7:21 Firstborn – Worf gets a character episode! Worf may stop being such a terrible father! (Seriously, the only two ongoing examples of parenthood we every get are Worf and Lwaxana Troi, and they’re in a contest to see which is a better argument for decanting.) Buncha talk about warriors and honor and the usual Klingon blah-bah.
7:22 Bloodlines – Picard gets a character episode! Unfortunately, it’s “Picard discovers his illegitimate son.” (They’re really sweeping up the scraps on the writers room floor, aren’t they? This one was, “Hey, let’s do The Wrath of Khan!”) Among things we’re supposed to swallow:
- The 24th century still doesn’t have any reliable form of birth control.
- More specifically, Picard individually didn’t have any reliable form of birth control.
- A disavowed Ferengi Daimon has the pull to discover a decades-old minor indiscretion on Picard’s part, which may — just may — have led to a child.
- Said Ferengi can also re-sequence someone’s entire DNA without that person knowing, just to evidence kinship.
- Starfleet had researched subspace transporter technology, which can transport living beings through shields over multiple light years, and which is simple enough that Data can whip up a working prototype in less time than it takes Geordi to run a diagnostic… and Starfleet abandoned the research because it “wasn’t reliable”? Good lord.
7:23 Emergence – Not having learned their “mashup two better episodes” lesson with “Masks” earlier this season, this episode combines “Phantasms” with the sixth season’s “The Quality of Life” (the one with the Exocomps, which really I didn’t like) and gets something worse than either. Apparently the Enterprise‘s computer is starting to spontaneously spawn an emergent intelligence, which self-organizes itself on the Holodeck by using disparate characters (a knight, a gangster, etc.) to represent different facets of itself at odds with each other, while traveling on the Orient Express as it tries to reach “Vertiform City” because the emergent intelligence needs subatomic vertion particles to make itself because SURE WHATEVER THE HECK.
And then once formed, the intelligence, which looks like it was made out of neon Tinker Toys, flies away to be happy. And no one wonders, “What the hell? Is the computer gonna make any more of those things? Should we figure out what just happened?”
If it weren’t for Dr. Crusher’s gothic romance episode “Sub Rosa,” this one would have a clear shot at being the worst episode of the season.
‘Bloodlines’ is more like “Hey, let’s do ‘Wrath of Khan’ but instead of Khan we’ll use a Ferengi! What could possibly go wrong?”
This feels like something that was sitting in a file cabinet and gathering dust since the first season and the producers couldn’t even be bothered to rewrite it using a more current or threatening villain.
Yep. Sweeping up the scraps on the writers room floor…
Actually I’ve heard that it was Patrick Stewart’s idea–the writers asked him if there were any remaining plot lines for his character, and he said the whole revenge plot with Daimon Bok.
And a good story could have been grown from that seed. But this wasn’t it.
Well, they live in a world of insty-evolution and technology that’s used once and then never again and other such made-for-TV nonsense, so after a while, I guess they just kinda react to bizarre happenings of the week the way Spinal Tap reacts to spontaneous combustion.
Re: Emergence –
I was thinking that it would be the biggest “oops!” ever if the Enterprise Computer Thingy ended up being hurled into the distance past after an encounter with a temporal anomaly and became responsible for the Borg.
Quick! To the fan-fic!