TNG S1E14 "11001001" Review by AnswerMan

Horrible:Meh:Adequate:Good:Fantastic

This shifty motherfucker...

Someone has taken over the ship! Who could it be? Well, this week it's the Bynars, a race of super intelligent aliens that link themselves physiologically with computers and always work in pairs. One is named One-Zero, and the other Zero-One, and they annoyingly always divide the responsibility of delivering a sentence between the two of them. They come on board while the Enterprise is docked at a space station to upgrade the computers, and immediately arouse suspicion, especially as they recruit extra help and then keep giving Wesley the side-eye as he watches them work. Now, I always thought that they were "Binars," as in binary computer code, which fits with the title of the show. But the Netflix subtitles spelled it "Bynar," and their planet as "Bynaus." I thought that maybe this was a mistake by the closed captioning people, but I hopped on Memory Alpha and found that they spell it that way too, which confuses me. "Bi" means two, as in two options, zero or one, and also appropriately describes the way that the species functions in pairs. So why "bi" was replaced with "by" is beyond me. Are we to assume that it's a coincidence that their planet is named Bynaus?



Meanwhile the crew is left with nothing to do since the ship is docked and upgrades are taking place. So we get to see what each member of the crew does when they're not responsible for the Enterprise. Not surprisingly, Tasha and Worf engage in competitive physical activity. Crusher crushes on some boring doctor who is giving a lecture or something. Wesley hangs out and annoys the workers. Data paints. And Picard enjoys the role of third wheel while Riker makes out with a hologram. Much fuss is made over Minuet, the character that the holodeck, with the help of the Bynars, creates for Riker. I know that at this time in the series the whole concept of the holodeck is still new, and therefore you have to understand some indulgence on the concept of being able to create your version of the perfect lover for your own pleasure. But I still just don't get why Riker and Picard fawn all over how wonderful this chick is. Riker and Minuet really don't seem to share any special bond other than she's what he likes to look at, and she's programmed to be DTF. She has no interesting back story and shares no particular interest with him. She does bat her eyes and grab his hands. It's all very shallow feeling. Then she objects when Picard wants to leave the two of them alone. By her insistence on them staying, it becomes obvious that she was programmed to keep the two of them occupied.

While they were considering having a Min sandwich, they missed a whole lot. The magnetic warp containment field decided to disappear, and Data ordered the evacuation of the entire ship and set the autopilot to get it as far away from people as possible when the inevitable explosion occurred. Of course, this was all a trick by the Bynars to hijack the ship and take off for their home world with it. Does Star Fleet go chasing after them? No, because they haven't any ships. At a star base. Ok...

So Picard does the only sensible thing and sets the ship to self-destruct before even bothering to figure out what's going on. It takes both the captain and the first officer to authorize the self-destruct, and it must be done in engineering. Oh and, five minutes is the only timer option. Because why would you make your self-destruct function customizable? I mean, they have infinite settings for how dim or bright the lights are, but there's no way to make the self-destruct sequence longer than five minutes? And here's where it gets really bonkers, the only way to shut it off is on the bridge, and they both have to be there to authorize cancelling it. Now normally, I don't get too geeky about picking things apart on the shows, but allow me this if you will. Engineering is, I believe, somewhere near the red oval on this picture, and the arrow points to the main bridge.

Photo credit: ex-astris-scientia.org

So, we're to believe that not only is five minutes the only option for self-destruct, but that the only way to disable it is to then travel all the way across the ship to the bridge, and BOTH OFFICERS have to make it there in time? Any time you're initiating the self-destruct, the situation is obviously dire, so anything could happen on the way to the bridge. What if one of them is shot, or even stubs his toe? I get both of them having to agree on initiating it, but couldn't either one of them disengage it? And why can't it be done from anywhere with a simple voice command? I guess maybe this sequence is designed to thwart a hostage situation where they are forced to disengage it against their will, but really that makes no sense either because if the captain or first officer already knows that they're going to die in a self-destruct, what additional threat would holding a phaser to their head pose?

In this case, they get to the bridge and find it locked. So they beam in ready to fight, but find that the Bynars are just laying in a pile completely helpless. After they cancel the self-destruct, they set about trying to figure out what the Bynars were up to. It turns out that the computer on their home planet was crapping out on them, and they needed a place to temporarily store all the data, and the Enterprise's computer was the only one large enough for the job. So Riker tries to find the file to upload it back and save all the Bynars, who can't function without computer assistance. He can't find the file, which....wouldn't it be the enormous one? He knows that they want it to be easily found, so Data suggest that it would be named something very simple, probably 8 or 16 digit binary. Wait, what? How is that simple? Why so many digits? Wouldn't they name "1"? No, they went with 11001001, which somehow miraculously the computer comes up with almost instantly. [I have since learned that it is all four of the Bynar's names smooshed together, but this isn't mentioned in the show and doesn't help them to find the file at all.] Oh ya, also it took both Riker and Picard on the console to open it, because the Bynars do everything in pairs. But, they are told, through Min, that it wasn't the plan to keep Picard there also, that's just a thing that happened. So how did they ever expect Riker to save them by himself if the process takes two people?

Anyway, they save the day and Bynaus lives on. The revived Bynars tell them that they didn't ask for help because they couldn't risk getting rejected, so they thought that stealing the ship was the safer bet. They are hauled off Scooby Doo style to jail or whatever, a fate that they knew was part of the deal. After the info dump, Minuet is gone and Riker says that she'll sure be hard to forget (which we know is true because she later returns as Riker's ideal wife in "Future Imperfect").

Oh boy. The only real highlight is the extra money they spent on the visuals of the space station docking sequence. That part is really very cool, visually. But because this one just has so many holes in the logical sequences, and because the events lack depth, it is only a Meh episode. 

Published April 29, 2017