Note: This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.
There are a lot of Star Trek episodes that actually do pretty well in
conveying a message. Others simply mean well. I think that this is one
of the latter kind.
Counselor Troi returns from a class
reunion to find Dr. Crusher on the bridge. As chief medical officer,
Crusher isn’t required to stand watch on the bridge, but she does want
to. Normally, Data would be standing watch that shift, but he’s away on a
mission to retrieve some radioactive material. It gets Troi thinking of
what it was like when she had been in command a while ago.
Her rank is lieutenant commander. To be promoted to Commander, she’d
have to take the bridge officers test. After talking it over with
Commander Riker, she decides to go for it. She passes most of the tests;
the only exception is the engineering qualification. She can’t seem to
figure out how to keep the ship from blowing up. It’s only with a slight
nudge from Commander Riker that she’s able to finally pass.
Meanwhile, Data has crashed on the planet that he was supposed to get
the material from. The society there is pre-industrial, which means that
Data isn’t supposed to have any contact with them. However, he wanders
into one of the villages carrying a case containing the radioactive
material and no memory of who he is. He can also read the word,
radioactive, but has no idea of what it means.
The case is
opened and half of the material is distributed around town. Pretty soon,
many of the people in the village come down with radiation poisoning.
Data is able to create a cure, which he puts in the village’s only water
supply right before he is apparently killed. Riker and Crusher go to
the planet and find Data buried about two meters below the surface. They
beam both Data and the radioactive material back to the Enterprise.
They’re able to repair Data, who has no memory of what happened after
the crash.
First off, we have Skoran, played by Michael G.
Haggerty. He’s the blacksmith who buys Data’s metal. He’s also the one
that leads an angry mob of villagers once people start to blame Data.
There’s just something about an angry mob that seems too easy. It’s like
the writers need a threat to Data, or at least some sort of time limit.
(Data has to cure the village before the mob destroys him.) It works in
this episode, but I generally don’t like it.
Also, Data seems
to have patch memory while on the planet. He seems to know that there’s
more to science than what the villagers know about it. He’s able to
find a cure using an empirical method. However, he doesn’t know what
radioactive means and he doesn’t recognize his own name, even when
someone says it in front of him. (Someone says, “I want to examine your data in detail.” It didn’t seem to phase data.)
Also, Data is told that he’s ‘obviously’ an iceman based on his
appearance. The village’s doctor/scientist/teacher seems to know quite a
bit about science and is able to ‘deduce’ this. The village’s level of
scientific understanding seems to be a joke about primitive science and
how wrong it was to think that way. Her speech about scientific
understanding is similar to a Saturday Night Live skit with Steve Martin
where he’s a medieval doctor. (Martin’s character said that in his
father’s time, a patient’s illness would have been attributed to demonic
possession, but he now knows that it’s probably a small imp or gnome in
the lower intestine.) On a similar note, Data’s repetition of the
‘fact’ that he’s an iceman is similar to his saying that he was a
Frenchman in time’s arrow.
I’m going to have to say three
stars for this episode. It’s too bad that Troi didn’t get a promotion
until so late in the series. It would have been interesting to have had
the chance to use this in later episodes, but it isn’t to be. It is,
however, the second of two back-to-back stories involving a promotion.
(We have three promotions over the span of two episodes.) I really don’t
think that someone who’s never seen the series before would enjoy the
episode as much as someone who’s seen the entire series. (This seems to
be common among seventh-season episodes.) At this point, I could
recommend buying this episode on VHS to a fan of the show, but I think
that most people would be better off considering the seventh-season set
of DVD.
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