“Ensign Ro” (5×03)
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This episode represents one of the boldest contraventions in the series to date of Gene Roddenberry’s edict about evolved 24th century humanity working in perfect harmony with one another. The show gets away with it by bringing in an outsider whose tragic and tumultuous past didn’t afford her the luxury of such enlightenment.
Ensign Ro earns our sympathy from the moment she steps off the transporter, when she is immediately ordered to remove her earring — a sacred symbol of her faith — because it doesn’t comport with standard issue Starfleet dress. Riker’s stern tone is meant to convey that she arrives aboard the Enterprise with a bad reputation. But the edict smacks of unfairness. Worf, after all, wears his baldric over his Starfleet uniform. And Troi gets away with not wearing a Starfleet uniform at all.
As the episode goes on, we see many of our upstanding officers give her the cold shoulder and gossip behind her back, as if her infamy is a virus that might rub off on them. It’s wonderful, then, to see Guinan take Ro under her wing and pierce through the bluster and standoffishness to see the hurt and lonely person underneath. Some Guinan appearances feel trivial, like they just threw her in because Whoopi happened to have some availability at the time. This is not one of them; Guinan is absolutely essentially here: she gets Ro to trust Picard, and she gets Picard to trust Ro. Picard doesn’t see what Guinan sees in Ro, but he trusts Guinan enough to act under the assumption that Ro will rise to the occasion.
And she does. Her actions and intercessions ultimately prevent Starfleet becoming complicit in the Cardassians’ crimes against the Bajoran peoples.
By the end of the episode, Ro has come to appreciate Picard’s approval as something worth earning, and Picard has committed himself to mentoring her to redemption. The conflict earlier in the episode, which felt so jarring, serves to make the payoff at the end far more impactful.
Impacts on Star Trek Continuity:
The events of the most recent episode of “Star Trek: Picard” inspired me to revisit Ro Laren’s story arc. This episode and “Imposters” provide nice bookends to the character’s story arc, with a prickly and impassioned performance from Michelle Forbes in both cases.
It’s also interesting for its embryonic exploration of the central conflict that would drive the entire run of DS9. The episode establishes some crucial facets of the Bajoran backstory: The non-Western name order, the earring as a symbol of the Bajoran religious faith, the backstory of Bajor as a center of learning and culture prior to the Cardassian invasion, the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, and the militant Bajoran resistance to that occupation.
However, there are also major differences, too; the make-up for the Bajorans is more elaborate here than in later episodes. The badmiral states that the Occupation has last for around forty years, when the timeline of DS9 would require it to be at least a decade longer than that. This episode heavily implies that the Cardassians have driven the Bajorans off of their homeworld, and that the Bajoran people now largely exist as a diaspora of scattered refugees who are losing their culture and identity as they are forced to assimilate into their new homes.
DS9 instead shows that the vast majority of Bajorans remained on Bajor and suffered terribly under Cardassian rule during the occupation. This episode uses the collective adjective “Bajora”, instead of “Bajorans” as would become standard. This is only the second appearance for the Cardassians, and they’re still largely undefined other that their willingness to use underhanded tactics and to commit atrocities to achieve their aims.
It’s really neat to think of everything that blossomed from the seeds laid in this episode.
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