| Review : |
I really don't like this episode, for many different reasons. Firstly, it makes the regular characters, especially Picard, look like hypocrites. I cannot believe they ever gave him that line about 'honouring' the people he had just condemned to death. Apart from anything else, it was entirely out of character. Even if he had taken the 'just following orders' stance (which he did not, he actually seemed to agree with this inhumane law) Riker should have objected strenuously. At least Dr Crusher dissented. Nikolai, who does have some personal interests, comes accross as a positive and humane character. As far as I am concerned, he was doing the right thing. Still, did he save his new people? This resembles the 'Montserrat Oriole Problem', where a species of bird was saved by conservationists when its island home was devastated by a volcano. It was a natural disaster, and people still stepped in to save the species, but some criticised them for 'playing God'. Even so, they only saved a few hundred, and now the species suffers from inbreeding depression, because there were not enough to maintain genetic diversity. Still, these were people, not animals. I won't even discuss the twist where one person escapes from the holodeck. |
| Review : |
This episode is such a catastrophe that it is difficult to know where to start listing its failures. Let's start with "Dr." Rozhenko. Anyone who has studied the social sciences, as I have, knows that the kind of interference he undertakes is absolutely anathema to proper research methods, not to mention professional ethics. Yet, his behavior is disturbingly familiar. Real-world anthropologists, as well as many of their social science kin, characteristically decide that they, the intellectual elite ne plus ultra, are uniquely and solely qualified to make moral decisions. The rest of us hoi polloi are too intellectually and so morally enfeebled to be allowed an opinion, let alone agency -- unless it comes to forking over vast sums of money to support their folly. So, in review, "Dr." Rozhenko is an accurate representation of at least early 21st century academia. One hopes that he is the exception, rather than the rule, for the mid-24th century. Dr. Crusher, as usual, opines vociferously on matters about which she has painfully little understanding; but, ignorance notwithstanding, we MUST accept her radical chic nonsense, or we will be branded "enemies of the state" -- oh, sorry, that's STD. No wonder her spawn turned out to be a justly reviled character in Trek. Poor Worf. He's caught between doing what he knows is right and honorable -- keeping his sanctimonious sibling from taking the law into his own hands -- and caving in to support for "family," regardless of the immorality and indeed illegality of doing so. He, of course, chooses family over honor, confirming my long-held belief that the Klingons are little more than an interstellar version of the mafia, or the Crips and Bloods. The Romulans are right about them. And the good Captain Picard. Why doesn't he throw "Dr." Rozhenko into the brig and deliver him to the authorities? Laws? "We don't need no stinkin' laws!" Picard IS the law; a "god" mightier than the Prophets or the Q. (Didn't they erect a statue in his honor? I'll ask Dukat.) WWAD? What would Adama do? Probably "space" "Dr." Rozhenko -- or am I confusing him with John Sheridan? All of these megalomaniacs are so similar. "O brave new world, That has such people in't.” |
