Title :
Starship Mine
Series :
Rating :
Overall Ep :
143
First Aired :
29 Mar 1993
Stardate :
46682.4
Director :
Year :
Writers :
Season Ep :
YATI :
Picard tries to escape the Enterprise after disabling Tuvo- er, a terrorist. He fails because the power goes out. Why not use a shuttle? The transporter on a shuttle? The Captain's yacht? An escape pod?
When the terrorists take over on the station base, one of them stuns Geordi and then points his weapon at Data, who freezes in place. But in "Power Play" when somebody fires a phaser stun at him and he is completely unaffected by it. So if Data is immune to stun settings, why doesn't he just charge the bad guy and knock him out?
Speaking of Data, when he tries out his small talk skills on Beverly and Riker, he asks if they have noticed that the temperature on the planet is slightly higher than normal for human comfort levels. He goes on to note that "I have found that humans prefer a body temperature of 21 Celsius in order to operate most efficiently." Um, no. Humans may prefer an atmospheric temperature of 21C, but if your body temperature is 21C then you're not operating efficiently at all, because you're dead!
He even goes on to continue this theme by saying that some species prefer their body temperature to be the same as the temperature of the room. Data seems to think that your body temperature is something that varies significantly. In reality your temperature does vary, but only very slightly - if your body temperature goes more than a degree or so up or down you're in pretty serious trouble, and your body will do everything it can to get the temperature back to normal.
Now this is true for humans, of course, and it is possible that there are alien species whose body temperature can indeed vary widely. So maybe Data was talking about those. But the way he described it, he really appears to think that everyone's body temperature wanders waaaay up and down according to how hot or cold it is, and the only result is that they feel a little warm or cold.
The Enterprise-D is the most famous Starship in the Federation, and Captain Picard is a famous person - remember he was credited with saving Earth from the Borg, after all. And these terrorists have presumably put a fair bit of effort into planning this mission... but they have no idea what the Captain of their target ship looks like?
Great Moment :
Picard has such a wonderful time in this episode, it's hard to pick out any specific moment. My favourite is the way he cold-bloodedly lures his first victim into the baryon sweep to kill him - and to think there are those who claim Picard is too wimpy to use force.
Body Count :
Six, I think.
Factoid :
Strangely, the only people from the base at the reception for the E-D officers are Commander Hutchinson and two waiters! The originally planned extras were unavailable due to budget restraints.
The weapons seen in Worf's quarters include a Ligonian glavin, used by Tasha Yar and her opponent in the episode "Code of Honor". Both Tasha and her opponent have these weapons with them when they are beamed aboard the ship at the climax of the episode, so it is entirely possible that Worf obtained one of them for his collection.
Plotline
The Enterprise-D is evacuated to undergo a high tech cleaning that will destroy all life on board. But Picard is trapped - and he is not alone.
