37 – Contagion

Grade: B-

Summary

The starship Yamato has had all kinds of systems failures. They send a distress signal to the Enterprise, hoping they can come help detect the problem and repair what they think is a design flaw in the ship. But before the Enterprise can arrive, the ship explodes.

Commentary

This was a decent episode, though certainly not one of my favorites. Its biggest problem seems to be that it is pretty predictable in many places. But it has some nice moments and the writing seems to be more in-line with what we’ve come to expect from this series in its last few seasons. In fact, I often forget this is from the second season.

One part I liked was that Worf’s prediction about when something would happen was correct in two places. First, when he said it would happen in four minutes and then about a minute later when he said it would happen in three minutes. If you follow the timer on your DVD player, you’ll see that it actually does happen when he predicted. So the episode did not pad the running time in order to artificially add suspense. It was a nice touch.

But I really don’t like Dr. Pulaski. I’m not sure why she’s even in this series except to just annoy everyone. In this episode, she storms around Sickbay yelling and complaining at people. It is very unprofessional from someone who is a Starfleet officer. At least it’s a short scene, though.

Finally, one piece of inconsistency is when Picard asks Worf to destroy all the historical data they’ve collected on their tricorder. I’m not sure he would have really done that, considering that he’s an archaeology buff. If they wanted it to seem like a sacrifice for Picard to do that, they shouldn’t have filmed it they way they did. But I guess it’s OK. Just seems weird.

Of Note

If you’ve never seen a Star Trek episode before, you may be surprised by what happens after the captain of the Yamato refuses to beam over all the non-essential personnel to the Enterprise. This is a pretty predictable episode.