Television Review: The Outcast (Star Trek: The Next Generation, S5X17, 1992)

The Outcast (S05E17)

Airdate: 16 March 1992

Written by: Jeri Taylor
Directed by: Robert Scheerer

Running Time: 46 minutes

The recent fiasco of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been widely attributed by many critics and disgruntled fans to an excess of contemporary ‘wokery’—a pervasive, often didactic, progressive ethos seen to have poisoned or ruined numerous popular franchises. In riposte, many trekkies of a left-wing or liberal persuasion have retorted that Star Trek was, in fact, always ‘woke’, its DNA encoded from the outset with social commentary. One of the more compelling exhibits for this defence is the fifth-season The Next Generation episode, The Outcast (S5E17), a narrative that bravely, for its 1992 broadcast date, tackled issues of alternative sexuality and identity politics. Yet, a critical re-examination reveals an episode whose progressive ambitions are hamstrung by a fundamental timidity, resulting in a parable that preaches more convincingly to the converted than it challenges the prejudices of its time.

The plot centres on the USS Enterprise-D’s mission to assist the J’naii, a humanoid race Captain Picard describes as “androgynous”. They have requested Federation aid in locating a missing shuttlecraft, which has vanished into a theoretical ‘null space’ pocket—an energy-draining anomaly. Commander William Riker leads the hazardous rescue operation, assisted by the J’naii scientist Soren (Melinda Culea). The mission is a success, recovering the shuttle and its crew, but it is the burgeoning personal connection between Riker and Soren that forms the episode’s core. Soren intrigues—and unsettles—the Enterprise crew by explaining that her people have evolved beyond a gendered society, procreating through a complex, impersonal procedure. In private, however, she confesses to Riker that a subterranean minority of J’naii, herself included, have begun to ‘revert’, assuming distinct male or female identities. She identifies as a woman and, crucially, reveals her romantic attraction to Riker. After seeking Counsellor Troi’s advice, a reciprocally intrigued Riker resolves to pursue the relationship.

This private awakening becomes a public crime. In J’naii society, which views gendered identity as a deviant perversion, Soren’s feelings are anathema. Her colleague, Krite (Callan White), reports her to the authorities. Despite Riker’s impassioned pleas to the J’naii leadership, Soren is taken to be ‘cured’ via ‘psychotectic therapy’. A desperate Riker, joined by a reluctantly supportive Worf, mounts a rescue mission to the J’naii homeworld. They arrive too late. The therapy is complete; a brainwashed Soren now speaks in flat, emotionless tones, repudiating her former identity and dismissing her love for Riker as a sickness and a mistake. A devastated Riker is powerless, forced to beam away in defeat.

Star Trek has, since its 1960s inception, built its reputation on breaking taboos, mirroring—and occasionally leading—shifts in American social consciousness. Its pioneering multi-racial bridge crew and its allegories on racism were landmark achievements. Yet, for decades, the franchise remained conspicuously, conservatively silent on one frontier: alternative sexualities, particularly homosexuality. Series creator Gene Roddenberry had expressed a desire to include gay characters, but it was only after his death—and under sustained pressure from increasingly vocal gay rights activists lobbying the TNG production office—that the issue was directly addressed. Staff writer Jeri Taylor’s script for The Outcast was a deliberate, commissioned response to this demand.

Taylor’s approach was conceptually ingenious. She employed a classic trope of soft science fiction—the genderless society—and deftly subverted it. Here, the ostensibly ‘advanced’ J’naii, with their enforced androgyny and horror of gender, stand in for the repressive forces of contemporary human society, its traditional mores and homophobia. Soren, the ‘deviant’ who feels female and desires a man, becomes a clear allegorical substitute for 1990s gay men and lesbians. The J’naii’s ‘psychotectic therapy’ is an unambiguous, chilling stand-in for the controversial practices of gay conversion therapy, making the episode’s condemnation of such treatmen’ powerfully explicit.

However, a compelling concept does not guarantee compelling execution, and herein lies the episode’s critical flaw. For all its talk of androgyny, the visual and performative realisation is fatally cautious. The J’naii, despite dialogue insisting on their genderlessness, are portrayed overwhelmingly with feminine characteristics: softer features, hairstyles and costumes that read as distinctly female to a 1990s television audience. Casting former fashion model Melinda Culea as Soren exacerbates this problem. The script asks us to see a being beyond gender, but the screen shows a conventionally attractive woman in a muted uniform. This visual timidity drains the allegory of its potential power. The romantic subplot between Soren and Riker—the franchise’s notorious ‘space Lothario’—feels unconvincing not solely due to a lack of chemistry between Jonathan Frakes and Culea, but because it plays as a standard, if slightly stiff, heterosexual romance. The radical edge is blunted.

Frakes himself later pinpointed this failing, arguing the episode would have been vastly more effective and its point much better made if Soren had been played by a male actor. Such a choice would have forced the audience—and the J’naii’s condemnation—to engage directly with a same-sex attraction, making the allegory visceral rather than theoretical. The TNG production team, however, lacked the courage to cross that line in 1992. Consequently, The Outcast resorts to telling rather than showing. Its message is delivered in lengthy expositional dialogues—Soren explaining her society, Riker debating philosophy with the J’naii leader—that feel didactic. The result is less a dramatic exploration of oppression and more a carefully sanitised sermon.

The Outcast is a fascinating historical artefact, a well-intentioned attempt to bring Star Trek’s progressive ethos to bear on a then-neglected issue. Its allegorical framework is clever, and its condemnation of conversion therapy is unequivocal. Yet, its execution is undermined by a fundamental lack of audacity where it mattered most: in its visual and narrative commitment to its own premise. By retreating into a safe, heterosexual presentation, it diluted its protest into a parable that could be easily absorbed without discomfort. In this sense, it stands in stark contrast to the often unsubtle, ‘in-your-face’ ‘wokery’ of 2020s television. Where modern iterations might be accused of forceful didacticism, The Outcast suffers from the opposite ailment: a didacticism rendered polite and timid, a brave statement whispered when a shout was required. It is, therefore, not the definitive proof that Star Trek was always perfectly ‘woke’, but rather evidence that even at its most progressive, it could be hobbled by the commercial and cultural constraints of its time.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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