Episode one of season three. It's not one of my favorite episodes personally, but it's the first of many episodes that show a great improvement over the first two seasons of the show.
It's a Wesley episode, and it's not really a bad one, but it simply does nothing to make his character more interesting.
Instead more attention is payed to the return of his mom, Beverly Crusher as the CMO. I was glad to have her back. Pulaski was wonderful, but too much of a throwback to TOS on many levels. Not a lot of room for growth. Also, Beverly was younger so she had a lot more years ahead of her to have various romantic entanglements and add to the general sex appeal of the show. It's not popular to say these things, but it's just a plain fact. They write her angst in this episode as wondering if Wesley will develop normally with his mother always around. Is that a shot being fired at home-schoolers? Maybe. Some valid points are made, but the fact is that because his character is a boy genius, he's not going to develop normally anyway, so it's a pointless exploration. We get a little bit of a realistic look at the way teenagers start to push the parents out of their business, but only for a short time until the conflict of the episode is ready to be resolved because they weren't interested in adding depth to Wesley.
That's okay, the main story is excellent. They bring a scientist aboard who's devoted his whole life to witnessing and recording a particular stellar explosion so he can finally accomplish this once in a lifetime opportunity. He's not so bad at first apart from being a little overzealous in his cause. But later on he shows his selfish and obsessive nature when glitches in the Enterprise's computer begin to hamper his ability to succeed in his quest. The gradual development over the course of the episode is engaging and intense. This was a well written episode.
It's a reworking of the story line from Home Soil in season one. In home soil, the terraformers are attacked by an alien presence that they didn't realize was an actual life form and the obsessive leading scientist wanted to proceed anyway even after the truth came out. I had a lot of things to be frustrated with in that episode, as you can reread if you like, including the attitude of the leader after evidence of life had been established and the war like reaction of the beings. In this episode, Wesley loses control of his experiments with nanobot technology and they escape into the computer systems, wreaking havoc. It's not very clear for a long time if they are simply computer bugs or if they're evolving into a life form. Micheal Crichton would later cover this subject matter in the novel Prey with horrific consequences of course, but in this episode the genesis of the nanobot life forms is treated with curiosity, and rightfully so. Dr. Stubbs becomes more and more impatient though when the crew wants to wait and see if the nanobots are an intelligent presence before eradicating them so he can get on with his stellar experiment. I have to side track a bit and point out that Beverly proudly showcasing the new life that was possibly brought about by her perfect son is good for her character, but one of the reason why the presence of Wesley is sort of irritating. Poor braniac Wesley who nobody believes or takes seriously... This time it's only Dr. Stubbs behaving like this, but it hearkens back to the first season and it's very old now.
The point is, Stubb's attitude toward the nanobots can be more easily sympathized with since there's not certainty that theyare alive. At least until he attempts to destroy them and they fight back, by attacking the life support systems and then Stubb's directly. At that point he forces Picard and the crew into their job of protecting the people of the Enterprise. They now may have no choice but to destroy the new life form. So there's no aggressive or sinister motives like there was in Home Soil. It simply becomes a matter of survival with the added outrage from everyone over the scientist's selfish nature in ruining what could be a great opportunity to study new life.
Also, when they do discover how to communicate with them (through Data, which is the coolest part of the show) there isn't a persistent drive for war. They understand that it was only one of the humans that attacked them and didn't really understand things like revenge and war since they were a newly formed life. It's confirmed that mistakes were made on both sides, to quote Picard and the nanobots need more space anyway. So a cooperative bargain is struck. The Nanites help fix the computer problems they caused and Picard relocates them to their own planet where they can feed on new resources. The ending is simplistic, but the threat was not a great one so it has a better balance than episodes in the first couple seasons in which dramatic life and death issues were resolved too simplistically. Dr. Stubbs gets to observe his stellar explosion and the audience can be happy for him in spite of the trouble he caused. So, it's not as simple as it would seem. Excellent writing.
They continue in character development, mainly with Beverly in this one, but there's not a lot of time wasted on it. Instead the episode is filled with scenes that are mostly relevant to the main plot while simultaneously reconnecting Beverly with her son and the rest of the crew. And that is the biggest improvement of them all. Like I said, it's just not one of my favorites probably because of Wesley, although it's unfair. And it's kind of a rehash even though it's original at the same time... a retooling of a concept isn't really a rehash but the comparisons are unmistakable so I can't claim this is a unique episode... it's a struggle to decide how many stars to get it, but I'm going to have to go with three and a half stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment