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Old 01-30-2019, 07:53 PM
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January 30th, 1989, "Unnatural Selection"

Prelude: TOS did the rapid aging episode better on the whole, but at least Pulaski got some good character work this week. Another episode where the plot holes are big enough to drive a shuttlecraft through.

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Transcript
Memory Alpha

The Episode

Captain's log, Stardate 42494.8. The Enterprise is bound for Star Station India to rendezvous with a Starfleet medical courier. We've been told only that our presence is imperative.

Why the mystery?

DATA: Two point two milli-parsecs, bearing three zero at one four five degrees.

2.2 milliparsecs is about 68 million kilometers, a little larger than the orbital radius of Mercury. For communications to be so broken at such a distance without a clear explanation is weird. Furthermore, why is the Enterprise so close to the Lantree if they weren't supposed to rendezvous or anything? TLDR: The "milli" is unnecessary.

PICARD: Adjust course to intercept. Warp seven.

Warp 7 is over 656.14 times the speed of light. To cover 68 million kilometers would take two minutes. On screen this is more like thirty seconds. One wonders why the creators even bothered pinning down numbers to the warp factors.

RIKER: Captain Telaka was my age, sir.

Riker is 30. I kinda thought that even in the 24th century captaincies at this age were extremely rare, meant for the exceptional. Yeah, I'm being pedantic.

PULASKI: All right. We could beam up one child in styrolite in suspended animation.

This episode was the only appearance of styrolite. I'm not sure what advantage this plastic bubble is meant to have over a stasis pod. Surely stasis pods with additional medical barriers have been invented by now. Furthermore I'm unsure how this thing is supposed to sustain the occupant. Suspended animation requires machinery.

O'BRIEN: It's the styrolite. I'm altering the delta-T so the styrolite coding materialises two micro-seconds ahead of the child.

It sure sounds like this stasis field is just a plastic bubble.


PULASKI: This child is in better health than we are. His immune system is so advanced it may not be possible for him to contract disease.

I hate this common notion in scifi that it's possible to make a body immune to all disease. Hasn't it been proven that disease will evolve in parallel with treatment?

PULASKI: I did, Commander. I assume that you're qualified to pilot this shuttlecraft.

And this is why people hated Pulaski, she kept up the android-bashing way longer than needed. I get the intended parallel with McCoy and Spock, but at least on TOS the jabs eventually turned into playful repartee, not continually building of barriers.


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