Horrible:Meh:Adequate:Good:Fantastic
The Enterprise had a baby. For real. I guess that's what she gets for whoring around with the other ships in orbit around Risa. Maybe next time the Enterprise will remember to leave its shields up for protection. Or perhaps just stick to only allowing suitors in Ten Forward or maybe even only fooling around with the nacelles. But not this time. This time she opened up her hatch right into cargo bay 5 and thus was implanted a life-form.
OK, since that is now out of my system, I can dive into this episode. The premise is that "emergent properties" of complex components can exist. For instance, our own brains only consist of basic cells, neurons, and some electrical pulses. But actually from that has emerged a consciousness. In the same manner, the ships systems have come together and become more than the sum of its components. And it has decided to reproduce?
There are some things that make no sense here. First off, as soon as the ship releases its offspring, the new data nodes disappear and everything returns to normal. This is brushed off by the crew as normal, since some species only exist to reproduce, and then die off immediately. Oh really? Which ones exactly? It makes no sense for the ship's new neural net to just disintegrate.
Also, the holodeck as the main hub of the ship's new found intelligence is just dumb. At first blush, you might think this is yet another "holodeck gone wrong" episode, but it's not. The holodeck is just being used by the newly-sentient computer as its imagination. I don't quite understand this. It seems to me that the only reason for the computer to use the holodeck would be for communication with the crew. Metaphorically, they can begin to understand what it's doing, and even strike an alliance with it. This makes total sense, but we are explicitly told to disregard this as an explanation. We are instead told that the computer is like a child, and we are to take the characters in the program at face value that they have no deeper understanding of what's going on. Opportunity missed.
This whole episode would have been much better if there was no holodeck component to it at all. The premise of the Enterprise becoming self-aware and wanting not only to self-preserve but also to procreate is enough on its own. We did not need the whole Orient Express distraction at all.
Otherwise, some of the dialogue hits while the rest misses. Picard asks Crusher if she knew how many people the Orient Express transported. She responds by saying that she's not interested in the train itself, only in the experience. Which, would only make sense had Picard been telling her something about the train, like how many wheels it had or how many horsepower it could generate. But he was also talking about the people. This might sound like nitpicking, but it just stuck out to me as an unpolished moment that distracted from the otherwise awesome science fiction taking place. But the conversation at the end between Picard and Data about whether or not it was ethical to help the ship release a new life form into the universe was pure gold.
I wish I could give this a higher rating, but unfortunately "Emergence" is only just Adequate. It aimed hig, but fell short.
Published May 23, 2021
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