ST: TNG - Genesis

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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Seriesdate: 7.19

Genesis

 

In which Deanna Troi is a cold fish!

 

Mark well, Commander, the carefully scripted makeup-friendly mutations.

 

Lt. Broccoli's caught a cold, and in lieu of chicken soup Dr. Crusher decides to do something unspeakable to his genetickses. By the time Picard and Data get back from drag-racing a torpedo (it makes more sense in context) they find Barclay's squeezed his cells into his molecules and infected everyone with Mr.Hyde-ism... and that part makes even less sense in context. Anyway, Worf bites. Also, an iguana had kittens. Look, I tried to warn you: even less sense.

I loved this episode at twelve years old and it's still a guilty pleasure now. Objectively, I can admit the script's a pile of minotaur shit meant to prop up the excuse for body horror monster stories aboard the Enterprise but dedication to its absurdity (the actors certainly sank their teeth into it, and the make-up effects garnered some well-deserved praise) elevates Genesis to an irresistible campy charm... for some of us. Oddly enough, that same dedication also killed its plot in the eyes of most viewers, barely escaping "worst of" lists. Skipping over some one-liners like "ribocyatic flux" here's Data didacticizing the phlebotinum:

"a synthetic T-cell has invaded his genetic codes. This T-cell has begun to activate his latent introns [...] evolutionary holdovers. Sequences of DNA which provided key behavioral and physical characteristics millions of years ago but are no longer necessary. For instance: counsellor Troi's gill slits [...] the DNA has created an amphibious life form which became extinct over fifty million years ago"

OK... so... DNA does not work that way... and I'm only saying that calmly because millions of biology students have already yelled it at the screen over the decades. In Brannon Braga's defense, the notion of introns hiding past evolutionary superpowers (much like telomere elongation instantly making us immortal) was sort of just floating around in the '90s, to the point my high school AP Bio teacher had to address it in class. You could nitpick the problem from a few angles but one big issue is the lack of selective pressure on noncoding DNA to correct for deleterious mutations by deleting the host. The idea of functional information (to the tune of recreating every ancestor) sitting there untouched and unused for tens of millions of generations, just because, is a statistical gasser.

As with "subatomic bacteria" they got their matrioshkas inside out by claiming a T-cell "invaded" DNA. At least nobody turns unicellular; we see an early hominid, a Betazoid frog and a Klingon armadillo... and Barclay turning into a spider, particularly problematic because we branched away from arthropods' ancestors long before (Cambrian vs. Carboniferous?) anything resembling modern spiders, information readily available even in 1994. I guess Barclay as some nondescript filter-feeding wormlike thing wouldn't have been as exciting, though it would've pushed the body horror angle through the roof. Nor were cats ever iguanas, while we're at it. The less said about the physiology angle, the better.

 

But weirdly enough, all of this Brundlefly nonsense still ranked as better researched and up to date than much Star Trek science fare. Unfortunately Braga&Co. knew it, and went to town; after years of infamously nonsensical nonexplanations, here we have actual science, cutting edge, hot off the lab bench! Introns! I've heard of that who says I haven't! The result? Genesis is about 30% technobabble by volume. Just the above pivotal scene of Data expositing to Picard takes up four solid minutes, bracketed by two shorter segments, with several more preceding and following.

 

Therein I'd say lies to key to Genesis' criticism. For the severity of the mistakes aren't the problem so much as the overconfidence with which they're presented, diving so far into details as to draw attention to the flaws in their reasoning. A great case study in science fiction writing weighing the necessity for both literature surveys and hand-waving. Reminiscent of The Number of the Beast in that respect, though of course Heinlein did it far more consciously.