Riker's Stasis
Although I am currently on vacation, I felt it would be unduly cruel to allow two weeks to pass without blessing my readers with a piece of writing: thus, I present to you a little essay I wrote about Star Trek.
I would like to talk to you today about an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I watched recently. In the episode, the crew of the USS Enterprise are investigating a scientific base that was abandoned eight years prior due to something called a “disruption field,” that prevented anyone from being beamed on or off the planet.
William Riker (the second-in-command of the USS Enterprise) had been stationed on the base during the evacuation, and is among the team that heads down to investigate now that the disruption field has passed. And what he finds there is a clone of himself, created through a transporter glitch.
You see, what the transporter beam does is transform its target into data, and then transmit that data to another location to be reconstructed. In this case, the “disruption field” caused the transporter to create two separate streams of data: one which reconstructed Riker onboard the rescue ship, and another which reconstructed Riker back on the abandoned base, where he lived alone for eight long years.
While the former Riker, the one we have known for six seasons, has grown and changed through his new experiences, the latter Riker has suffered within a social stasis, and still holds on to the beliefs and dreams he had when he was abandoned, and in fact has come to idealize the people and relationships of his former life.
This takes its most significant form in his feelings for Deanna Troi, with whom Riker was in a serious relationship at the time of the incident. The essence of these two characters throughout the show has been that of past lovers who have put their feelings aside for various reasons and become good friends. As we find out during the episode, the Riker who returned to the Enterprise spurned Troi for the sake of his career only a few weeks later, ending their romantic relationship.
With this new (old) (young) Riker comes a complicated situation for Deanna Troi, because this Riker still loves her, and in fact loves her all the more passionately for his eight years alone. He has become a Riker who would never abandon her for the sake of his career. During those eight years, the idea of love, or even any form of social contact, has taken on much more significance for him than any professional advancement.
What’s impressive about this episode is not just its engaging premise, which could easily be turned into relatively trite double-self TV plot, but the seriousness with which it explores this premise. One would fully expect our Riker clone to die by the end of the episode, perhaps sacrificing himself for the sake of his love, or some other heroic cause. One might expect Troi to decide that the past is best left in the past, and to spurn the advancements of this new Riker. Instead, the episode ends with Riker B still fully alive and, in fact, joining Starfleet in his own right; not only that, but Troi leaves open the possibility of continuing their relationship, and the two even share a passionate kiss while our Riker is still right there in the room.
Such an episode inevitably leads one to wonder about finding one’s self in a similar situation. Yourself eight years ago, frozen in time, and then unleashed with all their preoccupations, obsessions, and passions magnified severalfold. I reckoned somewhat with this idea last month, as it just so happens to be the eight-year anniversary of my old expedition to Japan, and the zeroth anniversary of my brand new expedition to Japan, but there’s an additional element here that I did not reckon with in that essay.
Because, wildly enough, if I were to, right now, as of writing this essay, discover my eight-years-frozen self, he would be in the exact situation as William Riker: unknowingly only a few weeks away from ending a long-term relationship via abscondence, and right on the cusp of a complete sea-change in his personal and professional life (if I can be said to have a professional life). And if he returned right now, he would take one look at me and my situation, completely divorced as it is from anything he had ever thought or dreamed about, and run off in some wildly different direction.
The episode attempts realism: the shocking appearance of Riker’s clone is integrated seamlessly into the lives of the characters. There is no moment where Riker must kill his clone, or someone else must choose which to kill — in fact, there is minimal expression of the sentiment that “there can only be one,” only an understandable and understated antagonism between the two as they struggle to assert their individuality. This nonchalance is refreshing in a genre laden with overused tropes and unearned drama, and is what gives the episode its unique charm.
However, when I reflect, if I were to meet my eight-years-frozen self, I probably would have to kill him. His pathetic pining after a woman I stopped thinking about many years ago, combined with eight-years-magnified versions of all the ridiculous, melodramatic notions of that age, would be too embarrassing. When I imagine that person walking around wearing my name and my face — how could I allow such a create to live?
Riker, it appears, is a much stronger man than I, a fact that we likely all already knew. He is willing to allow his clone to date Deanna Troi — who, let’s be real, he definitely still has feelings for — and join up with Starfleet still using his (middle) name, his face, and even his trombone. For Riker, perhaps this is a way to vicariously take a second chance at life, to do things differently, and allow other emotions or inclinations to win where they previously lost.
It’s a sign of maturity to accept your younger self as a struggling, grasping human creature worthy of pity and understanding. To no longer feel embarrassed by their emotions and actions, but to accept all that as part of the growth that led to one’s current self. I have written essays for this very website in which I pretended to do just that. But when I reckon clearly and lucidly, and earnestly place myself in the situation depicted in this episode, I still believe that I would have to kill him.