“Antidote. If we’re going to share, let’s share. Now quote me a little of that poetry.”
A weird smashup of what seems like three different episodes, “Up the Long Ladder” is charming in parts but can’t escape the vague stupidity of its writing, nor the ramshackle construction of its various plots. It’s most remembered for its lead story, where the Enterprise finds a lost colony of Irish throwbacks; this gives way, later in the show, to the discovery of a second colony, made up entirely of supercilious clones – who try to steal Riker and Pulaski’s DNA. None of which has anything to do with the best part of the episode, which is a wholly unrelated matter wherein Worf has a fainting spell, gets covered for by Dr. Pulaski, and proceeds to woo her with the Klingon tea ceremony. Oh, and in a further apparent effort to pad out the running time, Riker has sex with a feisty Irishwoman. What a daffy mix of miscellaneous things.
The concept behind the clone storyline, at least, has the makings of a good piece of Star Trek: it raises the notion of replicative fading, where clone generations eventually break down as copies upon copies begin to develop genetic errors. (This resulted in one of those weird crossover moments for me in Grade 7 or 8, when my science teacher and I got into a surprisingly animated discussion of whether or not such a thing would happen.) With the Mariposan clones’ theft of Riker and Pulaski’s DNA, the episode also gives a glancing assertion of the human right to control one’s own body – a hot-button issue, then as now, and made somewhat more interesting coming from Riker than, say, a female character. But the whole affair with the clones is introduced and dispensed with in less then ten minutes’ screen time, giving way to a trite conclusion in which – in surprisingly creepy fashion – the Enterprise crew pimps the Irish peasants to the clones as “breeding stock.” Everyone takes to the notion of this proposed polygamous utopia with appropriate glee – except the clones, who have been cloning for so long that they now find sex distasteful. But they’ll learn – cuz sex is great!
Naturally I feel like there’s a good idea buried somewhere underneath all this, which would actually make all of the seemingly disparate elements of “Up the Long Ladder” work – even the Klingon tea ceremony, if you believe (as I do) that Pulaski gets hella turned on by the notion of Worf reading her some Klingon love poetry. All four runners in the episode, in effect, deal with sexual urges in some direct or indirect way, which might have made for an interesting bit of thematic storytelling, if the script bothered to tie any of the loose ends together. But it doesn’t, and must be marked as a disappointing third Next Gen effort from “The Measure of a Man” screenwriter Melinda M. Snodgrass. Nothing ever really gels, and any element of suspense (or even fish-out-of-water comedy, in the case of the Irish colonists) is given insufficient space to develop in the overstuffed script, which seems to have altogether too much going on, and not nearly enough, all at the same time. Two Enterprises out of five.
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, with Season 3 due on April 30.