Customer Reviews

Star Trek - The Next Generation, Episode 50: Evolution [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) is back for the beginning of the 3rd season, replacing Dr. Kate Polaski. The story was that she was at Starfleet Medical for the year, but in reality, Gates McFadden was pregnant and had been filmed from the chest up at the last of the 1st season as it was. Wesley is working himself cockeyed - when he's not working on the bridge of the Enterprise, he's studying astro physics, temporal mechanics and other Stephen Hawkings-esque subjects to prepare for his entrance exam to enter Starfleet.

Working with nanites (microscopic robots) on his own experiment, he has to help a Starfleet Scientist, Dr. Paul Stubbs (Ken Jenkins), with an experiment of his own. Stubbs has made it his life's work to study a rare phenomenon with a Neutrino star that only occurs once every 196 years. A lot of progress with sensors and measuring instruments in the previous 2 centuries gives Stubbs the opportunity to become the Carl Sagan of his own 24th Century generation.

The Enterprise is at Stubb's disposal to assist him with the project. As they move closer to observe the stellar matter between a nearby planet and the pulsating sun, the Enterprise starts going ape. Suddenly they find themselves hurtling toward a giant star that will turn them all into futuristic pork rinds and nothing is working. No shields, no tractor beams, no sensors and their controls do not even respond. Suddenly, the Enterprise behaves normally and when Picard asks, "Computer! Identify malfunction immediately!", the computer (Majel Barret-Roddenberry) replies, "there has been no malfunction."

Well this is just dandy! The only thing keeping these star-faring astronauts from death is the Enterprise, and they don't seem to be in control of her anymore. All sorts of tests are run to no avail. Wesley returns to his quarters to resume his experiments with his nanites and when he looks in the container he kept them in, he finds that they are missing.

Can the 2 missing microscopic robots have anything to do with a systems-wide failure on the flagship of the Federation. Reluctantly, Wesley informs the senior staff and it turns out that these 2 little metalic stinkers have been harvesting tiny parts of the ship to make more of themselves - and collectively have become self-aware, sentient and able to control the Enterprise.

Stubbs cannot believe what is going on. He at first laughs in the face of their first scary speed bump, but when the nanites threaten to ruin his shot at studying the rarely seen phenomenon, he goes lulu, with more concern for his life's work than for the over 1,000 souls aboard the Enterprise. In a desparate act to halt the nanites, he uses a phaser to destroy millions of them and they don't take it lightly.

An interesting show with mind provoking subject matter for the armchair philosopher.

For the first show of the third season (you thought these were in the correct order?), Beverly Crusher is back as Chief Medical Officer, the Starfleet uniforms now look a whole lot better, and yet another eminent scientist causes trouble on the Enterprise. Dr. Paul Stubbs is going to study a rare phenomenon that happens only once every 197 years, as matter builds up on the surface of a star before exploding. But as the time comes to do this once in an every third lifetime experiment, the Enterprise's computer systems mysterious start to fail and Stubbs is coming apart at the seams at the idea that the mission may be scrubbed. However, it is not fate that is conspiring against the good doctor but Wesley Crusher. As part of a genetics experiment the ship's resident boy genius was working on Nanites, microscopic machines designed to make repairs on the cells of living tissues. Wesley upgraded the Nanites, teaching them to work together, to reproduce and to otherwise evolve. When two of his new and improve Nanites escaped, the result was that the computer core eventually was invaded by thousands of Nanites where they are happy and content, eating the memory chips. Ultimately they threaten not only Stubbs' experiment, but also the Enterprise's life-support systems. No one promised fair, but Stubbs is ready to go off the deep end on this one.

