Trigger warning: this episode rewatch discusses rape. And also disease spreading, which might be kind of stressful given, well, the current pandemic.

The opening sequence, always succinct and informative, tells us that the Enterprise is investigating some strange messages coming from a research vessel, the SS Tsiolkovsky. (Trivia: this ship seems to have been named after a Russian rocket scientist who helped pioneer space travel. I love these little details.) The Tsiolkovsky is studying a collapsing star.

And apparently, they are having a grand old time of it. The first thing we hear from the research vessel is “Well hello Enterprise, welcome. I hope you have a lot of pretty boys on board, because I’m willing, and waiting…In fact, we’re going to have a real blowout here…”

Sigh. This is going to be one of those episodes.

It seems like every TV show, even my favorites, has a few episodes that unfailingly make me cringe. This is one of them.

The mood immediately shifts from sexytime, however, when a moment later there’s a bang noise over the communicator, and silence falls. Data identifies the noise as the sound of an emergency hatch being blown.

He also says that it is impossible, which is kind of a stupid thing to say for someone who means everything literally. The ship has an emergency hatch, it’s not impossible to blow it open with people on the ship, it’s just a bad idea. The word Data should have used is implausible. I normally wouldn’t bother with this, but Data is supposed to be the pedantic one. Case in point:

RIKER: “You were right. Somebody blew out the hatch. They were all sucked out into space.”

DATA: “Correction, sir. That’s blown out.”

RIKER, exasperated: “Thank you, Data.”

DATA: “A common mistake, sir.”

It’s a blowout, get it? Get it? Eh, I take my lame puns where I can get them. Also, I’m pretty sure Data is not only pedantic here, but actually wrong. Suction is what you get when you have vacuum in one spot, air in another, and nothing between. Riker didn’t misspeak. That means this whole little back-and-forth is just to remind us of the pun they made two minutes ago. Ha.

Naturally, the Enterprise crew beam aboard the Tsiolkovsky to investigate. At this point, not three minutes into the episode, I’m already this close to screaming at the TV. But we’ll cover the crew’s blunders a bit later in the review.

On board the Tsiolkovsky, they find a bunch of crew members frozen solid. Well, frozen in a thin coat of white powder. Stars above, I thought their special effects crew learned their lesson in the first episode. You can literally watch the extras trying really hard not to move or breathe. Yeesh.

At any rate, someone was “playing with the environmental controls” and managed to bleed off all the heat into space. (Okay, that is a legitimately scary way to die.)

Analyzing the available data, Dr. Crusher can’t find anything wrong with the crew of the Tsiolkovsky, aside from them being dead. No one has any clue as to what might have caused this mysterious insanity, nor even any harebrained guesses. (Is this utter lack of ideas plausible? Not really, but I suppose it’s cleaner than throwing a bunch of hypotheses at the audience.)

We get our first “uh oh” moment on the Enterprise while Dr. Crusher is examining La Forge. Geordi is sweating, and gets mad when they point this out. Very out of character.

Dr. Crusher, concerned, confines La Forge to Sickbay. He walks out anyway. (Sigh).

Then Dr. Crusher, noticing a distinct lack of La Forge in her Sickbay, contacts security. Since La Forge conveniently had the presence of mind to leave his communicator behind, she can’t just call him back. Captain Picard, understanding the gravity of the situation, calls for a shipwide search.

Meanwhile, La Forge is with Wesley, who is showing off a cool little tractor-beam gadget that Wesley built by himself. Wesley also shows off a voice recorder/synthesizer thing that speaks in Captain Picard’s voice. Since tape recorders were invented in 1886, I’m not sure why Wes needs to build a bulky glowy box for the job, but fine, cool sci-fi gadgets are cool. Also, foreshadowing!

La Forge suddenly feels hot, and leaves Wesley with his toys. Yar finds him in the observation lounge staring into space. They have a brief and somewhat touching heart-to-heart in which La Forge expresses his wish for normal sight:

LA FORGE: “Help me to see like you do.”

