| Review : |
Now for one that's really weird. I have a feeling that's what they said when they first thought of writing this one. It seems to borrow heavily from Alien in some ways, the acid eating through the deck plates, Picard being chased through the jefferies tubes by a venom-spitting Worf and so on. It's also notable how the first episode directed by Gates McFadden involves a medical story. There are a few things that we had best not think about. Firstly, it would take months or even years for changes in your DNA to affect your appearance, but it is a dramatic convention that it happens immediately, so I'll let them off that. Secondly, switching on introns usually gives you cancer and eventually kills you, although this 'devolution' idea did make for a decent story. Perhaps it's best not to think about it and just watch. There were some great moments in it, Barclay as a half-spider jumping out in Engineering, Worf chasing Picard, Riker the Cro-Magnon and even the first sight of the ship drifting without attitude control. We also got the sounds, which we heard much more than normal. Then, we got to see the character changes, that became more and more noticeable. At first, I just though Worf was acting like a Klingon for once, then Riker's mind slowing down and Barclay dashing all over the place made it feel stranger and stranger. Picard's growing nervousness after coming back to the ship was done very well too. All in all, not bad, despite being biological nonsense. The only thing that really annoyed me was the fact that they got the naming convention wrong. Diseases are named after the first person to discover it or describe it to science. It should be 'Data's Syndrome' or 'Crusher's Syndrome', depending on who publishes the paper in the Lancet (if it's still going). |
