TNG S6E20 "The Chase" Review By AnswerMan

Horrible:Meh:Adequate:Good:Fantastic

First off, I wish to state that despite the rating, this is a very important episode of Star Trek. I was excited to watch it again, because I remember the profound impact that it left on me the first time. I got the sense that the Trek universe had fundamentally changed due to the findings of "The Chase." But, just like how we once were told that warp drive was destroying the universe, only to have it never mentioned again, the lack of continuity regarding these big moments actually reduces them right back down to being meaningless. Plus, this isn't that great of an episode anyway.



Picard is no swash-buckler like Kirk. In fact, deep inside he is just a boring man that wants to be left alone. Even though he would never fully admit it, he wishes that instead of having the most exciting job in the Alpha Quadrant, he could be a dull archaeologist. This is never more obvious than when his old professor shows up and starts guilting him about having a military job when he could be dusting off bones or whatever. Then the professor gives him a priceless relic that clearly belongs in a museum, rather than being toted around on a spaceship that gets blown up every other week. Seriously, that thing is going to get broken, or at least the pieces will get lost. Then this guy expects Picard to just abandon his career and leave with him to go explore something, without ever even bothering to explain what they'd be looking for. Seriously, this guy is a dick.

Good news! The asshole professor is killed immediately upon leaving the Enterprise in his shuttle. And, bonus, he has time to apologize to Picard with his last dying breath. The Yridians apparently wanted something that he had. But it looks like the only important thing he was carrying (besides of course 200,000 year old antiques) is a bunch of numbers. They soon realize that the code is DNA sequences collected from various species within a couple quadrants. Soon the Cardassians and the Klingons show up to get the code as well. Of course, the Klingons think that it will unlock a powerful weapon. The Cardassians optimistically believe that it will be a powerful energy source. But even though they all want to slit each other's throats, they soon realize that they each have a piece of the code and therefore must share resources in order to ever solve it. But instead the Cardassians double-cross, and the Romulans play peeping tom behind their cloaks, and yet somehow they all end up together on the final planet when it's time to unlock the last bit of code. While they're arguing, Crusher slips off and gets a smidge of DNA, which they lay on the tricorder, which somehow has the processing power to put it all together and then become a holographic projector to play a pre-recorded message. Alrighty then!

Here's where we get to the actual point of all of this. Ever wonder why so many of the aliens that the crew encounters look pretty much like humans, except for maybe a few small facial features? I bet you thought it was due to small visual effects budgets, but you'd be wrong! It's actually because billions of years ago the first humanoid race was all alone in the universe, and so they dropped their DNA into primordial pools of beginning life-forms on a variety of planets. So all humanoid life-forms did not come into existence independently. Rather, they are in fact all related. The aliens left the code out there to be completed, in hopes that all the races would eventually seek each other out and work as a team to unlock it. Ta-da!

Unfortunately, "The Chase" is only an Adequate episode, despite its ambitious subject matter. In fact, I would give the episode a Meh rating if not for the importance of the big reveal. But the pacing is slow, especially at the start, and the whole Picard longing to be an archaeologist is just not engaging. Professor Galen was not a believable character, and Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians all acting like Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians could have taken place around any old plot. And what's up with the Yridians? Why did that ship explode and why didn't we see another delegation from their world? The only really bright spot was when the Klingon captain challenged Data to some Klingon arm wresting and gets his ass whipped, then gets outed for trying to bribe an officer, all the while with Data barely being bothered to look up from what he was doing. That was a fun scene to watch!

In the end, there is an exchange between Picard and the Romulan captain that leads us to hope that some day the two worlds will actually work together. But actually it's a depressing tone, because the aspirations of the seed-laying aliens were not achieved. The whole exercise brought only some of them together, and only temporarily. They are still a long way off from where the aliens thought they would be at the moment of discovery.

Published February 25, 2018