One Mind-Blowing Star Trek Twist Remains Awesome
Let's revisit the timey-wimest cameo in Star Trek history.
In June 1991, at the end of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s history-making fourth season, it was never going to be possible to top the season finale of the previous year in 1990. Within less than two years, during the run of Season 3 and Season 4, and during the history-making year of the 25th anniversary of the entire Star Trek franchise, The Next Generation had gone from an underdog curiosity to a massive mainstream hit. As TNG surpassed the number of episodes produced by the original Star Trek, it was also just getting started. And so, when it came time for the Season 4 finale, which aired during the week of June 17, 1991, TNG was in a place of confidence and comfort, and smartly, didn’t even try to top the cliffhanger of “The Best of Both Worlds Part 1” from 1990.
Instead, 35 years ago, with its Season 4 finale, “Redemption Part 1,” TNG dropped a lore-heavy episode that also introduced a wild twist that still makes everyone’s head hurt to this day.
Although TNG is generally thought of as an episodic TV series, at least relative to the more heavily serialized Deep Space Nine, the truth is, TNG pioneered serialized continuity in a huge way, and much of that was thanks to the Klingons. Starting with Season 3 in the episode “Sins of the Father,” writer Ronald D. Moore was able to introduce an overarching plot element to TNG, a status quo that would evolve and carry over to future episodes: The turmoil and corruption within the Klingon Empire. In Season 3, we learned that the treacherous House of Duras was appeased to prevent an outright internal eruption within the Empire, and in Season 4, that got worse when Duras (Patrick Massett) himself murdered Worf’s (Michael Dorn) beloved K'Ehleyr (Suzie Plakson). The stakes for Worf were personal — he had accepted a public lie of family dishonor — but the political machinations within the Klingon Empire were even bigger.
TNG basically kept the possibility of Klingon civil wars on the back burner for two seasons, but by the Season 4 finale, with “Redemption Part 1,” everything blew up. The hows and whys of why different Klingons were fighting each other are less interesting than the fact that they were. In fact, in wonderful Star Trek-y fashion, an episode that sets up new space wars begins with a conference room scene in which incoming Klingon leader, Gowron (the incomparable Robert O’Reilly and his EYES) just tells Picard (Patrick Stewart) that even though Duras has been deceased, his family is still influential and that “their corruption has poisoned the Empire.”
This platitude is pretty much good enough to get the episode going, and nearly everything about “Redemption Part 1” builds to the moment where it seems that Worf is going to leave the Enterprise forever. This is the famous moment where the entire crew lines up and bids Worf farewell while he’s decked out in his Klingon uniform.
Worf leaving the Enterprise at the end of "Redemption Part 1." This was oddly not the true cliffhanger.
But here’s the rub, the great cliffhanger in “Redemption Part 1” isn’t that Worf leaves the ship. It’s what happens right afterwards, in the final moments. In case you didn’t believe Gowron, that there was a ton of corruption in the Empire, that corruption is given a face. The Romulans are back, colluding with a shadowy figure, briefly teased, who is revealed to be someone who looks exactly like Tasha Yar! Her final line in the episode is also great: “We should not discount Jean-Luc Picard yet. He’s human. And humans have a way of showing up when you least expect them.”
“Redemption Part 1” could have ended with Worf leaving the ship, and the audience wondering if he was really getting written out of the show, but the brilliance of revealing that the new Romulan mastermind was somehow connected to Tasha was a moment where TNG was flexing all of its continuity at the same time. Later, we learn this character is named Sela, and she’s the daughter of an alternate Tasha, who traveled back in time from an alternate timeline created in the Season 3 episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Tasha was also the security officer in TNG Season 1, which means, visually, an episode that seemed to write out her successor in that role, also brought her visage back.
Is that Tasha? Why is she a Romulan!??
While that bit of writing might not have been entirely intentional, the soap opera-ish drama of the reappearance of Denise Crosby as a Romulan, but talking about the danger of humans, made “Redemption Part 1” more mind-bending than leaving the audience with the simple question of: Will Worf leave the show, or what?
The timey-wimey explanation for Sela’s basic existence would have to wait until “Redemption Part II,” and the kick-off of TNG Season 5. But at this moment, TNG managed to deliver another show-stopping finale that left the fans with a bittersweet feeling of a long-awaited comeback. A familiar face was back, yes, but this time, as a villain.