YAR: “But you already see better than I can.”

LA FORGE: “I see more. But more isn’t better…I wanna see in shallow, dim, beautiful, human ways.”

Slightly contradicting our conclusions from Episode 1, this scene suggests that La Forge can in fact see the visual spectrum with his fancy visor, plus some extra. That makes more sense from a technological standpoint, but it does make me wonder what the heck he is smoking when he asks for “normal” vision.

Okay, rant incoming.

Natural Isn’t Always Better

Why, oh why, would anyone ever want to make their eyesight worse?

Mind you, I’m not discounting the idea that “seeing with one’s own eyes” can appeal for its own sake. It’s in the same sort of ballpark as the concept of Living By Your Own Strength, which is pretty dang important.

But that’s not the same thing, and it’s not the same kind of argument that Star Trek seems to be making here and in many subsequent episodes. Here, La Forge seems to serve as a conduit for the vaguely Star Trekkian notion that all forms of cybernetic enhancement or computer intelligence are always and necessarily inferior in some way to “natural, human” bodies and minds.

What an arrogant thought.

And it’s not just here, either:

• We see it in Spock, who confuses “logic” with “lack of emotion” and who is constantly shown up by mere humans.
• We see it in Kirk, who manages to solve nearly every problem with “instinct” that just happens to be right even when it totally shouldn’t.
• We see it in every robot or artificial intelligence we encounter in the series, which can be fooled into self-destructing by asking it a paradoxical question.
• We see it in Data, who never tells us why he yearns to be human, as we are just supposed to assume “of course he would.”
• We see it every time Riker of the Smug Grin cites “the human equation” in subtle mockery of Data or whichever villain-of-the-week can’t out-think Picard.
• We see it in a bunch of other places that I’ll probably re-notice on this re-watch and maybe expand this list as I spot them again.

And it is bullshit.

Right now, today, there exist in our world people with actual cybernetic replacements or enhancements, most of which are worse than the human version but some of which are better. There’s a guy who wears a massive computer everywhere he goes, there are people who have sex in fursuits, there are people who identify as otherworldly beings and people who identify as squirrels. There’s a double-digit number of genders. Yes, some of these people are crazy and yes, some of them take it too far. But that’s not the point.

Remember this scene from Ready Player One? Just take a moment, pause the video if you have to, and notice the massive diversity in avatars that people choose to represent themselves. That’s not sci-fi, that’s reality. This is what the world would look like if everyone had absolute control over their body and appearance.

Weird? Hah, the joke’s on us – everyone is weird. Some people just wear their weirdness on their sleeves, is all, and everyone else hides it.

What would people add to themselves, if technology allowed? Forget thermal vision, what about full-blown synesthesia? Perfect pitch? Grace and dexterity? Hand-eye coordination? Wings?

If you magicked a set of fully functional angel wings on my back, do you think I’d waste a moment complaining how they weren’t natural? Sorry, no, I’m gonna be way too busy flying to get all philosophical. Oh sure, I might joke about how inconvenient it is to cut a hole in my favorite jacket, but I sure as heck ain’t pining for lost humanity. It makes no difference if the wings are biological or mechanical, either.

There are limits to this sort of self-modification, and there are genuine dangers of going too far. There are some things that it would be a tragedy to lose, and pitfalls like wireheading that could replace a rich and fulfilled life with blissed-out zombiehood. But there’s also tremendous potential.

It’s shortsighted and arrogant to dismiss the entirety of cybernetic tech as inferior, which is what Star Trek seems to do every time the subject comes up on screen.

So maybe La Forge’s blindness is a serious loss to him, and maybe he really, genuinely wants to see with “normal” human eyes, because that’s what matters to him, even if he can already see better through his visor.

Or maybe Star Trek is trying to make a point that doesn’t need to be made.

Sorry, Star Trek. “Natural” isn’t always “better.” Grow up.

