TNG – The Host

Plot – There are times when TNG exudes a glorious sense of familiarity with the characters and you just smile at the warmth that is exuding from the screen. The opening of The Host is one of those times. Crusher wants to get her new Ambassadorial lover to her quarters and bonk his brains out but Data, failing to spot all the right social cues, instead wishes to take away her lover and do a two-hour study. Cue a sequence of lies to keep Data busy so Crusher can sneak off and get her end away. It’s not exactly comedy gold, but it did make me smile.

The Trill are an opportunity to do someone a little unusual with an alien species, to not just throw some ridges on an actors head and have that as a shortcut that the person on screen is an extra-terrestrial. It’s taking a much more psychological approach, where storytelling possibilities are enticing, where the Trill is a host carrier for a symbiont that passes from person to person and carries their memories with them. I remember when I first watched this as a child feeling excited by the possibilities of such a species and that kind of psychological insight you could tap into, even then. That episodes such as Facets, Rejoined, Equilibrium, Afterimage were all a result of this bold concept that TNG put out there is all to their credit. The potential was fully realised and I’m sure that there were still more stories to tell, post DS9.

Character – Trust Picard to cut through Beverley’s kinky fun. She’s being kissed and complimented and he cuts through all the fun with a comms. She acts like a child that has been caught doing something naughty. I love it when Dr Bev is allowed to behave like a human being instead of a Starfleet medical drone. It’s in her downtime moments where Gates McFadden really shines in the role and where I can’t imagine Dr Pulaski taking her place. The second she starts admitting that she is blissfully happy in love it is patently clear that she is about to receive terrible news that her lover has suffered a terrible fate. That’s just the way episodic television goes.

Just look at Picard’s face when Odan states that Dr Crusher is an extraordinary woman. Never before has he tried to change the subject so quickly.

Imagine the difficulty for Troi to counsel Beverley who has fallen in love with a man who comes from a species that can change host bodies and he know inhabits the body of Troi’s former lover. Only on Star Trek.

Performance – Good grief. The gorgeous scene where Deanna winds Dr Bev up as she is getting beauty treatments displays a lovely, natural chemistry between the two characters. ‘Sometimes I wish you weren’t so damn empathic…’

Great Dialogue – ‘You can’t be open to love if you can’t risk pain’ might sound like a dreadful line but anybody who has been in love and felt pain knows just how much truth there is in that statement.

Best moment – All the unspoken relationships amongst the crew that give this story it’s substance. This might be a love story about Dr Bev and Odan but the most powerful moments come from Picard and Troi when it looks like Beverley and Riker have been snapped up. It’s one of the few times where I feel it was a good idea that they never explored these relationships on TNG because what is unspoken is much more powerful than what is said aloud. Even better is the weirdness that now exists between Beverley and Riker now they have done the deed.

Worst moment – The negotiations. They are merely an excuse for Odan to be on the ship. Why we have to sit through all the preparations and then the actual negotiations says something about episodic television of the time. Nowadays we would get to the juicy stuff of the Trill plot much quicker and explore the implications of the gender transition with much more detail and (hopefully) satisfaction).

I wish they hadn’t done that – In The Host it is acknowledged that transportation damages the host symbiont of any Trill. Obviously, that is something that they worked on over time because it would have been a major plot complication in many a DS9 episode. Either that or the writers just chose to ignore the continuity that they set up here.

What’s odd is that Riker literally seems to become Odan the second the symbiont is inside of him. Going forward that is the suggestion that the host is the dominant personality and that all the previous hosts memories swim beneath the surface. Here the episode seems to suggest Riker’s personality is subsumed and the previous host is now in control of the body.

When Dr Bev talks about how she cannot move past the fact that the host has moved from one gender to another it sounds as though she is talking for the entirety of humanity, and that is one of the more unfortunate decisions that TNG ever made. It would have been so much braver (for the time, but complete normal these days), and more interesting had she chosen to pursue the relationship whilst Odan is in a female host. Essentially it seems to be saying that bisexuality or pansexuality does not exist in the future and that’s not a statement any show should be seen to be making.

A reason to watch this episode again – First off, massive kudos for TNG for trying to tell a fairly radical story, especially for the time. It takes real nuts to tackle the subject of bisexuality in such a creative fashion and for a while I was convinced that this was going to be an absolute classic. Beverley’s relationship with Odan feels very real and the two actors have terrific chemistry and I love how the show shifts into uncomfortable territory when the symbiont shifts to Riker and the romance continues. The Trill are an intriguing new species and one that DS9 would be able to tackle in far more depth over seven seasons, but this is a fair attempt to explore the idea of lifetimes shifting from one person to another in a single episode. Where the episode dives and crashes is in the last scene where Dr Bev fails to acknowledge that humanity can move on from very strict gender ideals. Newsflash – we’re already making huge strides in that direction. How much bolder would it have been for Beverley to extend the possibility of a romance to female Odan and to suggest that sexuality is a far more malleable thing than was the norm in the early nineties. Instead it seems to putting a halt on stories that explore sexuality in the 24^th century, which is unthinkable, when there is so much that could have been explored there. When Star Trek came around to exploring Trill romance again it did so in DS9’s Rejoined where same sex passion is a perfectly normal, unquestioned delight. The Host is trying very hard to be revolutionary. Instead it’s reductive and exclusionist. And that’s a crying shame because everybody is so committed. Gates McFadden has never been better.

*** out of *****