YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E17 "The Outcast"

• Anvilicious: Whatever your attitude on its effectiveness, there's certainly no questioning how loud the Gay Aesop of the episode is.
• Fair for Its Day: The episode really shows its age, but as a Gay Aesop episode airing in 1992, it could have been a lot worse.
  • The episode uses gender identity as a science fiction stand-in to address homosexuality, failing to anticipate that gender identity would itself become a part of the greater LGBT movement. It simply wasn't on most people's radars in 1992.
  • The show never even acknowledges homosexuality in the 24th century. This was most likely due to content restrictions on prime-time broadcast television shows in 1992, several years before Ellen Degeneres coming out on her show was considered revolutionary. It's limited to expressing support for gay rights through metaphor, though it's not exactly subtle.
  • The episode is frequently criticized for not having Soren played by a male actor to make the gay aesop more explicit (Jonathan Frakes was apparently very much in favor of this). While this would obviously have been difficult to pull off due to the social mores of its broadcast date, it also would have muddled the Persecution Flip metaphor. The episode's tactic was to gain the sympathy of a 1990s audience by presenting the argument for gay rights through the defense of an explicitly heterosexual relationship.
  • When asked about gender roles, Riker and Crusher largely describe them along traditional lines, though they're clearly just acting as an Audience Surrogate for people in the 1990s to wrap their heads around the concept of a society without gender roles.
• Funny Moments: "Commander, tell me about your sexual organs."
• Retroactive Recognition: Megan Cole, who plays Noor, also played Peggy, Elaine's "germophobic" co-worker on Seinfeld.
• Strangled by the Red String: Ladies man Riker falls so hard for Soren that he has to have a whole scene with Troi about how his relationship with Soren will affect them. Yet this is after only a few scenes of mild flirtation mostly centered around a discussion of gender.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A lot of commentators, particularly those writing long after its air date, have criticized the episode for many missed opportunities to be more explicit and address a lot more facets of gender identity and sexual orientation than it did.
  • Jonathan Frakes himself criticized the episode for not having Soren played by a male actor to make the Gay Aesop more explicit.
  • The answers that Soren's questions receive about gender roles in the Federation try to walk a tightrope between representing the 24th century Federation as an idealized society while also being an Audience Surrogate to the 1990s audience being presented the concept of a genderless society. As such, Riker and Crusher's perspectives come across as a little shallow.
  • The "psychotectic therapy" is used to quickly wrap up the episode with a Downer Ending, but the ethics of that idea alone could have made up a large part of an episode.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Riker is tripped up by what pronoun to use for J'naii individuals and says that his language's only option for gender-neutral is "it", which he even says is wrong for obvious reasons. Just a few decades later, a variety of neopronouns arose to address just this problem, with the "singular they" being the most common.
• Values Resonance: The episode might be clumsy and wishy-washy as a metaphor for sexual orientation, but in recent years, some trans people have expressed finding that it is more straightforward and works better as a story about gender identity.

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