ST: TNG - The Murderclonomat

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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"If we could teleport anything there would already be weasels in their skulls..."

"I know, right? A show where all sentient life has the ultimate superweapon and they all float around pointing flashlights at each other."

Vexxarr 2017/03/06

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Seriesdate: 5.15

Power Play

Oh, noes! In a shocking and original episodic plot, our heroes have been mentally possessed!

...

... yeah... Yeah, I know, but try to act surprised, ok?

Clap your hands for Tinkerbell.

After answering a distress call from a centuries-old wreck on a dark and stormy planet, space-ghosts possess Troi, O'Brien and of course Data. They take some hostages and force the Enterprise to beam up the rest of their space ghost social club. Most of the episode is an excuse for the three actors to spread their emotive wings a bit while Picard susses out the far more rational explanation.

See, they're not really the space-ghosts of a 200-year-old Federation crew.

They're the space-ghosts of 500-year-old prison inmates.

Oh. Okay. Much better. Totes ScieFie!

 

For bonus nonsense points, pay attention to how the almighty transporter moves the plot along. First they declare it impossible to beam down through the constant storms, leading to the wrecked shuttle. Then O'Brien beams down anyway with a signal booster. Then the transporter once again doesn't work. Then it does. Then it doesn't. Then it does. Every ten minutes we need to stop to fabricate new technobabble for why the ghosts can or can't be teleported... and conversely for why the murderclonomat cannot/can perform its function at this plot-relevant point. The whole back-and-forth plays out as wasting air time to explain what was deliberately un-explained in the previous wasted air time.

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Seriesdate: 5.24

The Next Phase

 

While transporting from a damaged Romulan ship, cloaking field interference turns Geordi and Ro into invisible, inaudible space ghosts who can walk through walls. But not floors. Never floors. Space ghosts gotta take the space elevator.

Much of this comes across as slow-paced filler. On one hand, in '92 "phasing" was still treated as a novelty to the wider public unfamiliar with Kitty Pryde or a few other SF/Fantasy examples, but after these past decades' superhero / fantasy movie craze TNG's explanations come across as belabored. On the other hand, the "power of friendship" monologues by crewmembers preparing for the two's funeral would've sounded trite even thirty years earlier. Lesser issues include brilliant engineer LaForge noticing he can leave detectable traces by phasing through solid matter but just randomly punching desks instead of tapping out prime number sequences, or writing his name into a wall. Or worse, aside from the floor issue, you have to wonder what exactly they're breathing while phased out of reality.

 

Still, it gave us some amusing sequences of the two walking through objects, and an engaging chase/fight sequence against a similarly phased Romulan, plus a hilarious one-liner by Geordi reacting to Ro's initially religious explanation of their apparent afterlife: "Are you saying I'm some blind ghost with clothes?"

Also, this:

It's not a phase disruptor, it's a phased disruptor

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Seriesdate: 6.02

Realm of Fear

To mount a rescue/salvage too risky for shuttles in a binary star plasma link strong enough to block tractor beams, the Enterprise beams an away-team to the derelict, because personnel transporters are apparently more powerful than tractor beams.

 

Our not-so-stalwart hero Reginald Barclay, who's already a nervous teleporter and panics when first getting into one, is punished by fate (or screenwriter contrivance, take your pick) for working up the courage to get beamed by getting bitten in the beam by a giant miniature space ghost worm.

 

Reg vs. magic wrinkly space penis: fight!

 

He gets a nasty case of teleports elbow, but everyone tells him he's crazy. Even the computer.

Problem: Comparing teleporting to airlines with Geordi's line "transporting is the safest way to travel" despite the stability problems cited in various episodes. Also that spaceship you're riding is the plane. Your murderclonomat is some kind of mutant evacuation slide. Also, nobody who's spent ten hours between an encroaching lardass and a screeching baby would ever call THAT teleporting.

But then... Crusher's autopsy subject starts ventillating and palpitating, and Broccoli decides to test his fears' veracity, gets wormed a second time and convenes a high council (because that's apparently something junior officers can do on a whim) leading to the discovery of "quasi-energy microbes that exist within the distortion of the plasma streamer" and infect human bodies which makes absolutely no s-

Ah, crap.

TNG invented midichlorians.

Anyway... muffer, bicrobes... spacial ionic stream corpse contractions ionic suspended biofilter... dispersion phase transition ionic frequency... and for no ionic reason pertaining to any of the preceding ionic technobabble, if you give the giant miniature space wrinkly penises a big manly squeeze, out comes space seamen!

 

Y'know, I like Lt. Broccoli and I like freaky space beasties, but this definitely hit the silliness threshold.

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Seriesdate: 6.07

Rascals

 

It's Little Rascals IN SPAAACE!!!

Yeah, this is one of those misconceived wrecks that fans and even its creators would prefer to pretend never happened. While shuttling through "some sort of energy field" Picard, Guinan, Ro and Keiko are teleported... as their child selves. This is explained by damage to specific maturation-triggering DNA, using the common misconception of genotype as direct blueprint for phenotype. Then just to double down on the idiocy:

"Whatever turned the crew into children turned these plants into seedlings."

