Guest Post: Uncomfortable Reflections on "Homeward"

Novelist and scholar Adam Roberts reports

[Adam Roberts, one of the world's other Adams, is a British science-fiction author and an academic (Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London). He is a long-standing Trek fan and is coming to the end of a Next Gen rewatch. This guest post comes out of that. His own amazingly varied newsletter is available here.]

Like many, I am undertaking a comprehensive rewatch of the Star Trek I watched, more or less patchily, in the 1980s and 1990s. I saw most, if not all, Star Trek: the Next Generation on its initial broadcast—the vicissitudes of UK syndicated broadcasting meant that there were occasional episodes I missed, and before streaming if an episode was missed it was gone—and rewatching, systematically, has been an interesting experience. When it comes to those episodes I missed first time round, there is a strange combination of novelty and déjà vu to seeing them now: they are simultaneously intensely familiar, dated and new. But even with episodes I definitely caught on their first showing, my memory is a variable quantity: some I recall vividly; others more patchily. And either way rewatching very often gives me a qualitatively different experience—perhaps because, when I first watched these episodes, there was not yet such things as Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise—to say nothing of Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, Picard etc—to contextualise the experience in a larger sense. And from time to time the rewatch throws up, right in my face, a completely different sense of what I thought the episode was about.

And example of that is ST:TNG (s7, ep13) ‘Homeward’, the 165th episode of whole run, initially broadcast January 17, 1994. We’re halfway into the final series of TNG, here, and this makes for a self-contained drama, expanding a little on the backstory of Worf, one of the show’s most popular characters. I remember watching it first time round and enjoying it, if not considering it an absolutely top-drawer example of Trek. The plotting relies on a couple of rather clumsy contrivances, and doesn’t altogether deftly tie-up its elements. So, we meet Worf’s brother (adoptive sibling rather than blood-relative) Nikolai Rozhenko, a Federation anthropologist, played with chunky middle-aged energy by Paul Sorvino, famous from Goodfellas and other mafiosi or policeman roles.

Nikolai has been working as a Federation anthropologist, observing a primitive (in the sense of: pre-warp-technology) society on a distant planet, Boraal II, from the vantage of a cloaked observation station. The plot driver here is the prime directive, by which Federation staff are forbidden from intervening in alien cultures, no matter the provocation. This episode provides a limit case for this directive, for Boraal II is suffering an overwhelming atmospheric catastrophe, which will kill all the indigenous people—they have, Nikolai insists, a rich cultural and spiritual life—in a matter of days. Nikolai calls the Enterprise hoping to save the Boraalans, or (one presumes) some of them, by beaming them aboard and shipping them somewhere else. Picard refuses, citing the prime directive. Nikolai appears to concede the point and asks for permission to upload his observational data to the Enterprise’s main computer. This is a ruse: actually he has designed a holodeck impersonation of the Boraalan caves in which the natives are hiding from the storms, and somehow managed to transport the entire population into this simulation, without—improbably enough—either them, or the Enterprise crew, noticing. We can swallow this unlikelihood as the necessary premise for the show: Nikolai presenting Picard with a fait accompli, and then the orchestration of the deception by which the Boraalans are made to believe they are travelling through the cave system to a new home, away from the atmospheric storms. In fact the whole planet is destroyed, and the Enterprise has to skoot through the galaxy to find an equivalent unoccupied M-class world upon which the Boraalans can resettle, all the time believing that they have never left their homeworld.

To make this more dramatic the plotting throws in two wrinkles: one, the holodeck is starting to malfunction (a consequence, we are told, of the atmospheric storms, though one wonders how the storms affected the holodeck and only the holodeck). Geordie could fix this, but only by turning it off and turning it on again—that thoroughly 1990s computing panacea—which would reveal the illusion to the credulous Boraalans. This can’t happen. So the Enterprise crew have to make do and mend, racing against time to get to the new world before the programme crashes altogether. The second wrinkle is that one of the Boraalans, Voralin, stumbles accidentally out of the simulation altogether, like a medieval peasant finding himself aboard a high-tech futuristic starship, with consequent culture-shock.

The smooth-foreheaded, multi-racial Boraalan have a kind of ridge running down their noses, which Nikolai mimics with advance-tech surgical alteration so he can pass as one of them. Worf has the same surgical modification, though he had to wear a hood to cover his big crinkly forehead which, the implication is, not even Dr Crusher’s surgical skill can smooth. The ingenuous Boraalans accept them both as examples of their own species, and indeed meekly follow them. Nikolai presents Worf as a ‘seer’ and claims that the malfunctions in the holodeck—glitches, moments when pools or water or walls fade to reveal the neon-grid beneath—are prophetic signs and wonders. There’s a certain amount of Worf and Nikolai’s difficult fraternal relationship: the former disparaging the latter’s lack of discipline, his tendency to rush-in and expect everyone else to pick up the pieces from the damage he causes. But Nikolai is unapologetic: he has no regrets about breaking the prime directive, since doing so saved these people, and their entire culture, from extinction. Eventually the Enterprise arrives at a suitable replacement world, and the Boraalans are beamed down to their new home, none the wiser.

