“The Vengeance Factor” (3×09)
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Riker has a reputation for being a womanizer among TNG fans, and this episode both embraces and complicates that narrative with a plot that feels straight out of an early Bond film.
The story’s unusual vibe starts with the cold open in a pillaged Federation science outpost. The whole place is lit with an eerie green light, and the matte painting for the world outside of the facility have an old school fifties science fiction vibe to them.
We soon learn that the perpetrators are a marauding band of savage space pirates called the Gatherers who come from a planet of with a long history of Hatfields and McCoys-style feuds between clans. Picard, eager to rid this region of space of the Gatherers’ mischief, cajoles Marouk, the ruling leader of the species’s home planet, to have a reconciliation summit with the Gatherers.
As Picard works to get the Gatherers on board with his plan, Riker starts romancing Marouk’s chef, a beautiful blonde woman with a shy and docile disposition.
What Riker doesn’t know, but we do, is that the chef is a genetically augmented femme fatale who was engineered by her clan to wipe out their enemies.
Overall, it’s not a great episode; the Gatherers feel like rejects from a Mad Max movie, and the stakes — while huge for the Gatherers and their brethren on Acamar III — are pretty small from the perspective of the Enterprise and the Federation. If things hadn’t gone well, they would have dropped off Sovereign Marouk back on Acamar III and continued on their merry way.
But there were still a number of things I liked about this one:
- The asymmetrical levels of technological development between the Federation and the Acamarians. The Acadamarians are barely a warp-capable civilization, not much more advanced when it comes to interstellar travel than humanity was in the years immediately following Zefram Cochrane’s flight aboard the Phoenix. They haven’t moved beyond their home solar system and a handful of nearby stars. Nor do they have replicator technology. But their genetic engineering is far beyond what the Federation is capable of, such that Crusher almost missed the genetically engineered virus. That too makes sense, since humanity banned genetic enhancement after the Eugenics Wars.
- When the chef throws herself at Riker, but Riker is initially really into it. But he halts things immediately when he realizes that Marouk has offered her up as a transactional good will gesture. And then he offers her comfort instead. By contrast, James Bond would have definitely just slept with her.
- When Riker intervenes before the chef can claim her final victim, she forces him to vaporize her. It’s the kind of thing James Bond would do on the regular, but Riker isn’t James Bond. He lives in the utopian 24th century where life is precious. It’s unquestionably a “good” shooting, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live with. It’s one of the downsides of the episodic format that we don’t get to see Riker grapple with his guilt in the weeks and months to come.
- I liked how Picard was able to see past the Gatherers’ boorish and uncouth natures and see the situation as a negotiation like any other. It would have been easy to make the Gatherers just punchlines, but there is clear evidence of strategy and political thought behind their positions.
- It was fun to see Coach Balbricker from the Porky’s movies as the ruler of an entire civilization. And she’s excellent at it, too.
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