this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I guess it's worth mentioning that Star Trek has always been a product of its time, and also pretty weird about it. For example, consider two episodes of The Next Generation...
On one hand there's "The Outcast," about a planet of genderless people who lobotomize those born with the "aberration" of wanting to identify as a particular gender. Riker falls in love with one of them, who secretly identifies as a woman, and the whole thing turns into a Prime Directive nightmare (while also being an allegory for gay rights).
On the other hand there's "The Host," the first episode with the trill. Crusher falls in love with a (male) trill ambassador and eventually learns about the symbiotes. The original host dies, and the symbiote is transferred into a trill woman. It ends with Crusher giving a pretty bizarre monologue: "Perhaps it is a human failing, but we are not accustomed to these kinds of changes. I can't keep up. How long will you have this host? What would the next one be? I can't live with that kind of uncertainty. Perhaps, someday, our ability to love won't be so limited."
Not to imply that Crusher must be bisexual, but come on, just say it. Don't turn her heterosexuality into quasi-philosophical rambling.
Getting back to the question of Cochrane and the Companion, I can basically give Cochrane's obliviousness a pass. The Companion was a strange ethereal life form, and one can imagine that the mind meld would still be full of ambiguity. Maybe the better question is, why did the Companion have a human screenwriter's understanding of love, when it was an immortal glitter bomb?
Anyway, probably the biggest rug the plot gets swept under is that the Companion apparently kills the ambassador in order to have a human body with which to make Cochrane fall in love. Now there's a dark ending that isn't dwelt upon.
It could be argued that the Companion's nature/understanding evolved after the first mind meld with Cochrane to save his life, possibly introducing it to the concept of emotion at that point. To the point on the Ambassador, the Companion/Ambassador does keep referring to themselves as we, even though it's clearly the Companion in the driver's seat. I'm not as familiar with Next Generation, oddly enough, but should definitely check those episodes out.
I can't imagine the ambassador would really be cool about staying on that little planet, alone with Cochrane, for the rest of "their" "lives." But this is another product of its time issue: The reason they'll be stuck alone is because Cochrane doesn't wanna be bothered by an onslaught of Federation historians and Starfleet fanboys. The ambassador, if she's still there at all, just gets to go along with what the man wants—it's never brought up whether she can be asked what she wants.
So I guess overall I don't think "Metamorphosis" is a very good episode. It's in a cerebral, what's-going-on sort of style, but then what's the point of what's going on? I read one time that theme isn't a word, it's a sentence: a story can't be "about ambition" (for example), but rather, it has to be about how ambition can isolate you from those around you, or how ambition can make you lose touch with yourself, or how ambition will throw you into a world full of sharks.
I can't nail down what "Metamorphosis" is about, thematically. What were the writers trying to tell us? And maybe this is an unfair question, since a television show has to crank out some number of episodes, and a writing team doesn't have time to coherently unify plot, theme, and character every single week. Maybe we should just look at the Companion as a monster of the week, but it's a monstrous kind of love, and there was a mad scramble to tie a bow over the conflict.
Wow, I've never heard that bit about theme being a sentence. Thanks for sharing that, I really appreciate the thought process behind it.
I agree that the episode wasn't paced properly to give every angle a chance to breathe. The Ambassador essentially just exists as set dressing/a prop to drive the story they were trying to tell with Cochrane and the Companion. I think that Metamorphosis is an episode that deserves the Star Trek continues treatment, similar to how Who Mourns for Adonais is continued in the episode I linked. There are a lot of open threads that could be used to tie the story up and give it some more impact and evolve/clarify the theme.
https://youtu.be/3G-ziTBAkbQ