Back to the Main Event

Oh, and now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, here’s yet another detail I utterly missed on first viewing: this is our first clue that Geordi is sweet on Tasha. It’s not until he directly calls her “beautiful” in Episode 10 (spoiler, I guess) that this fact becomes sufficiently clear for someone with my level of cluelessness. Yes, yes, I’m oblivious, news at eleven.

That does put this conversation into a bit more perspective. Geordi is drunk and in love, maybe that explains the whole normal-sight fixation. He’s actually being metaphorical.

Eh. My point stands.

At any rate, since the canon seems ambiguous here, I’m going to exercise the Fan’s Right of Interpretation and assume that La Forge actually cannot see the visual spectrum. At least until I see further evidence to the contrary. It makes more sense this way, and honestly I kind of like the implications – he’s making a tradeoff, normal vision for thermal-and-radio vision, one useful enough to keep despite the pain it causes, but one that leaves him vulnerable and emphasizes the need to work together with his friends and fellow officers. You can even make a case for it: his optic nerves can only handle so much information, and he has to sacrifice visual processing to be able to “see” the thermal-to-radio spectrum instead.

This is validated by a quote later in the episode, where La Forge says he’s never seen a rainbow, a sunset, or sunrise. Presumably he would have, if his visor showed the visual spectrum.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Back at Sickbay, La Forge’s condition still baffles everyone. There’s some great foreshadowing, especially when Troi says La Forge seems “intoxicated”, and when Yar wipes her forehead and leaves. (Oh no! It’s spreading!)

Meanwhile, something about this situation jogged Riker’s memory, and he and Data are trying to track it down. It turns out something similar happened on the last Enterprise, captained by one James T. Kirk… this clues the officers into the possible nature of the sickness, and kickstarts the search for a cure. They even have a formula already!

I love this reference, but not for the reason you might think. Yes, it’s a nod to the original series (the fourth episode, in fact), but anyone can reference old episodes. No, what I love about this scene is that it once again reminds us that this is a science vessel, and the thing science does best is to learn. Once we’ve seen and solved a problem before, we can record the solution and share it with the world, so that future scientists, engineers, and eventually random Joes like you or I can enjoy the fruits of that hard work.

I’m so thrilled with this thoughtful approach that I’m going to slide riiiight past the actual chemistry being referenced here. Shifts in gravity! Change water molecules! So they take on carbon! And act like alcohol! Eh, sure, if you say so. It’s not even that implausible, if you ignore the gravity thing.

(But if the root cause is gravity, shouldn’t it be happening to everyone? Or is it just one molecule that got affected and it’s reproducing like a prion disease?)

At any rate, the effects of the gravity-warped-water-molecule-thing are to make people act exquisitely drunk. And horny, apparently, because everyone wants to have sex when they get drunk, right?

Speaking of impaired judgment, next we cut to Troi’s quarters, which for some reason Yar is ransacking for pretty clothes. She’s uncharacteristically giggly and wants to “change her image.”

Let the sitcom drama begin.

There’s an odd little bit of music I can only describe as hissing dangerously, when Troi touches Yar’s hand. Put a pin in that for later, folks, we’ll come back to it when we talk about contagion in the postmortem.

I’m gonna start going a little out of order here, because there are really two plotlines at work.

Party Time!

And here is where the cringe begins. I’ve never liked watching people make fools of themselves. Still, there are some funny moments. Your mileage may vary.

Shortly thereafter, most of the crew of the Enterprise are now embracing and kissing. Yar…struts? Swaggers? (pause while Joe looks up words) sashays across the hall, hips a-swaying, grabs a nameless extra, and starts smooching the heck out of him. Confidence!

On the bridge, we wonder what’s up with that collapsing star. Oh, we can outrun any stellar material it flings at us. No problem at all. Foreshadowing!

WORF: “Sir. I’m getting very strange reports from all decks.”

PICARD: “Such as?”

WORF: “Such as the ship’s training division ordering all officers to attend a lecture on metaphysics.”

PICARD: “Metaphysics?”

