Unnatural Selection
Dr Pulaski is aging to death waiting for a good script to arrive for her - can she make it...?!
Picard... is talking... in staccato... so you know... he's deep... in thought. Apparently about whether Dr Pulaski's dedication to her job will interfere with her judgement. That's not unreasonable, because that happened with Dr Crusher practically every week. Suddenly, there's a distress call from the USS Lantree, but when they arrive nobody answers. So they hack in - and discover everybody has aged to death. Oh dear. Off they pop to Darwin Station, where everybody is also ageing to death. They promise it's nothing to do with their children, so the Enterprise beams one up. To prove the children are harmless, Dr Pulaski and Data take the weirdly 20-year old child out in a shuttlecraft where - surprise surprise! - Dr Pulaski starts aging to death. Wow, didn't see that twist coming.
Chief O'Brien, who now has a name and thus can be invited into the crew staff meetings, suggests that they might be able to restore her biology using the transporter - only Pulaski, being modelled rather too obviously on Dr McCoy, has never used the Enterprise's transporter. Meanwhile, Pulaski and Data fly down to the planet for an exposition dump. It seems the kids at Darwin Station were genetically engineered to be telepathic, telekinetic, and able to create deadly pathogens by accidental whoopsie. Remember kids, genetic engineering is dangerous, ill-advised, and hasn't given us a good episode of Star Trek since "Space Seed". Infected with McCoy's "Encounter at Farpoint" ageing make-up effects, Pulaski gets older and older and nearly dies until O'Brien's ingenious technobabble allows them to use the transporter to switch her biology off and on again, saving her life. To celebrate, the Enterprise gets to blow up the USS Lantree before zwooshing off to our next adventure.
Words
The draft screenplay for this episode, by John Mason and Mike Gray, is a mess. Even in the first scene, there's a line reading:
NOTE: THIS DIALOGUE HAS TO BE REWRITTEN
…in SHOUTY ALL CAPS. It's packed full of terrible ideas that didn't make it onto the screen. Mike Gray was a producer on the show for the first thirteen episodes of the second season, but these two never wrote another episode for Trek, either together or separately, which all things considered is rather good news for everyone. The script does, however, contain some interesting word uses.
Let's start with 'Natural causes'. What does it mean to die of natural causes, exactly? Dr Pulaski says that the crew of the Lantree died of old age, which is probably what most people would think of as 'natural causes'. But in contemporary medical doctrine, nobody dies of old age as such. Getting older just inevitably leads to something failing... a heart attack, lung failure, susceptibility to respiratory viruses... Hey, speaking of respiratory infections, remember when Dr Crusher repeatedly told us that we'd wiped out the common cold in season one, right before the ship became infected with a nuisance variation on the common cold...? Well it seems that the cold is back, baby!
Thelusian flu?
That's an exotic but harmless rhinal virus.
Yup. 'Rhinal virus' means a virus of the nose, and rhinoviruses are one of the many causes of the common cold, so season two has moved back to a more conventional understanding of the cold virus I'm pleased to report. And Dr Pulaski should know all about it as she wrote 'Linear Models of Virus Propagation', which is one of those technical sounding titles for which I suggest we don't kick the tyres because they'll probably deflate with a disappointing 'pffft' noise.
'Genetic research' and 'advanced genetic research' are our big load-bearing concepts this week. It seems we can make telepathic and telekinetic X-Men, but at the cost of their immune systems turning harmless pathogens into deadly aging viruses. We really don't get any good generic engineering stories until DS9, but never mind. Anyway, it's a nonsense sci-fi story however you look at it, but at least it sets up some good acting roles this week.
Acting Roles
It finally happened! Colm Meaney's character at last has a name: say hello to Chief O'Brien.
They still aren't giving him much personality, but at least he has picked up a surname. The name itself is rather interesting... Rick Berman, Roddenberry's right-hand man and soon-to-be Star Trek supremo claims the character was named after his nephew, Miles O'Brien. Yet an article in the 1991 issue of Star Trek Magazine suggests the writing team considered 'Aloysius' as a name... This suggests Berman snuck in his nephew's surname in this episode and then snuck in his nephew's forename in season 4's "Family". That's some freaky mind games there if he let the writing team believe they could provide a different forename for two years!
The newly-named O'Brien has an interesting role in this episode, as he is the primary dispenser of technobabble, a role usually reserved for either Brent Spiner's Data or LeVar Burton's LaForge. Why substitute O'Brien...? It certainly wasn't necessary to do so. So why is he here...? The answer lies in the terrible screenplay. The original story had a character called Rina who the script notes describe as "an arrestingly beautiful young woman", and the plot requires everyone to have hilarious mishaps around her because of Rina's distracting good looks. Ugh. Losing these scenes left a shortfall of screen time and for some marvellous and inexplicable reason they decided to plug it with Colm Meaney instead of, say, expanding one of the other character roles. It seems as if the course of Trek history was thus changed forever by the creation of Chief O'Brien simply because the writers of this episode did a lousy job with the story. Really, we ought to thank them!
Diana Muldaur has to carry this episode, as the entire story rests on her shoulders. But she's up for it, nonsense plot be damned! Her performance is solid, but I find it odd that her scenes with Patrick Stewart all fall flat. Stewart is usually the person whom everyone can play off, so why can’t he manage it with Muldaur...? My first thought was bad direction from director Paul Lynch (an amusingly eccentric Englishman who worked on both TNG and DS9), but it may just be that the screenplay for this episode was never very good and Stewart consequently flails about not knowing what his motivations are supposed to be.
Muldaur's performance transcended this terrible story so brilliantly that she showed this episode to the production crew over at LA Law, landing her the gig as Rosalind Shays - which was also the absolutely greatest role of her career, bar none.
I have so much I want to say about that but I'll save it for later, maybe for "Shades of Gray" when we'll have nothing very interesting to say about anything.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Well, it's time to dig up a new model from the Trek back catalogue... the USS Lantree is of course using the model created for the USS Reliant in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, although the studio miniature here has lost its 'rollbar', which had previously housed a torpedo launcher.
This change in the design wasn’t to make it a more convincing 'Class VI supply vessel', but rather a result of technical problems during shooting. Gary Hutzel reports that the team could not get the lighting to work on the studio miniature, and so they ripped off the 'rollbar' to make the derelict USS Lantree. Supra-fanonically, this creates the Miranda II sub-class, but there is no 'Miranda class' in the canon if you go solely by what's on screen (as I do), so this is just a 'Class VI supply vessel'. Note the registry of the USS Lantree is NCC-1837, a dollop of correction fluid away from the USS Reliant's registry of NCC-1887.
I absolutely love to see the fingerprints all over the models, so this always gives me a chuckle. They even get to blow it up!
Boom! Love it!
The SFX team also get to wheel out the shuttlecraft model, with some rather lovely shots of it alongside the Enterprise that are leaps and bounds over the introduction to this studio miniature back in "Coming of Age".
Last - but by no means least - there's a lovely matte painting of Darwin Genetic Research Station by the legendary Syd Dutton.
And if you don't know who Dutton is, please go back to the "Angel One" WAM and check him out! He's a lot more interesting than the plot of this dud.
Bless this terrible script for birthing the chief. May he kayak forever in a holodeck somewhere.