6:7 Rascals – A transporter oopsie accidentally deletes a jot and tittle in the DNA of Picard, Guinan, Ensign Ro and Keiko O’Brien, materializing them all as 10-to-12-year-old child actors. Aside from the awkwardness while Dr. Crusher figures out what happened and how to reverse it, it wouldn’t really be a problem… except then the Enterprise is taken over by a handful of rogue Ferengi with a couple of surplus Klingon birds of prey.
Seriously?
Seriously? THAT’S what took over the Enterprise?
I guess it’s a good thing it was Ferengi; if it had been a REAL enemy like the Cardassians, there’s no way a bunch of kids could have played Home Alone and saved the day. But that’s what happens: With the adults incapacitated, the kids have to rescue everyone! (And that’s not just the recently juvenilated adults; other youngsters like Alexander help retake the ship from their base of operations in the ship’s daycare area. In case it escaped anyone’s attention, Having children on the Enterprise is a frickin’ bad idea.)
That’s just so… embarrassing. You just know that, when all the officers were free and the crisis averted, they looked at each other and said, “We will never speak of this again, or all of us would be discharged.”
6:8 A Fistful of Datas – There’s a running competition between the Holodeck and the shuttlecraft: which one of these supposedly “safe” technologies is a bigger threat to life and limb? This time, the Holodeck gets to carry the torch: Everyone on the Enterprise has some downtime, so Alexander ropes Worf into playing out a Wild West adventure (and Deanna decides to hitch along). But Geordi and Data are also using their downtime to test if Data’s positronic net can fill in for the ship’s computer in a pinch. Thanks to a plot-specific power surge, Data’s programming overwrites several sections of the computer’s “entertainment” files, which means that suddenly all of the villains in the Wild West are now overwritten with Data, including his abilities. And the safety interlocks are offline, naturally, because nothing fails more often than the Holodeck interlocks.
A fun episode, but it also justifies putting a “PERMANENTLY OUT OF ORDER” sign on the Holodeck doors.
6:9 The Quality of Life – A scientist working on a new power station technology that the Enterprise is helping out with has engineered some small problem-solving robots that she calls “Exocomps” which Data has reason to suspect are…
…Okay, this episode annoys me like few others, mainly because of how that sentences gets ended. Everyone starts talking about whether the Exocomps are “alive.” Because everyone talks about Data as being “alive.” Except: He’s not. He’s conscious/sentient/self-aware/however you want to put it, but “alive” is not a word you should apply to him except in a colloquial sense. And you definitely shouldn’t apply it to the Exocomps, which are entirely artificial little units without any communications ability — the only thing that makes Data suspect they’re “alive” is that, in the course of the self-programming which makes their problem-solving abilities so “amazing” (not really that amazing, but whatever), they’ve also developed a self-preservation behavior, to the degree that they will burn out their own command circuits to avoid being ordered into situations which will destroy them.
So everyone keeps speaking as if this makes them “a lifeform,” even though the issue is whether they’re sentient, not whether they’re biological. the goalposts get switched almost sneakily when Troi, in the course of a conversation, substitutes “intelligent lifeform” for the earlier “lifeform” and no one calls her on it.
The whole story is based on lazy thinking and misdefinition of words, and it gives me a rash.
Aw, yeah: that’s possibly my favorite “bad” episode of the entire Star Trek franchise! As other fans and critics have pointed out over the years, this episode had the characters make a truly awesome discovery (i.e. how to use transporter technology to rejuvenate people) and then the franchise’s writers and characters totally allowed it to go to waste by never following up on it. (Just to rub a little more proverbial salt in the wound, some Trekkie out there then wrote a pretty good fan fiction that totally did follow up on it.) As some of those fans and critics also pointed out, if the characters ever had realized what a fountain of youth they’d just discovered and handed it over to Starfleet’s researchers to work out the kinks (e.g. maybe get the transporter to reduce you to a twenty-something adult rather than a prepubescent child), the whole plot of the Star Trek: Insurrection movie would never have needed to happen.
Fun fact: this episode’s editor and writer Ronald D. Moore (who really didn’t want to write this story, but did the job anyway) agrees with you! In the scene where the Ferengi Daimon Lurin threatens to kill all the children if Riker doesn’t give him control of the ship and implicitly calls out the Federation for so recklessly endangering those children by sending them out on its flagship on these risky missions along with their parents, that’s basically Moore getting in several jabs at Gene Roddenberry and his fellow executives for insisting on the Federation doing something so obviously foolish as that just so they could have stories about children on the show.
Well, somebody must have blabbed, since Odo later trolled Worf over this when he complained about how comparatively lax security supposedly was on Deep Space Nine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzhgEGeKcbo
Judging by Worf’s reaction, neither he nor any of the others involved in this incident ever lived it down.
My favorite parts of that episode: the awkwardness between the adolescent Picard and everyone under his command, the just kill me now look on his face as he contemplates his prospects of returning to Starfleet Academy to “be Wesley’s roommate,” rejuvenated Guinan telling rejuvenated Ro what a “cute kid” she is (which she totally is!), the prepubescent Keiko O’Brien failing to understand why her husband is so creeped out by her affectionate cuddling with him, Picard having to sacrifice a little more of his dignity by throwing a childish temper tantrum demanding to see his “father” Riker, and Riker totally BSing a Ferengi with a bunch of made-up technobabble.
Honestly, if the writers had scrapped the absurd B-story about the Ferengi taking over the ship with a couple of space jalopies and just focused on all the A-story’s comic-and-yet-sometimes-disturbing social implications of adults being physically (but not mentally) turned back into children, that episode would have been way better. As it is, it’s nowhere near so good a story in itself as it is an inspiration for other better stories like that aforementioned bit of fan fiction.