DATA: “Confirmed, sir. And there was a rather peculiar limerick being delivered by someone in the shuttlecraft bay. I’m not sure I understand it. ‘There was a young lady from Venus, whose body was shaped like a…’

PICARD: “CAPTAIN TO SECURITY! COME IN!”

DATA: “Did I say something wrong?”

WORF: “I don’t understand their humor either.”

Ah yes, lewd limericks, the pinnacle of human comedy. Although I suppose this is an example of lewd limericks and irony, which of course makes it much more sophisticated. Let us sip our tea and snigger, like the masterful primates we are. Sip. Snigger.

We cut to Yar’s quarters, from whence Data has been asked to fetch her.

Yes, very fetching indeed.

Okay, we just met Lieutenant Yar, we barely got to know her, and already she’s half-naked and seducing someone. Why is it always about sex?

We do actually get some character development here, in addition to the gratuitous semi-nudity. Yar explains that she was abandoned at age five, fled from “rape gangs” (!) for ten years, and escaped the colony at age fifteen.

(How’s that perfect utopia going, Federation? Maybe you ought to leave that particular colony alone until they re-invent warp travel. I’m sure they’ll have fixed all their societal problems by then. And you wouldn’t want to interfere with their culture.)

DATA: “I am sorry. I did not know.”

YAR: “And what I want now is gentleness, and joy, and love. From you, Data. You are fully functional, aren’t you?”

And that’s our Data. His heart is in the right place. You know, metaphorically. Also, we learn that Yar is quite emotionally resilient, as she proceeds in her seduction.

Data’s physical reactions are hilarious. You can see him gulp, at one point. It’s like he’s human after all.

I have to admit this scene is pretty dang funny. Congrats, Yar, you seduced an android. I think that’s a record or something. A Federation first. And how’s that for pillow talk, huh? If you want to seduce a Trekkie, try asking him if he’s fully functional. Hah.

Still…gratuitous fanservice? Objectifying much? I dunno, it seems a little…something.

But wait! There’s more!

DATA: “Of course, but…”

YAR: “How fully?”

DATA: “In every way, of course. I am programmed in multiple techniques. A broad variety of pleasuring.”

Hold up.

You are what? With what?

Why is Data programmed for sex? What were his designers thinking?

Hmmm…I suppose if you’re going to make a human-like android, you may as well go all the way, huh? And you wouldn’t want to be an android who’s programmed for sex and bad at it. So…I guess his designers just did a really thorough job. Thoughtful of them.

But wait! There’s more! This leads into the whole lovely sequence where we get to see Data drunk. Seriously, watch that, it’s hilarious.

Yes, that’s right. You got a robot drunk. And it’s almost as funny as that “low battery” scene from Big Hero 6.

Okay, so in this episode, we learn that not only is Data not a robot, he’s not even close. He’s an android, and apparently in Star Trek that means that he runs on biology like everybody else. Or, something sorta like biology, but not. Except maybe his brain? Because he keeps talking about his circuits and stuff? And he has pores and “chemical nutrients.” So maybe he’s a chunk of circuitry inside a sack of meat?

You’re getting more human by the day, Data. At this point I’m starting to wonder what’s left to yearn for. Slap an artificial amygdala in there, and you’ll be good to go.

And now I’m wondering where his super-strength comes from. Artificial muscles? Does he need to breathe? If not, why not? If he does, why’d they bother? What other super-biology is he hiding? Is there a Khan on a hamster wheel in there?

Mysteries on mysteries. Wheels within wheels.

Next, Counselor Troi starts hitting on Riker. Who can blame, her, really? In addition to the intoxicant (which she caught from Yar), she also has this empath thing as an excuse – apparently she can’t turn it off, and simultaneously eavesdropping on every sexual encounter on the Enterprise has her wound up.

Do you think empaths are creepy now?

TROI: “It’s a side of humans I never felt before…”

Wait, what? What is? Love? Lust? These should not be new concepts to you, Troi. You called Riker “beloved” when we first saw the two of you together. You’re also a half-human adult woman, and an empath, and a counselor. Whaddaya mean, “never felt before”?!? How could you go your entire life and not?!?

