicting a race engaged in all sorts of PG-appropriate revelry. No wonder Riker, retooled as the show’s master of all things “bonk” from here on out, had such a big grin on his face.
And yet, if you strip away all the instantly dated excess, the core concept has a lot of potential. The idea of criminality in a hedonistic utopia sounds like something ripped from the Roddenberry playbook; a fascinating opportunity to bring together the concepts that gave rise to the original series in the first place.
The episode seems to realise this potential in the latter stages. Picard’s conversation with Data on their difficult situation in the final act is probably the most thoughtful and, by extension, Trekkian moment of the series at this point. A quiet minute away from all the cheesy gumpf where The Next Generation’s real potential began to shine through.
It’s a shame that Justice came so soon in the show’s run. With maturity and the show’s later-season confidence, I think it had the potential to be a decent episode.
But unless Trek’s current crop of uninspired writers digs it up for an episode of Strange New World or something of the ilk, its enduring legacy will always be one of awful costumes, terrible dialogue, and a hound dog first officer’s barely contained excitement.