Good night, everybody! Apparently weeds mature via human genes.

Then, for no particular reason: Ferengi pirates. Kneebiters save day with toys.

Ugh.

Then they get teleported back to adult age by murder-clonin' their maturation genes back into place.

Uuuugh...

 

The couple of decent scenes (O'Brien creeped out by his now tween wife putting moves on him) get swamped in fallout from the monumentally stupid decision to excise some of the cast's best actors and replace them with random kids, at a time when child actors were not selected or coached nearly as well as they are post Sixth Sense. The boy playing young Picard acquits himself well enough and some effort was made to preserve adult speech patterns, but generally their mannerisms remain those of children and it's damn near impossible to take our heroes' plight seriously given they've all just had twenty or forty years tacked on to their lifespans with no insurance copay. Especially Picard, who even emphasizes checking his bald head when he's re-aged... but especially especially Guinan, who would stand to gain freaking centuries!

Other idiocy aside, if you find yourself writing a plot that necessitates hand-waving four characters' gratuitous refusal of decades' worth of extra life, you are writing a bad plot!

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Seriesdate: 6.24

Second Chances

 

Riker leads an away-team to a planet he'd barely escaped eight years prior, only to find a teleporter clone of himself. Okay, sure, why not, crew members get cloned all the time on this show. Picard gets time-cloned, alien cloned, clone-cloned, robot-cloned and whatnot every other season. Wasting no time, alter-Riker starts yelling at his self and hitting on Troi.

While the episode barely crawls through the obvious Riker/Troi/Riker love triangle and the two clones staring each other down to the point of leaving little plot to recount, it does distinguish itself by a more reasoned interpretation of the duplicates as long-lost twins, without feigning the cheap drama of identity conflicts. Nonetheless, the whole thing gets resolved via a trite old "take my hand" clifftop rescue.

Overall... not as bad as the others, but still, meh.

Just one element of this episode stuck with me over the years.

 

 

The infographic depicting the two Rikers' divergence via teleportation signal splitting. In a show whose explanations most often bordered on the Necronomical, here was a sane, clean summary of the plot's premise in a concise .gif, all the better to offset the twenty minutes wasted on frowning and smooches.

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Star Trek's famous teleporter has a quaint origin story. Apparently back in the '60s the Original Series had wanted space-boats to carry the crew, but couldn't afford to paint a plywood shack and stick some blowtorches on it to call it a shuttle so ended up telling the actors to just stand there and, ummm... we'll just overexpose you while playing some wind chimes... or something. After that it was one of the show's staples, and every subsequent script had to deal with the casual, unthinking interjection of an immensely overpowered futuristic transformative technology into what they had intended as a relatable high seas space adventure.

I don't know about later series, but this misconceived budget cut proved a consistent millstone around TNG's neck. Usually it had to be pointedly ignored, technobabbled out of commission to justify the crew in doing anything other than sitting in a transporter room zapping everything into or out of place. When it took center stage, it did so to farcical effect. Look at the scripts built around it: one half-decent yarn about Riker's past and personality, Little Rascals in Space then space ghosts, more space ghosts and even more space ghosts. If they're remembered well at all it's due to the efforts of Colm Meaney or excellent guest stars like Dwight Schultz and Michelle Forbes, but the plots were crap!

 

Because the transporter was so hastily concocted, they could never even decide on its properties.

If it's off by one atom you stop existing (Barclay's fear) but apparently it can create or destroy mass (adult vs. child bodies) with no side-effects.

Teleporter interaction with cloaking field emissions phased Geordi and Ro out, but they never try stepping into a transporter beam while phased to see what happens.

You either need to stand motionless on the platform, or you can teleport a whole village wherever you please.

Subjects are either frozen in place during transport or they have time to go three rounds with a one-eyed snake.

It can be blocked by a storm on the surface of a planet, but not by a stellar matter stream.

It can be used to separate diseases from bodies unless it's plot convenient not to.

It can age and reverse-age people, but this limitless fountain of youth is never discussed again!

Signals can apparently be duplicated in multiple containment fields... begging the question of why everyone isn't teleport-cloning entire armies with fully-charged phasers.

 

Hell, if this superweapon were logically developed, every Trek spaceship would consist of massed transporter bays with ancillary systems built around them. You wouldn't even need living quarters. Just keep the crew stored in batteries until you need to dress them in red shirts.

 

And therein lies the main problem, the murderclonomat's infamously flawed basic function, molecular disassembly and reassembly. It does not so much transport as destructively analyze its target at origin and replicate a fresh copy from the stored pattern at destination. When our very existence depends on assuming the Ship of Theseus remains whole as long as not too many of our synapses get replaced at once, a full strip and refit every time you hop the equivalent of a bus makes a jarring conceptual nightmare for Star Trek's peaceful post-scarcity society. Basically StarFleet consists of endless clones being murdered and freshly constituted to certain death on a daily basis. No wonder episodes built around it looked so ridiculous. Most of the writers' energy must've gone into avoiding the obvious intrinsic horror of that infernal machine.

And all because Gene Roddenberry couldn't find a wrecked VW van to repaint as a shuttle!