Riker does the right thing, and takes Troi to Sickbay, where he accidentally infects Dr. Crusher. 

Learn some respect for personal space, dude. Social distancing!

And then, of course, Dr. Crusher starts hitting on Picard, which I suppose sets the stage for some interesting sexual tension later on. For the most part, their flirting is funny and endearing, except…

CRUSHER: “You owe me something. You do realize that, don’t you? I’m a woman. I haven’t had the comfort of a husband. A man…”

Do…do people really talk like that? Ever? “I’m a woman, I have needs?” It pops up every now and then in books and movies. I guess writers think it’s sexy. But I’ve never heard a woman say anything remotely like that before, except maybe as a joke. It’s also kind of creepy and cringe-inducing.

I’m genuinely curious now. Women, have you ever said this? Men, have you ever heard it? Is this just something that fiction writers think women say, or is there any actual truth to it?

On Seduction, Consent, and Double Standards

Okay, so now we’ve got Women 3, Men 0 on the Attempted Seductionometer. I’m not counting La Forge hitting on Yar, because that was so subtle that I missed it the first time, and no sex was actually solicited. I think.

So, what’s with that? You sure don’t hear guys going around saying, “I’m a man, I have needs, my wife died on your watch, you owe me sex.”

Wait. You do, actually, hear guys saying that sort of thing. More often than women, in fact. Huh.

That’s a horrifying thought.

Come to think of it, we don’t really see any drunk-acting men going around the Enterprise trying to act all seductive, do we? So, if a woman goes up to a man and starts begging for sex, it’s attractive, but switch the genders around and…

Mental image loading…loading…mental image obtained.

…Yeah, then it just becomes creepy and appalling, doesn’t it. I’m pretty sure this is sexist but I’m honestly not sure which direction. On the one hand, double standards, kind of a raw deal for men. On the other, yikes. Men tend to be bigger and stronger, and women have a lot of reasons to fear. Reverse the situations, and Tasha Yar is just about the only one who’d stand a chance of escaping, physically, and Data has super-strength…

At least this explains why it’s the women on the Enterprise doing the seducing.

Can we maybe all agree that whatever your gender, if you want to have sex with someone you should just ask nicely? And maybe if they say no, you should leave them alone? Also maybe don’t get blackout drunk if you do this kind of thing when you’re inebriated?

Even though the cause of this is alien mindscrewery, not anyone’s fault in particular, that’s small consolation for anyone on the wrong end of a drunken, horny crewmember. Especially if you’re not the sort of person who wants to have sex when you’re drunk. Someone on the Enterprise is going to need help after this. The episode glosses over that neatly, but it’s no joke.

And if that doesn’t sober us up…

Don’t Drink and Derive

While all of this is happening, an intoxicated Wesley has ambled over to Engineering, lured away the chief engineers with his high-tech Picard tape recorder, given himself sole command of the Enterprise, put up a forcefield with his little tractor-beam gadget, and started playing with the controls. Truly, Wes is the soul of resourcefulness.

Funnily enough, he doesn’t actually break anything; it’s not until the drunken assistant chief engineer starts playing Jenga with the main computer’s “isolinear optical chips” that things start going to pot.

To be fair, Wesley infected him in the first place, but can you really blame the guy for wanting to play? It’s a starship! With glowy buttons! And he knows what they all do!

WESLEY: “And henceforth, a dessert course shall precede and follow every meal…”

Uh, writers, he’s fifteen and a genius, not nine and hungry. Sometimes I think adults have forgotten how kids actually think. And also what qualifies as a “kid.”

But now the star’s collapsing, the Enterprise is stuck trying to tractor-beam the Tsiolkovsky out of orbit, and nobody can get to Engineering to power the impulse or warp engines because there’s a forcefield in the way. Riker and the still-sober Chief Engineer MacDougal are trying to hotwire their way into Engineering, but things aren’t looking good.