One hanging plot-thread is Voralin. Precedence in Star Trek universe might suggest his memory could be wiped and he returned to his people, but Dr Crusher handwaves this away: there is something unusual about the physiology of Boraalan brains that makes such treatment impossible. If he returns to his people it will be with full memory of his time on the Enterprise. Picard explains the situation to him, and gives the option either to return to his people—and tell them what he has seen, or to lie to them—or else to stay and make a new life in the Federation. Viewing either option as untenable he commits suicide, a rather downbeat story development right at the end of the episode. Picard, standing over his corpse, tells Deana ‘I wish I had had the chance to get to know him.’ How he took his own life, on an advanced and one must assume safety-conscious starship, is not vouchsafed to the audience.

Meanwhile, on the Boraalan new homeworld, the rather bovinely named ‘Vacca VI’, Nikolai informs Worf that he will not be returning to the Federation, but will instead be staying with the Boraalans. He has paired-off with one of the Boraalan women, Tarrana (played by Susan Christy) who is pregnant with his child. Boraalan physiology is so radically different to human that memory-wiping technology has no effect upon them, but so similar that a homo sapiens can easily impregnate them. Worf and Nikolai make up, and hug, and that’s that.

This is not an episode with a great reputation amongst Trekkers. Wikipedia tells me that Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a C+ grade, and that Keith DeCandido of Tor.com rated it 1 out of 10. My memory of it was that the relationship between the brothers is rather under-written, Sorvino miscast, and the plotting full of holes that need improbable patches to get the story to its conclusion. The hook, a ‘prime directive’ moral dilemma, has been treated many times before, and after, on Trek, and the particular iteration of it here is unconvincing. Non-intervention is a creditable principle, but surely not in a situation where a small population could be easily saved from total obliteration: sticking with the directive in such a circumstance seems cold, cruel, even psychotic.

Rewatching it three decades later the episode hit completely differently with me. Not that these dramatic limitations didn’t still obtain: I think they do. But the main premise landed differently. The ongoing political situation with the Epstein scandal had something to do with this; but it’s also true that between watching this in 1994 and watching it in 2025 I read Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013), which I still consider her best novel. It’s based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. Read through that lens, ‘Homeward’ becomes a disturbing piece of drama.

Gajdusek (the basis for Yanagihara’s character Abraham Norton Perina) undertook a great deal of anthropological and sociological work in the South Pacific, afterwards bringing 56 mostly male children back to live with him in the United States, providing them with high school and college education. It transpired that he molested many of these and had a history of having sex with underage boys when in New Guinea, Micronesia, and Polynesian islands (he served 12 months in jail for these crimes, and afterwards moved to Europe). His defense, if that doesn’t over-dignify his testimony, was that such sexual contact was unexceptional in the aboriginal societies he was studying. A BBC documentary The Genius and the Boys (2009) included seven men who testified that Gajdusek had had sex with them when they were boys, four of whom said ‘the sex was untroubling’, while for three ‘the sex was a shaming, abusive, and a violation’. Yanagihara’s fictionalized version of the Gajdusek case captures this ambiguity, and immersively renders the situation without either too-easy condemnation or particular sympathy for its main character.

All the Boraalans we encounter in ‘Homeward’ are adults, played by adult actors, but their manner and demeanor is curiously child-like. They are ingenuous, gullible, easily led and overawed by Nikolai and Worf. When the latter says that their new home will not be like their old, and ‘even the stars will look different’, one male Boraalan objects to this manifest impossibility of this, and is quickly shut down by Nikolai. One elderly Boraalan urges his nubile daughter upon Worf, insisting that if he, as an old man, doesn’t survive the trek to their new home, he must marry her. Worf deflects this (‘you will reach your new home, I promise’) but Nikolai has manifestly not resisted this particular temptation. The Boraalan cultural record, the only way they connect with their history, is a set of panels, folded together, in which primitive text is supplemented with large illustrations, like a kindergarten picture-book, again tending to characterize the Boraalans are child-like. They resemble the Eloi from Wells’s Time Machine (another novel in which an adult explorer encounters a child-like peoples and has sex with them).

The way the episode not only does not punish Nikolai—a Federation officer!—for his violation of the prime directive, but indulgently leaves him living with this infantile tribe of people in their new home, struck me on my rewatch as genuinely uncomfortable. His job was to observe the Boraalan peoples objectively, from a distance, without interfering with them: instead of which he has gone amongst them and had sex with one of them. Indeed, if he has had sex with one, he will surely have sex with more: the episode leaves him as de facto tribal leader, with absolute power over these ingenuous folk, all of whom revere him as their savior. Tarrana seems happy to be carrying Nikolai’s child, but other Boraalans may not be so happy.

Why does the Federation not discipline Nikolai? He has broken the prime directive and the episode end sees him openly planning to continue doing so. I suppose what the Epstein case shows is that powerful men who abuse others generally get away with their crimes. A Hanya Yanagihara novelization of this episode, getting into the detail of Nikolai’s life with the Boraalans and their life on Vacca VI, would be an interesting though not comfortable read.