In the third episode of the third season of The Next Generation, the crew finds an impossible set of survivors in an irradiated wasteland. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Trigger Warning: For talk of grief, death, and genocide.
This is both one of the best episodes of the entire show and one of the most fucked up things in the Star Trek canon. It’s not an easy thing to sustain a mystery like this one over the course of “The Survivors,” and it’s even harder to come up with a solution to it that’s not disappointing. But holy shit, after forty minutes of uncomfortable scenes, impossibilities, and Deanna’s suffering, the writers deliver the bleakest hour of Star Trek storytelling thus far, and it’s just so good.
Right from the beginning, this episode is unnerving to watch. What I love so much about it is how it visually teases the audience with certain surreal elements, all meant to pique our interest in the unfolding disaster. When the Enterprise arrives at Delta Rana IV, it is completely destroyed. That’s not exactly a unique thing for The Next Generation or Star Trek as a whole, you know? I feel like we’ve seen that premise before. What we haven’t seen is practically everything that comes after this. That little perfect square of developed land in the middle of a toxic nightmare? It’s utterly surreal to see it, and the writers know it. So they continue to exploit that juxtaposition with every new detail revealed in “The Survivors.” We find out that the couple who survived the destruction of their land knew that this attack had happened and had actually witnessed.
Yet their home still stands.
Delta Rana IV was destroyed, systematically and thoroughly, by an unknown party. For no apparent reason whatsoever, this alien race more or less committed genocide, exterminating the lives spread over this colony. Their devastation was complete.
Yet the Uxbridge home still stands.
The ship that attacked this planet even returns, taunting the Enterprise and firing upon it, cueing a bitter race away from the planet. It’s clear that this ship possesses a ridiculous amount of power, enough to annihilate the Enterprise.
And yet, the Uxbridge home still stands.
Why is that? Why spare these two? Why is Deanna afflicted with the repetitious music from the music box that the Uxbridges own? Are these two complicit in the attack on their planet, or did the mystery force spare them for some ulterior motive? Even if you suspected that Kevin wasn’t telling the truth (which I did), there’s still not enough seeded into this episode to give us a fuller portrait of what was going on. Does “The Surivors” dangle the carrot? Yes. Openly so! I didn’t get the sense that Michael Wagner’s script was unaware of this. There is, however, just enough given to us with each new scene to keep our interest from wandering. (Insert a joke here about me falling asleep to an episode of this show. HAR HAR.) For me, I loved that each new “answer” gave way to about twenty new questions about what was really going on here. If this ship had truly destroyed the colony, why didn’t it destroy the Enterprise on the first go? Why did it resist firing during its second appearance until it destroyed the Uxbridge home? What was the point of that???
To misdirect our attention elsewhere. Holy shit, y’ll, most of what we see here is the manifestation of Kevin Uxbridge’s power. When the show reveals that he’s this powerful, immortal being, they are not fucking around. The man is capable of even more than is on display in “The Survivors,” and yet it’s still one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen a Star Trek episode do. Kevin Uxbridge – if that’s even his name – is suffering from grief throughout this episode. That grief is probably mixed with his own guilt over not getting involved with the fighting on this planet. Regardless, the end result is the same. Upon killing Kevin’s wife, the Husnock raiders are subjected to a taste of their own medicine.
BECAUSE KEVIN EXTERMINATES EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF THIS RACE EVER. He commits genocide, utilizing his power to wipe out an entire species in a few seconds. Like Picard says at the end, this story is a mess of moral certainties and platitudes. How do you even begin to address something as horrific as this? Rishon was a figment of Kevin’s power, a way for him to maintain the illusion that nothing had happened to her, that she was still alive and well. What the Husnocks did was undeniably terrible and the show never tries to rationalize that, not even once. It’s a horrific act of genocide. The show also doesn’t try to paint Kevin as a courageous hero, either. Yes, he was upset and justifiably so. But killing every member of this species in retaliation? Jesus christ, HOLY SHIT.
In the end, Picard leaves Kevin alone. Alone with his guilt and his grief and his shame, because what else can he do? What sort of justice could Picard bring to the world? While there is a part of me that loves the ending to this episode, I do wonder how reckless it is to leave a being like Kevin Uxbridge alone and possessing all that power. Like… maybe stop him from doing something worse? At the same time, I got the sense that Picard was leaving Kevin to wallow in his misery and loneliness forever, a damning fate for anyone. What else could he do? I don’t know that there’s an answer here, and I don’t imagine that “The Survivors” would be as good as it was if it had given us a moral certainty to work from.
Basically, everything’s just super messed up.
The video for “The Survivors” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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