2.18 — “Up the Long Ladder”
Plot: The Enterprise follows a distress signal to the Ficus Sector. There they pick up 200 or so refugees from 22nd century Earth, whose colony is being threatened by solar flares. To make things interesting, the refugees don’t wont leave their planet without their livestock and a lot of straw, and are more Irish than a picture of a leprechaun. Next, the ship finds a society that is more technologically advanced, but made up of the clones of only five spacewreck survivors. This society lacks the genetic diversity to propagate normally. Naturally, Picard takes this as an opportunity to force a big social engineering experiment on everyone.
Thoughts: Ugh, do I have to? This one makes me want to stab myself in the brain. Okay. This is another script by Melinda Snodgrass, teleplay author of “The Measure of a Man.” I do not like it as well as her previous teleplays. The episode title comes from the expression “Up the long ladder, down the short rope,” which of course refers to the impending execution of everyone involved in creating this episode for crimes against the humanities.
Solar flares! Also known as an all-purpose excuse to immediately suspend any inconvenient technical capabilities of the ship along with all other forms of disbelief. This society is so technically devolved that its leader Danilo Odell can’t pronounce the word computer, there is no artificial power source on the planet, and no evidence of an “advanced communication network.” The Enterprise nevertheless detects their intergalactic distress beacon from light years away. Riiiiight. They’ve been surviving in an underground colony 30 meters below the surface of an alien planet without using any technology. Sure.
If I were feeling charitable, I might forgive the cornpone that follows, in which we experience stereotyping by gender, ethnicity, social class, and age, were it not for what comes later, when the Enterprise visits the second Mariposa colony. Let me get this straight: It’s immoral and out of the question to donate sloughed off skin cells to a clone race. However, prostituting a more “primitive” culture into sexual slavery for the sake of their survival is a-o.k.
Does anyone believe for a second that these two societies can get along? How is this supposed to work? There are only five genetic codes in the second society, which means genetics-wise, they would quickly be absorbed into the larger culture. Is Danilo supposed to be happy about having three wives that are all clones of each other? How does that promote genetic diversity? What I see in their future, however, is the institution of an apartheid-like caste system and massive social unrest.
Terrible, terrible, embarrassing, and terrible. The best part was the non-sequitur scene in the first act between Worf and Pulaski. I don’t know what that scene is doing in the episode, but it was far more watchable than the rest. I scratch my head. Episodes of TNG are shorter than TOS, because of greater time reserved for advertising. TOS frequently struggled to fit its stories into a 50-minute running time. TNG episodes are approximately 44 minutes, yet they are padded out with filler.
Warp 1 of 6.
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