It certainly doesn't help that Soren here is performed by Melinda Culea in dull, relentless monotone - no doubt to make her seem more androgynous.
OUTCAST BEYOND CONTACT TV
(Might it have been more of a challenging choice, for example, to have Soren be played by a man instead of a woman?)Īlso, since Riker is presumably, from all past evidence, 100 percent heterosexual, how exactly would sex even work between him and the genderless Soren? I suppose the message here is that romantic love can transcend sexuality, but the episode sort of glosses over this issue while at the same time purporting that Riker can fall in love with Soren in a matter of days, a TV cliché I never find convincing. But airing in 1992, this strikes me as gutless. Maybe if this episode had aired in 1967 as part of TOS, I could forgive the tap dance. The writers dance around the subject completely, as if afraid to offend their audience. Riker and Soren have lengthy conversations about sexuality and human sex roles (and these discussions touch upon only the most conventional of sexual and gender roles, ignoring the rest), but there isn't so much as a word that homosexuality exists - or ever existed in human history. Every once in a while, Trek will decide to tackle an issue head-on (in this case, acceptance of gays) and go all-out preaching a message "The Outcast" is such an episode.īut there's a fundamental flaw in the conception of "The Outcast," which is that it's so obviously an allegory about the discriminatory issues facing gays, and yet, in the 24th century, there apparently is no such thing as homosexuality. "The Outcast" is a Star Trek message episode, plain and simple - an allegory that is born of good intentions about tolerance and acceptance.
Such identifications are forbidden and those individuals are subject to a psychotherapy "treatment" that eradicates those "abnormal" feelings. It turns out that the Genai once had male and female sexes but have since "evolved" into asexual beings - their current-day reproduction involves a baby being grown in a husk or something - but occasionally there are some Genai who identify with one gender or the other. The Enterprise comes to the assistance of the Genai, a race that has no gender, to help retrieve the crew of a shuttle that went missing in a mysterious void of "null space." Riker teams up with one of the Genai, named Soren (Melinda Culea), and in the process of their investigation Riker learns more about Soren and the Genai society. Star Trek: The Next Generation "The Outcast"
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