The premise of this episode had promise, but it was another
lemon, in my opinion.
First I want to point out the Wesley abuse again. This wasn't too bad of a Wesley episode on
the whole, but my problem comes at the beginning with the character of
Harry. Remember, the Traveler built up
Wesley as being a prodigy and possibly having powers that transcend
space-time. He's young, 14(ish), and
more or less the chief engineer for season one.
Then you have little Harry who looks to be no more than 8 running around
on the ship to get away from his dad who reprimands him for needing an
understanding of basic calculus. At
8. Let that sink in. It waters down Wesley's specialness. We teach
8 year olds calculus in the future. It
makes a person wonder what's so special about Wesley... it seems normal that he
can pretty much run the enterprise at 14... nothing special about that. I always hated this scene.
Okay, so the premise.
The planet is populated by a colony of people who can no longer
reproduce, so they steal the children off the Enterprise to one day repopulate
their "world." I like the
premise itself. I've made up my own
stories with this for a basis that make sense in my mind, but there are a lot
of problems with it working in this episode. Firstly, not knowing whether to call it a world or a colony since the
"Custodian" device cloaks the entire planet, but there only seems to
be a small colony of people that needs dealt with. And I realize that's a casting issue. But it's also a flaw of the Roddenberry age
of Star Trek - over simplification. The
visuals and magnitude of an entire planet were not taken into account.
Similarly, there are only a handful of children. The episode infers that all of the children
aboard the Enterprise are kidnapped, but you don't have to have more than a
small amount of high school biology to know that this little group of children
isn't enough to effectively repopulate even a colony much less a planet. With so few children, in fact, it wouldn't
even be practical to have schools on the Enterprise but rather they'd probably
be home schooled, or be schooled "online." In following years, they made classroom
settings that showed a larger variety of children in one way or another, so you
get the idea that there are hundreds of kids running around. At any rate, as I've pointed out before,
people were much smarter in the 80's and standards were definitely higher at that point and this sort of simple representation of
the story just wasn't good enough anymore. At least not for me.
And I'm sure there was never any intent for the scenes to
feel disturbing, but some of them did. I
realize it's my own damaged mind that makes me imagine molestation in some of
these scenes, but hey, they all are being violated just by being kidnapped, so
one can't really feel comfortable with one of the old men guiding the young
girl to play the music for his reminiscent pleasure anymore than it was supposed to be
normal when Barbosa was encouraging Elizabeth to eat for his reminiscent pleasure in
Pirates of the Caribbean/Black Pearl.
But I understand what they were doing with these moments, trying to show
the sad state that the Aldean people are in.
Which brings me to one of my two huge problems with the
episode. The first is, again, this
Utopia that the creators of Star Trek have set up. Why didn't the planet ask the Federation for
orphans or people willing to go to them?
(Why weren't their people in Who Mourns for Adonais? willing to serve
that Olympian God in return for comfort?)
Why, because the Earth has no orphans anymore. We're perfect,
remember? No poverty, no orphans, no
crime. Therefore, no reasonable and
believable solution. And people don't
even realize that the socialistic ideal that they had in mind for Earth would, in
reality, manifest itself in something more like Adonais, with people having to
bow to their government that is providing for them without a choice.
But in their idealistic land of socialism working on Earth and Aldea, when
people are provided for, they will automatically devote themselves to art and
study... for no reason. There's no
incentive from competition or drive for improvement because they're being
provided for so there's no point in trying.
They touch on this in the end when they're talking about the
blind trust they had in the Custodian, but they still don't see how this very
argument makes the socialist utopia ideal impossible. Anyway, a thinking person can't be expected
to accept the premise of this planet which they glorify at the beginning as
being perfect. In reality lives would be
nothing but poverty,depression, and crime due to the extreme boredom of being
kept as pets or animals in a zoo. Humans
with individual minds can't live like that. Also the fact that when a government entity is providing for a people they are incapable of doing it sufficiently. It always looks good on paper, but it just doesn't work.
I'll have other opportunities to touch on this in the first season episodes, so I'll be
referring back to this another time.
My second huge problem of the
episode, and what makes me really angry, is the opportunity to preach global
warming. This monstrosity that provides
for them (somehow... almost magically... not very good science fiction) has burned
away their ozone layer and that's why they're all sterile. It's not surprising that a show uses its
format to push political agendas. Star
Trek was doing that in the 60's too, but the position in this episode is still
a highly offensive insult to my intelligence and it grinds at me to watch
it. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad
if they hadn't been throwing everything else into the mix with their ideal
socialistic utopia, protestation techniques and oversimplified story along with
global warming to top it all off. I love
Star Trek and I know it's a forum for liberal ideology, but I can only handle
so much garbage in one episode.
Good points... I did like the
Custodian machine. It reminded me of
Forbidden Planet. This was also a good
episode for Wesley. His character wasn't
too overbearing and you get to see some early interaction with Picard which was
sadly ignored until it was too late. (See: The Shame of Wesley Crusher in previous blogs.)
Also a good episode for Picard and a good demonstration of how the crew
would work as a cohesive team to outsmart many antagonists over the course of the series run. It's a watchable episode, but it's still not
enough to give it more than a star.
