35 Years Ago, Star Trek Retroactively Created New Canon, And No One Noticed
One blistering Next Gen episode still holds up.
Star Trek fans familiar with the franchise’s 1990s output know that the Cardassians fought Starfleet for at least a decade and a half before the start of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. This infamous alien species remains iconic and relevant, and deeply rooted in the TNG/DS9 era’s deft handling of allegorical stories that reflected real-life geopolitics. But do you know when and how the Cardassians were first introduced? Deep into its fourth season, smack in the middle of TNG’s golden age, the show showed us the Cardassians as though we’d known about them all along. Today, this slick retcon sits comfortably in an episode that holds up not only because of the story it tells, but because it subtly redefined Starfleet’s status quo.
“The Wounded” aired on January 28, 1991, right after the fan-favorite “Data’s Day” managed to convince viewers that Keiko (Rosalind Chao) had been a long-standing civilian member of the crew, even though she was only introduced the moment she and Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney) were married. In an era before serialized sci-fi became the norm, TNG had perfected the trick of casually introducing a new character, then immediately capitalizing on our newfound closeness to them. The earlier Season 4 episode “Family,” for example, did this by giving us Picard’s brother, nephew, and sister-in-law all at once.
Captain Maxwell (Bob Gunton) and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) square off in “The Wounded.”
Much of this character-focused storytelling came from script editor Michael Piller, who, starting with Season 3, focused many TNG episodes on specific characters. “The Wounded” is, oddly enough, a Chief O’Brien episode. While a beloved TNG character who’d become an important regular on Deep Space Nine, O’Brien wasn’t part of the main cast. The choice to focus on his confused loyalties to renegade Captain Benjamin Maxwell (Bob Gunton) is interesting, because not only was TNG retroactively introducing a formidable alien race, but doing so through a character study of a supporting player.
The set-up of “The Wounded” is excellent: the Enterprise is supposed to meet with a Cardassian ship, but quickly learns that another Starfleet ship, the Phoenix, has been attacking Cardassian vessels. We learn that Picard also fought the Cardassians when he was on the Stargazer, and so the Cardassians are suddenly much like the Romulans were in The Original Series; old enemies who now have an uneasy truce with the Federation. But the rogue Maxwell claims the Cardassians are up to something, and he’s blowing up their ships to stop it.
“The Wounded” was only the second episode featuring the O’Briens as a couple.
While this set-up makes it sound like an action-packed episode, nearly all the phasers and photon torpedoes are fired off-screen. The tension here is all deeply personal; O’Brien is dealing with PTSD from fighting the Cardassians years prior, and Maxwell has totally snapped, having lost his entire family to a Cardassian raid.
Gunton could have played Maxwell as a one-note lunatic, but you get the sense that he really is broken. The actor was a Vietnam veteran, and you can sense some real military training (and real pain) in all his scenes. The only person who can get Maxwell to stop his reign of terror is O’Brien, who joins him in singing an old Irish hymn thought to commemorate the many losses of the Irish Rebellion. The tender moment conveys a sense that Maxwell is still fighting a battle that ended long ago, and while he’s ultimately proven correct about the Cardassians being up to something, it wasn’t his place to destroy a fragile peace.
Picard and Gul Macet, the first Cardassian played by Marc Alaimo.
With the conclusion of “The Wounded,” TNG gained new cold warriors in the Cardassians, a massive piece of Trek mythology who would shape Deep Space Nine and help kick off Voyager. Alamio’s portrayal of Macet was so good that he later played recurring DS9 villain Gul Dukat, a character Paul Giamatti said inspired the portrayal of his own villain in Starfleet Academy.
Thirty-five years ago, though, “The Wounded” was just one more Next Gen episode focused on a specific character. It was building out the Enterprise’s extended family and giving us insight into haunted starship captains who weren’t our intrepid heroes. But with the sly introduction of the Cardassians, the episode also took The Next Generation into darker, more morally dubious territory, setting up not just some of its greatest episodes, but the premise of Deep Space Nine just a few years later. Not bad for an hour of television.
