The Outcast

The J’naii are a race that have sworn off gender. No males. No females. Just J’naii. But there is one J’naii that loves the way Riker moves her. Yes, her. Also, what happens when you clip null space? Find out when welcome The Outcast into the Mission Log. AGREED! dang, Riker seemed pathetic…w his “I love you…”- they should have played it like, Riker just wants her to be free and choose, even if it means leaving her planet. “She’s my friend!! I can’t just leave her down there to be brainwashed!! I don’t care if anything happens between me and her, but she should be allowed to live her life how she sees fit!!”- Agreed – Riker suddenly wanting to hand out exclusive access to the Full Riker to one person makes about as much sense as…well…Kirk and Flint’s robot girl whose name I forget? And The Outcast unfolds in a pretty concentrated time frame, this isn’t like Paradise Syndrome, where Kirk is missing from the Enterprise for a period spanning weeks or months. his new spine IS awesome…like it never even got injured! wow imagine that!! hahaha….. If Worf ever goes into slo-mo during a fight and we hear Six Million Dollar Man sound effects, then I’m gonna consider my theory from last week proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s kind of interesting… I think it was way back in the Star Trek VI podcast that Ken was upset that people other than Kirk exhibited openly racist, intolerant attitudes toward the Klingons… and yet here he’s lamenting the fact that Worf is always cast in the Archie Bunker role. I don’t disagree that it would indeed have been more jarring to have Geordi be the one to have a problem with this week’s alien monoculture – that would have been jarring. It’s just kind of an interesting evolution of his view on how evolved and enlightened the characters in Star Trek are allowed to be. But that’s now. In 1992, TNG was doing good to sneak this issue in under the door like this. And as has already been pointed out on the Facebook page, DS9 hit things much more head-on just a few years later, and we’re all waiting to see what Discovery does with it. And yet, in between DS9 and Discovery, Enterprise completely, miserably fumbled a “non-binary gender” story and did not recover the ball. It’s still important to discuss. And the time to be subtle and oblique about it is more over now than it has ever been. It’s time for people to not have to fear for their lives anymore because of their sexual or gender orientation. It’s time for people to stop having to keep their entire lives under wraps. Great episode – both of TNG and Mission Log. We shouldn’t forget that this was late 80s, early 90s. Discussions about gender issues were pretty radical back then. I really, really enjoyed Ken’s exploration of these issues, and it makes me, quite frankly, somewhat proud to follow your show. Admittedly, it would have been more fun to have an androgynous male actor, but this was fine. Like, Tilda Swinton was so awesome in “Orlando”, which everyone shouold watch. To address comments by Mike Piller, just showing two gay background characters would’ve been a far bigger and more powerful statement than anything they could’ve come up with as an allegory. By making no deal about it whatsoever says, “This is normal.” The biggest failing of this episode is the down ending. Stopping at, “See, we fixed her and now she’s better” is not acceptable. If an alien parasite takes over the body of a crewman and uses their voice to say, “I’m much happier this way” Star Trek doesn’t say, “Well, Ok, if you say so.” Star Trek says, “No, screw you alien parasite, we’re doing anything we can to get our crewman back.” This is another sledgehammer episode, just like last week. They spent all their time saying things but forgot to actually show those things. I don’t mind a bummer ending, I mind this bummer ending. A bummer ending would have been that she commits suicide because the retraining doesn’t work. Instead of confusing the issue of brainwashing with sho