10 Times Star Trek: The Next Generation Went Woke

*Not one of Doctor Crusher's and/or The Tempest before things go wrong on the holodeck. Sorry!

Nichelle Nichols once pointed out to Gene Roddenberry that what he was doing for The Original Series was writing 'morality plays,' to which he apparently (jokingly) replied, "Shhh. They haven't figured it out yet." As we noted in our '10 Times Star Trek Was Woke,' TOS triumphed and stumbled in its allegorical approach to the issues of the day. In that, Star Trek: The Next Generation was no different. Not every episode was a resounding metaphorical success, but each did try to catch the conscience, not of Shakespeare's king, but of the audience.

Let's take The High Ground. The title is, admittedly, more on-the-nose than Bajoran rhinoplasty, but this was the third season episode so pointedly political that it was banned from broadcast by the BBC and RTÉ. You'd have needed to be 'woke' (read: literally 'awake') seriously early in the morning when the BBC did finally air The High Ground for the first (and apparently only) time at 02:39 GMT on 29 September 2007. The reason? One of Data's examples of "terrorism [as] an effective way to promote political change" as "The Irish Unification of 2024." As The High Ground writer Melinda Snodgrass related in Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, the whole episode was intended to be a parallel for Northern Ireland.

The geopolitical allegories continued in later seasons. The two-parter Unification of 1991, for example, was inspired (at least in part) by German reunification. Unification also served as a tie-in to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, itself drawing reference to and from the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union. Political allegories had already shifted before that, of course, with Worf on the bridge of the flagship.