Worf’s back gets broken in a stupid accident! How can a warrior cope with the ultimate “Worf gets knocked down” scenario? By committing ritual suicide, of course. (Spoiler: He doesn’t end up doing it.)

As pointed out in a number of YouTube compilations (especially this one), everyone and everything getting to beat the crap out of Worf (which also came to be known as the “Worf Effect”) was a pretty common thing on The Next Generation. Fun fact: when he signed on to join the cast and story on Deep Space Nine, Michael Dorn specifically had it written into his contract that the writers would stop doing that to Worf, and let him start winning fights for a change.

Jeez, where to begin? This one’s got obvious, deliberate subtext (by which I mean “not sub at all”) relating to contemporary human social treatment of homosexuality and transgenderism, but it really doesn’t hold water.

Ironically, that’s in part because the writers actually did a good job on the episode: when you write a story for an audience that is likely to be deeply divided about some issue(s) you bring up in it, the proper way to do it is something called “debate and switch” in which you resolve the story without resolving the issue(s) debated in it, which is exactly what the writers did here. The reason it doesn’t hold water is that the analogies themselves aren’t particularly honest. Of course, it doesn’t help either that the story’s resolution comes through a science fiction solution that has no analogous real-life counterpart. (If such easy cures for various forms of sexual deviancy existed, believe you me, they would be applied as often and as regularly as vaccines and antibiotics in our society.)

While I’m not too sure about how J’naii reproduction is supposed to work either, their repeated mention of reproducing via “the husk” seems to be suggesting that these days they’re biologically “manufactured” from a centralized plant like kernels of corn on a cob, and their version of sex involves re-injecting some of their genetic material (by one means or another) back into the plant that spawned them, which then recombines it to make more of them. (Let’s just ignore for the moment the icky implications that basically the J’naii reproduce via a science-fiction-y version of parental incest, m’kay?) By implication, that means the J’naii used to be a binary species that reproduced the same way we do back before they created this centralized “husk” thing, and deviants such as the one shown in this story and the other one she mentioned in her conversation with Riker are just genetic throwbacks to the pre-“husk” J’naii.

Of course, if this fan theory of mine is true, that pretty thoroughly undermines the whole sermon about what we in the audience should think of people with same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria. Basically, even if you believe in evolution (which I don’t), the cold logic of natural selection (in which I do believe, this being an observable and well-documented phenomenon) dictates that same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria can not be throwbacks to earlier iterations of our species. Basically, any gene that prevents an individual from reproducing is self-eliminating; and homosexual reproduction is biologically impossible, so none of us can possibly be descended from it.

Of course, your third point about the J’naii cure opens a whole different can of worms on the subject of autonomy and the ethics of curing people who don’t want to be cured. Something I’ve noticed about the perverse and insane identitarian culture that insists all people are born straight/bi/gay, but not born male or female is that it regularly engages in special pleading and appeals to consequences and No True Scotsman fallacies when confronted with questions about more widely despised forms of sexual deviancy such as pedophilia: why don’t these identitarians consider pedophilia a sexual “orientation” the same as heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality? Pedophiles are sexually “oriented” (i.e. attracted) to prepubescent children just as these others are “oriented” toward sexually mature adults of the same or opposite biological sex, after all. Well, that’s different, you see: they don’t consider pedophilia an “orientation” because all sexual orientations should be accepted and encouraged but pedophilia should be despised as a mental disease because having sex with children hurts them and shut up and stop comparing homosexuals to child molesters, you bigot!

I want to believe that the whole script started with someone saying, “You know what would make a good pre-credits teaser? Destroying the Enterprise!”

Well, it worked, didn’t it? As I recall, this was pretty much the process by which D.C. came up with its (in)famous “Death of Superman” story arc: the comic books’ writers and editors regularly held meetings to discuss what they should do with Superman in their next story arc, and almost invariably, someone exercising his wit would joke “Let’s kill him!” Then eventually, when they were short of ideas, they actually decided to roll with that idea.

I’ll bet that’s exactly what happened with the writers on this series as well. “So, guys, what should our next story be?” “Let’s blow up the Enterprise!”