Entertainment
The Secretly Raunchy Star Trek Episode That Could Never Be Made Today
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek: The Next Generation had several surprisingly naughty episodes, including “The Naked Now” (where Tasha Yar finds out Data was programmed to be a love machine) and “Sub Rosa” (where Dr. Crusher gets down and dirty with her grandmother’s ghost boyfriend). Nobody really thinks of “The Game” as a dirty episode, though, because it features very little sex outside of Riker picking up a dangerously addictive game from his latest alien booty call. However, episode writer Brannon Braga later revealed a raunchy little secret: all of the Enterprise crew who get infected by the parasitic video game experience onscreen orgasms.
First, some context: in “The Game,” Starfleet Academy cadet Wesley Crusher has returned to the Enterprise, eager to catch up with his mother and his many shipboard friends. But they are more than a bit distracted because Riker got everyone hooked on a weird video game that feels insanely good to play. That’s because completing levels stimulates the pleasure centers of a player’s brain, causing intense addiction; this leads to the ship nearly getting hijacked, but Wesley and his new friend Robin Lefler (played by Ashley Judd) manage to re-activate Data and save the day.
Getting The High Score On Sex
One of the most notable features in “The Game” is that we can see the effect that the titular game has on fan-favorite Next Generation characters like Riker. When someone completes a level, the game lights up their pleasure centers, making them feel good right away. Most fans always assumed this was to emphasize the game’s addictive nature; after all, the faces these actors pull make it seem like their characters just replicated and consumed the finest heroin in the galaxy.
However, “The Game” writer Brannon Braga later set the story straight when discussing the Next Generation episode “Sub Rosa.” If you don’t already know, this episode is infamous for making Dr. Crusher impossibly horny: she reads her grandmother’s erotic journal entries and ultimately has ghost sex with grandma’s spooky slampiece. Oh, and Picard walks in on her, an interruption that prevents the, um, warp core breach that Dr. Crusher is working towards.
Paging Dr. Love
In Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, Brannon Braga mentions how he thought the sex in “Sub Rosa” (an episode he wrote) was “mild by comparison” to what he had written for his earlier episode. According to him, Dr. Crusher’s infamous scene in “Sub Rosa” wasn’t a big deal to him because, “I scripted the first orgasm in ‘The Game.’”
That’s right, Star Trek fans! Every time you see your favorite Next Generation characters making those happy faces in “The Game,” they are supposed to be experiencing honest-to-God orgasms. This is straight from Braga himself, who apparently took his own perverse pleasure sneaking a series of “O faces” past network censors without getting any real pushback.
A Raunchy Episode Hiding In Plain Sight
In retrospect, Braga wasn’t exactly subtle in his writing; pull up the script for “The Game” online, and his description of the game’s effect on the Enterprise’s first officer makes things quite clear. “Suddenly, Riker’s entire body tenses up,” the script reads. “A moment, then he relaxes and lets out a small gasp. Like he’s experienced a brief moment of internal pleasure.”
As he gets better, the erotic nature of the game gets the better of him. According to Braga’s script, after Riker completes the second level, he ‘lets out a gasp of even greater pleasure,” which is the last thing we see during the cold open. Riker’s own ecstatic O-face is the last thing you see before the opening credits, perfectly setting the tone for one of TNG’s naughtiest episodes.
Nobody ever really clocked how raunchy “The Game” was, and most fans chalked the characters’ apparent onscreen pleasure up to the drug-like effect of the game. Now, we know the truth: that our favorite characters were getting their rocks off onscreen, over and over again. Given this information, I don’t need to be a Betazed to read Brannon Braga’s mind: I sense great freakiness, captain!