Aside: Chief Engineer MacDougal looks like the sort of woman who makes Scotch whisky think twice before it messes with her brain. I don’t know if she can get intoxicated. She’s kind of the anti-Scotty.

Here we observe the noble engineers in their native habitat.

The collapsing star flings a chunk of debris at the Enterprise, and the Enterprise can’t move out of the way because its control computer is currently sitting on the floor of Engineering in a hundred pieces. Bad news for all.

(This particular computer state is known to IT technicians as a “weird glitch”, and the recommended solution is “turn it off and on again.”)

Eventually MacDougal the Severe manages to discombabulate the frazzoppler thwip, and the forcefield drops. She takes over Engineering from the drunks, and calls the bridge. The officers realize it’s going to take forever to put all the computer chips back in the right order, and so they call in drunk-Data for his widely-recognized superhuman skill at insertion. Wink, wink.

(What? It’s a sex episode, there are sex jokes).

Unfortunately, even Data isn’t moving fast enough. (Wink). They need to buy a little more time for the android to finish… his work.

Is this the end for our heroes?

Enter Wesley, who, while still drunk out of his mind, rejiggers the tractor beam to repel the Tsiolkovsky. The repolarized beam bounces the Tsiolkovsky into the path of the giant rock, and boosts the Enterprise away. This maneuver buys the Enterprise just enough time to repair the computer and push the big red button labeled “Aaaahhhh! Run!”

If anyone doubted that Wesley was a whiz kid, now we know. I can’t give him too much credit for solving a problem that he caused, but considering how inebriated he was when this whole mess started, that part’s not really his fault.

At any rate, Dr. Crusher synthesizes a cure in the nick of time. She and Picard, after some goofy intoxicated flirting, start dosing everyone back to sanity.

Now everything’s back to normal, if you ignore all the redshirts we traumatized off-screen.

Postmortem

Alright, let’s break this down. Was this whole fiasco avoidable?

Well, to put it bluntly, yes. Yes it was. Let’s do a little Roses and Thorns.

Firstly, the Roses. What do the Enterprise crew do right?

1. The captain orders full quarantine and decontamination when the away team returns.
2. Dr. Crusher catches La Forge’s symptoms immediately and confines him to Sickbay.
3. For the most part, the officers (especially Picard and Crusher) treat the sickness as a grave and serious threat.
4. Dr. Crusher asks her son to stay in quarters, even before she knows he’s intoxicated.

All of these are sound precautions, and way more sane than you would see in most movies or shows involving contagious diseases. Kudos to the writers for inserting them.

Okay, that’s some pretty good decision-making here. Now let’s talk Thorns. What do they do wrong?

1. When they first beam aboard the Tsiolkovsky, they already have strong evidence that something on board the vessel drove its entire crew insane. “Contagious toxin” ought to be high on the list of possible threats, and beaming over there in anything short of full HAZMAT suits is downright silly. The Enterprise is a science vessel, you know they have access to HAZMAT suits; if all else fails they can materialize some. This sort of shenanigans are literally the reason HAZMAT suits exist.
2. Speaking of Personal Protective Equipment, Dr. Crusher does a lot of tests on her patients. Not once do I ever see her wearing gloves or a mask. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think we ever see a Star Trek doctor wearing anything more protective than a lab coat. Shame.
3. When they notice La Forge’s symptoms at the start, they utterly fail to keep him properly contained or quarantined, and he just walks out of Sickbay. This is negligence of the sort that you can legally prosecute in real hospitals.

Why these blunders? Well, (1) and (2) are obvious – if the crew are wearing HAZMAT gear, we can’t see their dashing faces, not to mention their sexy skintight sashayable Starfleet uniforms. It’s the same reason soldiers don’t wear helmets on TV. Can’t exactly fault the writers here, even if it breaks immersion. Star Trek does this sort of thing all the time.

