“Scientists believe no experiment is a failure.”
Ah, Dr. Pulaski; we hardly knew ye. I admit my relationship to Lady Bones is heartily impacted by my brother’s spastic rendering of her name – “P’LASKI!” – but on the whole I like her well enough; were it not for my immense love of the character she was replacing, I might even be a fan. But Pulaski’s entire Season Two run was torturous to me, because she was not Dr. Crusher; and her diagrammatic efforts at being The Next Generation’s equivalent of Leonard McCoy only meant that she was, in fact, trying to replace two of my favourite Star Trek doctors simultaneously. Rough mission. Not a success.
Dr. Pulaski – “Kate” to her friends, of which Troi is apparently the only one – gets her only proper episode in “Unnatural Selection,” which is, I think, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s final effort at remaking an episode from The Original Series (“The Deadly Years,” in this case). This episode also functions as a kind of inversion of “Too Short a Season” from Season One, and that episode’s problems are similar to this one’s: 1980s age makeup, especially hyper-age makeup, just sucks. When she advances into the centenarian level of her aging, Diana Muldaur looks less like a human and more like Jeff Goldblum as The Fly. Nonetheless, of the three aging episodes I’ve mentioned, “Unnatural Selection” is probably my favourite, if only for its novelty and because Picard’s such a grim badass in it.
The episode begins quite nicely, with an unnerving encounter with the S.S. Lantree, whose crew has died of rapidly increasing age in a matter of days. It’s one of those shipboard processes that we rarely see on the show – Picard remote-accessing the dead ship using his command codes (per Star Trek II), and Worf setting up quarantine beacons and automated warning messages – and it’s a fairly chilly little short story, all on its own. The rest of the episode, though, seems to write itself down a hole in an attempt to go somewhere with the premise. The issue of Darwin Station’s genetically engineered “children” is interesting enough, though casting male underwear models as the children in question seems a bit bizarre. Also, one wonders why the Enterprise, and in fact all of Starfleet, don’t have a standing order to just leave any victims of genetic-experimentation-gone-wrong to deal with their own problems. Surely, these god-playing bozos cannot be worth our heroes’ time.
Chief O’Brien finally gets a name, and attends a staff meeting to boot, and the solution to the crisis makes me realize that I will happily go in for various transporter technobabble, as I just find the whole notion of teleportation so neat anyway. Stick a piece of Pulaski’s hair in the transporter buffer and use it to scrub her genetic code clean of the aging virus, rematerializing her onboard ship as her proper self? Sure, why not. Once you’ve accepted the existence of the transporter, and therefore the idea that our entire physical and mental selves could be converted to a computer file and then back out again, pretty much anything’s possible.
The episode virtually begs for Dr. Crusher to come sailing in at the last minute to solve the medical dilemma… or maybe that’s just what I’m begging for. Whatever, I’ll just go back to believing that Picard is so pissy with Pulaski all the time because he misses Beverly so much.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season 2 is available now. I’m double-timing it for the next few weeks, to prepare for Season 3’s launch in April.