This is another one of those Next Generation episodes that focuses on the issue of sentience. We have dealt with Androids ("The Measure of a Man," Episode 35), holographic characters ("Elementary, My Dear Data," Episode 29), and crystals ("Home Soil," Episode 17), so now we deal with "living machines." Dr. Stubbs wants to exterminate the Nanites and proceed with his experiment. Of course, Captain Picard refuses to destroy out of hand what may well be a new species just because they are eating his computer. They might be small and a new life form, but Picard always likes to look at the big picture. Perhaps one of the biggest ironies of the Star Trek universe is that it is a Starfleet captain, the Federation's "military" wing if you will, who is the voice of conscience and reason. When I watched "Evolution" again I knew it was an above average episode but I was surprised at how strong it was, mainly because it really does not have any major weaknesses. I ended up giving it 5 stars because I liked Dr. Stubbs' mental relaxation technique of playing a baseball game in his mind, foreshadowing one of the more interesting character traits of future DS9 Captain Benjamin Sisko.

This is as a opposed to Frankenstein: By Mary Shelley. Plot: Dr. Stubbs (who was a prodigy and is obsessed with his experiment) is launching a special ship called "The Egg" that will be launched into a star just before it goes "BOOM". Meanwhile, Wesley is experimenting with nanites, microbe-sized robots that can enter living cells (later, in "The Best of Both Worlds Part 2", Data and Dr. Crusher suggest using this guys to knock out the Borg, but it would take to long to "breed" them, so they didn't) and a couple escape. To make things worse, they're in the computer core, eating the little computer chips to their delight (which for some reason leads them to "evolve", hence the episode's title) which causes the ship to go haywire. Well, now the decision is either to try and reason with these little pests or simply exterminate them. Dr. Stubbs is for the latter, so that his experiment can continue uninterrupted. Picard would rather try and communicate with the nanites and hopefully solve it diplomatically.

I much prefer this episode over "The Quality of Life", because the reasoning is far better. For one thing, the Enterprise always has the option of wiping out the nanites at any point, but they don't. Another thing is that someone isn't putting someone else at extreme risk of getting killed (like in the aforementioned episode) for something that "may be alive", when they're putting something that is alive in jeopardy. While the "non-living thing evolving so that they're alive and self-conscious" can get a little wearisome in being addressed over and over again, this is one of the better ones.

Gets a nice, solid 5 out of 5 stars.

While the exploration of the development of sentience is an interesting plot line, the fact that a schoolboy science project could lead to the destruction of the core of the Enterprise computers is farfetched. Wesley Crusher is conducting an experiment with nanites, extremely small machines that are capable of conducting repairs or destroying whatever they infect. Somehow, the nanites combine into a more sophisticated organism and two of them escape, entering the core of the Enterprise computers. Once there, they evolve at a very rapid rate and somehow manage to achieve a collective consciousness. They begin eating up the core memory, rendering the computer somewhat insane, which is occasionally very funny.
At the same time, an arrogant scientist is onboard to conduct an experiment monitoring the predictable explosion of a star. The computer glitches threaten to terminate the experiment, so he destroys a large number of the nanites. This causes them to retaliate, giving him an electric shock. Data then manages to interface with the nanites and an agreement is reached whereby the nanites repair the computer and are allowed to live.
As the obligatory subplot, there is the return of Dr. Crusher from her hiatus. She tries to rekindle her relationship with her son, but the acting of Gates McFadden is awkward at best. This reinforces my continuing theme that the role of the doctor in the TNG series is the weakest character, nowhere near as interesting as the Dr. McCoy character of the original series.
What I found weak about the episode is how vulnerable the computer core was and how nonchalant the Enterprise crew was about the nanites. They evolved so quickly, that it is quite possible that they would continue to evolve into flesh eaters or creatures that would eat away the structure of the Enterprise. As a scientist, I was also disturbed by the lack of supervisory oversight of Wesley Crusher's science projects. In the real world, no schoolboy science project with that enormous potential for disaster would be allowed to be performed without the strictest of scientific controls. Even college students working with relatively harmless bacteria are required to conform to stricter safety protocols than Wesley is following.