Television Review: Attached (Star Trek: The Next Generation, S7X08, 1993)
Attached (S07E08)
Airdate: 8 November 1993
Written by: Nicholas Sagan
Directed by: Jonathan Frakes
Running Time: 46 minutes
The unresolved romantic tension between two central protagonists is frequently not merely a seasoning, but the very engine of a successful, long-running television drama. Savvy producers understand its potency and often treat it as a cardinal resource, to be husbanded carefully and never fully expended. To explicitly address and resolve such a tension is typically an act of either desperation—a gambit to resuscitate flagging ratings—or finality, undertaken when a series concludes and its creators need no longer worry about the narrative vacuum left behind. Yet, even then, the resolution can misfire spectacularly, alienating the very audience it sought to gratify. A prime exemplar of this misstep is found in the seventh and final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the episode Attached, a clumsy attempt to confront the decades-long subtext between Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher that ultimately served to irritate and fracture its devoted fandom rather than provide a satisfying culmination.
Penned by Nicholas Sagan, the episode commences with a premise rich in diplomatic intrigue. The USS Enterprise-D is dispatched to the planet Kesprytt to oversee its petition to join the United Federation of Planets. Upon arrival, however, the crew discovers a profoundly divided world: the Kes faction ardently seeks Federation membership, whilst the Prytt are pathologically xenophobic, rejecting contact not only with off-worlders but with their own planetary neighbours. In an effort to mediate, Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher beam down to the surface, but a Prytt tractor beam intercepts their signal, and they materialise not at their intended destination, but in a stark prison cell.
As Commander Riker and the crew grapple with their Captain’s disappearance, the Kes ambassador, Mauric (Robin Gammell), arrives aboard the Enterprise advocating for a military rescue—a course Riker wisely resists. Mauric’s increasingly paranoid behaviour, turning his guest quarters into a fortress of anti-surveillance equipment, does little to endear him or his faction to the Starfleet officers. Meanwhile, Picard and Crusher’s captors, the Prytt, implant them with psionic devices designed to facilitate interrogation. A significant, unintended side-effect of these implants is that they forge a telepathic link between the two prisoners, rendering their innermost thoughts audible to one another. Provided with a rudimentary map and a device to disrupt the prison’s force fields, they are forced into a perilous escape, their journey now underscored by the inescapable and profoundly intimate noise of each other’s unspoken minds.
It is during this fraught trek that the episode’s core, and its most controversial, drama unfolds. The telepathic link acts as a brutal truth serum, stripping away a lifetime of professional decorum and personal reserve. Picard, his mental defences obliterated, is laid bare. He confesses to Crusher that he loved her years prior, but refrained from acting due to her marriage to his closest friend, Jack Crusher. Following Jack’s tragic death, Picard felt any romantic pursuit would be a profound betrayal of that friendship and an abuse of his position as her commanding officer. It is a raw, vulnerable moment for a character famously governed by intellect and control, and it gives weight to the simmering subtext of their seven-year history.
The external plot reaches its conclusion when Riker, leveraging Starfleet’s technological superiority, coerces the Prytt security minister, Lurin (Lenore Kasdorf), into providing the coordinates for a safe beam-out. In a fitting coda to the political narrative, Riker informs Ambassador Mauric that the Kes’s own duplicity and paranoia have likely doomed their Federation application. The episode’s true denouement, however, occurs back on the Enterprise. In a quiet, painfully awkward scene, Picard and Crusher tentatively discuss their forcibly revealed feelings. Picard, uncharacteristically hopeful, suggests they might now explore a relationship. Crusher, with a gentle but devastating finality, declines. The door, held ajar for so many seasons, is firmly closed.
This conclusion is the wellspring of the episode’s divisive legacy. From their very introduction in The Encounter at Farpoint, the potential for a Picard-Crusher romance was a tantalising thread woven through the series. Countless episodes teased this possibility, building a compelling “will-they-won’t-they” dynamic that stood as the most profound personal connection amongst the senior crew. By waiting until the final season to address it directly, however, the writers painted themselves into a corner. The result feels less like a natural progression and more like a conventional, “safe” attempt to have it both ways: to acknowledge the tension whilst ultimately preserving the sterile, professional status quo. The burden of prior episodes like Lessons, which demonstrated the catastrophic personal cost when Picard becomes romantically involved with a subordinate, hangs heavily over the scene. Ultimately, it is Crusher—once a more independently intriguing character—who is tasked with dousing the romantic flame, a decision that retroactively renders much of the prior teasing as narrative false advertising.
The profound disappointment of Attached stems not solely from this romantic anticlimax, but from its staggering waste of a compelling geopolitical premise. The central conceit of a planet divided between a open, seeking society and a closed, paranoid one is ripe for the kind of nuanced exploration of culture, ethics, and the Prime Directive at which The Next Generation excelled. The Kes-Prytt conflict could have served as a potent allegory for contemporary global divisions, interrogating the Federation’s role as an interstellar arbitrator. Yet, all this rich material is relegated to mere background noise, a simplistic B-plot device existing only to facilitate the psychic imprisonment of the two leads. The political implications are hastily resolved with a Starfleet threat and a moralistic rebuke, whilst the fascinating cultural and ethical questions are left entirely unexamined.
Consequently, Attached turns into a solidly crafted but deeply frustrating piece of television. The performances from Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden are commendably nuanced, and the direction maintains a taut pace. Yet, the episode feels less like an organic, necessary chapter in the Enterprise’s journey and more like an item on a pre-finale checklist: “Address Picard/Crusher Subtext.” It attempts to service a long-standing character thread but does so in a manner that satisfied few, whilst simultaneously abandoning a far more interesting narrative avenue. It is the very definition of a missed opportunity, demonstrating that when a show finally chooses to resolve its central romantic tension, it must do so with far more courage and consequence than this ultimately safe and ultimately hollow exercise managed to muster.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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