Inexplicable TV Review: Star Trek TNG and uncomfortably sexual moments

Warning: Spoilers follow for random episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mostly the gross ones, though.

Lately, I’ve been watching two things in my free time – Gilmore Girls, as most followers of this blog know, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, which you probably could have guessed, given my past entries on Voyager.

Here is the thing I didn’t realize about TNG until bingeing upon it – There is a whole lotta uncomfortable sex stuff. Like, Riker is out there banging half the galaxy. As he mentions in his awesome Random Roles interview at The AV Club, about him and Counselor Troi, “They wanted to free us up, obviously, to have relationships with alien lovers.”

And, boy, does he ever! In “The Game,” Riker and everyone else is making these weird, orgasmic sounds when playing a VR game. We covered it in our Emmy show on Your Parents Basement, but it’s an uncomfortable episode. It doesn’t help that Ashley Judd(!) is a guest star, and she’s makin’ time with Wil Wheaton! Riker basically serves as the bearded sex god of TNG, there to bone any attractive alien with breasts. “A colony of statuesque blondes in a female-dominated society? Sign me up! A retribution-obsessed servant gal? Sure!”

Troi serves the opposite role for the male aliens. This is normally much, much, MUCH creepier, like the telepathic aliens who mind molest her. There is also the time she randomly gets pregnant.

However, the person who has it the absolute worst when it comes to “romance” on TNG is Dr. Beverly Crusher. First off, the show starts off with her husband being dead, which isn’t so great for her, obviously.

But then, things get worse because she falls in love with a ghost. Or as Wikipedia describes it, “Dr. Crusher attends her grandmother’s funeral, and spends time in her grandmother’s haunted house, romanced by her grandmother’s non-corporeal lover.” Well, that sounds great! It’s on the list of Tech Republic’s five worst TNG episodes, with good reason.

Another noteworthy “romance” for the good doctor involves her falling in love with a parasite in a symbiotic species relationship. He starts bound to a male alien, then jumps to Riker, before finally ending up in a female alien. It’s all kind of weird and uncomfortable.

So, anyway. TNG has a lot of weird sex stuff going on. Beyond the stuff I mentioned, there is also “fun” aspects like Tasha Yar’s dubious-consent child becoming a villain, or the fact that Tasha and her sister had “rape gangs” on their home planet. But outside of those episodes, it’s a perfectly fine show! The series introduces us to the Borg and the Q continuum, and they’re both bad ass. They’ve got that going for them, which is nice.

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