| Review : |
Far too much of Wesley in this for my taste, but it did show him doing something daft and having to own up about it. He seemed to have found a kindred spirit in Dr Stubbs, perhaps including the arrogance and dogmatism. Respected scientists often seem to be arrogant or dogmatic, and Ken Jenkins lived up to that fairly well. Still on casting, I'm not entirely sure about bringing Dr Crusher back. Maybe she was unpopular, but Pulaski was believable. The story played out fairly well, not a clue what was going on, then it became more and more clear. Picard's call for equal rights for small pieces of silicon was certainly curious, and would have made him look rather foolish if he had been wrong. Still, it worked out OK in the end, and they even got their experiment done. I have to admit that I was with Dr Stubbs, the most sensible thing to do would have been to blast the computer core with hard gammas. Of course, he was assuming that the nanites were acting in a similar way to a bacterial infection, which is what any scientist would expect them to do. I'm not sure where the idea that they might be intelligent came from, but I suppose they went down the right track eventually. Verdict, watchable episode. |
| Review : |
The basics of "Evolution" have been described elsewhere, so I shall not recapitulate them. Rather, I should like to address the more idiotic and disturbing facets of this episode. First, the idiotic: Wesley the "wunderkind" screws up. No worries, though, as he apparently receives no punishment for jeopardizing the entire crew of the Enterprise and nearly ruining an important United Federation scientific experiment. No one even gets miffed with him. One wonders if he has compromising information about Capt. Picard. (o: Now, the disturbing. The "boy genius" has created a machine-based intelligence with a collective consciousness that has no concerns at threatening or even killing other life forms. I am describing the nanites from this episode, but I could pretty well be describing the Borg, too. As if this isn't bad enough, the UFP settles these creatures on a planet. How long will it take these nanites to turn on the incomprehensibly naive UFP? Dr. Stubbs was right to try to eradicate this menace. If someone had taken such action against the Borg when they were nascent, perhaps this blight might have been eliminated before it caused such devastation. One of the more moralistic and absurd episodes in TOS and the franchise. |
