“You take shortcuts. Right through living tissue.”
After a fairly amazing year in Season Four (“Remember Me” and “The Host” being the highlights), Dr. Crusher gets the hell shafted out of her in Season Five. She’s basically been a day player in every single episode up to now, with the partial exception of “Disaster.” Now, the first Crusher-centric show of the year – sixteenth out of 26 overall – is “Ethics,” a dull moral stanchion about biomedical morality and euthanasia. Worf breaks his back in an accident in the cargo bay, and under the influence of an ambitious, somewhat devious experimental physician, Beverly has to work out whether or not to attempt a risky procedure to restore Worf’s ability to walk.
That makes it a Worf show too, obviously; and by extension, an Alexander show, a Riker show, and a Picard show. From that standpoint I like the episode – it ties the Enterprise family together in unique and interesting ways, with everyone playing a part slightly off-center of what you’d initially expect. Picard’s fatherly pragmatism on the subject of Worf’s suicide request would seem wholly out of character if Patrick Stewart didn’t play the scenes so convincingly. And Troi gets a couple of real belter scenes, too – first when she scolds Worf for his paraplegic pity-party, and later when Worf asks her to raise Alexander if he dies. Epic feels!
Still, it’s a really uninvolving episode for the most part, because it’s so fascinated by its core theme – ethics – and therefore fairly soap-boxy. Dr. Russell is such an unabashed villain that it’s astonishing that Starfleet would send her anywhere to do anything. Beverly reverses her own decision on whether or not to support Russell’s untested spinal procedure over a commercial break, maybe because the writers couldn’t dig their way out of their own moral holes. And she doesn’t even save Worf’s life in the end – his “overdesigned” Klingon anatomy does that (or the tears of his son, depending on how dippy you’re feeling today).
That overdesigned anatomy is the only real takeaway from “Ethics” that I enjoy – the notion that the Klingon body has multiple redundancies for all their organs, making them nearly unkillable with a single blow. It’s a cheat in this context, but a nice addition to the mythology overall.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.