But (3) seems especially stupid to me. It’s kind of like in zombie movies when Patient Zero starts shuffling around muttering “braaaiiinnnssss” and the doctors just sort of shrug and put him back in bed. Actually it’s worse than that: it’s like the doctors putting Mr. Brains back in bed while there are zombies outside clawing at the windows. Dr. Crusher is concerned, but she ought to be way more cautious. There are a pile of frozen corpses one vessel over that show just how bad it could get. La Forge was showing signs of the exact insanity that killed an entire crew; he should have been restrained or at least guarded at all times. You better believe that’s the protocol on my starship. And we don’t even have as a defense “oh, we’ve never seen this sort of thing before” because Starfleet totally has seen it before on Kirk’s ship.

You could argue that (3) kind of had to happen if there was going to be a plot, but I don’t think it was necessary; just make the virus-thingy something airborne, and now it’s everywhere. Or have La Forge infect a couple other people before being confined to Sickbay. Or make the gravity-warping affect everybody’s molecules, maybe some faster than others. No, the real reason for (3) was that we need to ramp up the suspense for the audience. I kind of hate it when drama and realism conflict, but that’s TV for you.

Of note: I missed this detail in the first watch, but if you follow this episode carefully, you can actually see some fairly cool epidemiology at work. The toxin in question is transmitted by touch; La Forge catches it on board the Tsiolkovsky when a frozen corpse falls out of a closet on him (ew). He passes it to Wesley, then to Yar when she walks him back to Sickbay. Yar then infects Troi and Data. Wes infects Assistant Chief Engineer Shimosa. Riker, while he does hover uncomfortably close to a lot of people, never actually touches anyone infected until Troi accosts him in Engineering. Dr. Crusher picks it up from Troi during an examination, then passes it to Picard. Apparently neither of them can hold their metaphorical liquor as well as Riker, who stays sober the longest after exposure.

There are also a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle cues about who is affected and how badly. People wiping their foreheads, sweating, or complaining about the heat; Picard’s little mannerism changes; even the extras get to perspire and wander around embracing each other and moaning. It’s quite effective.

Overall, I think the writers did a decent job of balancing the competing demands of drama and realism. They can’t simulate a full-blown epidemiological containment program, and they probably did about as well as could be expected without consulting an actual pandemic scientist. Limits of television. Still, the differences between TV Logic and Real Logic are worth pointing out – they can draw our attention to what truly competent precautions entail.

Wear a friggin’ mask, people. And stay six feet apart.

Bonus Thoughts

Why is it that the crew of the Enterprise can manually dock the saucer and battle modules, but they can’t manually fly the ship in a straight line away from a rock? Do you really need a computer for “go faster that way”? Eh, maybe it’s to control the reactor or something.

A Crush on Crusher?

I didn’t bring it up earlier, but Dr. Crusher’s, ah, encounters with Picard are actually kind of funny. There’s some great acting from them both. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a harrumph before, but Picard manages two in a row. Crusher displays a truly staggering array of distressed, stiff, and casually intimate body language. Picard gives her a silly little wave as she gets on the turbolift, and we see him do a cute little hop when he goes to Sickbay to check on the cure. The poor guy is so out of his depth, trying to do all his serious captaining over a shipful of drunk cats, then catching it himself. But we know he’s at least a little sweet on Dr. Crusher, now, so it’s mutual! Maybe in 50 episodes, something will come of it. Ugh, romantic subplots and their foot-dragging…

This Blows

A final thought: Why did the Tsiolkovsky’s captain blow the emergency hatch on the bridge? Was it some drunk’s idea of a joke? Seems like a stretch that someone was lucid enough to disable the automatic safeties (remember, there are always automatic safeties) and push the necessary buttons to vent the bridge to space, yet impaired enough to think it’s a good idea.

But I’ve seen some really stupid decisions made by drunk people, so I guess it’s not that much of a stretch. Sometimes you just need to decompress, right? Right?

Right?

Stay tuned for the next e-vent. I’m out.

Joe drifts dramatically off into the cold darkness of space…