Worf, injured in a serious accident due to a container leak that caused the barrels of Ghostbusters Ectoplasm to fall over, led to what started out as three great topics:
What gets my goat is that the guest doctor is contrived at every turn just to make her look bad, solely for the sake of Crusher getting to bleat on an increasingly tall soapbox. It's incredibly bogus. Keeping the guest doctor with working on a new treatment for spinal injuries and bypassing the contrived scene with the near-dead patient, just for another excuse for Crusher to get all pious (where's Q when we need him? At least until season 6...)
And that's not even taking into account Worf's convenient synaptic backup system, which I bellowed out loud laughing with over how cheesy it was. It ranks up there with how having more redundant organs means "more can go wrong". Yet they have only one heart to go with the two livers, two kidneys, and everything else... Ugh.
Crusher's wasting so much time with her apparently sordid history yet the guest villain of the week still so high ranking... Add in the "it's never been tested on Klingons" and "Oh there were some simulation hiccups" (Despite the story also shoehorning in how so little being known on Klingon anatomy to begin with?! Worf would have been toast either which way. And that's not taking into account his desire to off himself, at which point citing 37% success rate becomes less than moot. But the episode really wanted to make the guest doctor look so gung-ho by introducing in-development medicines based on preliminary results, I'm truly amazed they even wrote in how the subject's blood pressure was too low for the other medications and how Crusher refused to listen - but I oughtn't be since most of the episode is well-handled and not preachy, so there was genuine effort applied. And yet, despite it all, the only things missing from the guest doctor were a big floppy black hat and mustache to twirl.)
Worst of all, strangely, the episode still wanted to drag out the "He's dead Jim, no he's not" drama way too long, mostly to hide around a laughably bad plot contrivance set up far earlier in the story, possibly in hopes none of us would remember it. It doesn't matter and I'll get to the why in a moment. Had this been Michael Dorn's final Trek episode, it'd have a lot of gravitas going for it. But there's no way to win when a main cast member that isn't leaving is given a dramatic turn, which makes a lot of plot points even that much more cringey because we know he's going to make it thanks to his backup brain cells (okay, "synapses") since the problem was with the spinal cord and not his brain and for all anyone knows it would have been the addition of Crusher's medication that, in cocktail with the guest doctor's, caused the brain damage, yet his backup brain was still intact, just like Data's UNIX operating system and memory backup disks. How convenient and unique; an alcoholic raccoon could have 3 redundant livers and they're all attached to the same core systems and would all get fried by the same external impetus (perhaps slower, so 3x the delicious Everclear is then needed... but whatever, and if "The Chase" states similarities between all species and how Romulan unlike Vulcan can be used to save Klingons, this far bigger stretch of convenient backup systems-- ugh, just let humans fly around without wings while they're at it, it's just as hokey); interior organs where duplicates are found are either backups in the sense of one being damaged the other can still operate (there's just no on/off switch as such) or for the multiple units operating in greater efficiency...
It's a real testament to the non-doctor scenes' quality and acting that buoy and keep this episode going.
My score is ultimately 5/10, which is depressing because a couple of mild and mundane script changes were all that's needed to have kept this as being one of Trek's all-time finest entries. Every other subplot was nuanced and thoughtful and sublime. Except for Dr Preachathon(tm) and her seasoned one'd frenemy o' the week(tm). There was simply no need to contrive the guest Doctor to be such a baddie just to make Crusher look good, especially with meretricious yet simplistic and sophistry-laden dialogue. That was just done in another attempt to prop up Crusher. But, as they say, "like son like mother". If Wesley could be written by making everyone else look dumb, it's inevitable the same will happen to other characters in some episode eventually. Bev got her turn in this story.
That said, "Ethics" is still worth a watch as the non-Doctor plot strands are surprisingly compelling, especially for season 5's shiny new format, but I wouldn't do this type of format every week.
How might you rate this story?
- Assisted suicide arguments
- Living with a disability
- The line between traditional and experimental medical treatments
What gets my goat is that the guest doctor is contrived at every turn just to make her look bad, solely for the sake of Crusher getting to bleat on an increasingly tall soapbox. It's incredibly bogus. Keeping the guest doctor with working on a new treatment for spinal injuries and bypassing the contrived scene with the near-dead patient, just for another excuse for Crusher to get all pious (where's Q when we need him? At least until season 6...)
And that's not even taking into account Worf's convenient synaptic backup system, which I bellowed out loud laughing with over how cheesy it was. It ranks up there with how having more redundant organs means "more can go wrong". Yet they have only one heart to go with the two livers, two kidneys, and everything else... Ugh.
Crusher's wasting so much time with her apparently sordid history yet the guest villain of the week still so high ranking... Add in the "it's never been tested on Klingons" and "Oh there were some simulation hiccups" (Despite the story also shoehorning in how so little being known on Klingon anatomy to begin with?! Worf would have been toast either which way. And that's not taking into account his desire to off himself, at which point citing 37% success rate becomes less than moot. But the episode really wanted to make the guest doctor look so gung-ho by introducing in-development medicines based on preliminary results, I'm truly amazed they even wrote in how the subject's blood pressure was too low for the other medications and how Crusher refused to listen - but I oughtn't be since most of the episode is well-handled and not preachy, so there was genuine effort applied. And yet, despite it all, the only things missing from the guest doctor were a big floppy black hat and mustache to twirl.)
Worst of all, strangely, the episode still wanted to drag out the "He's dead Jim, no he's not" drama way too long, mostly to hide around a laughably bad plot contrivance set up far earlier in the story, possibly in hopes none of us would remember it. It doesn't matter and I'll get to the why in a moment. Had this been Michael Dorn's final Trek episode, it'd have a lot of gravitas going for it. But there's no way to win when a main cast member that isn't leaving is given a dramatic turn, which makes a lot of plot points even that much more cringey because we know he's going to make it thanks to his backup brain cells (okay, "synapses") since the problem was with the spinal cord and not his brain and for all anyone knows it would have been the addition of Crusher's medication that, in cocktail with the guest doctor's, caused the brain damage, yet his backup brain was still intact, just like Data's UNIX operating system and memory backup disks. How convenient and unique; an alcoholic raccoon could have 3 redundant livers and they're all attached to the same core systems and would all get fried by the same external impetus (perhaps slower, so 3x the delicious Everclear is then needed... but whatever, and if "The Chase" states similarities between all species and how Romulan unlike Vulcan can be used to save Klingons, this far bigger stretch of convenient backup systems-- ugh, just let humans fly around without wings while they're at it, it's just as hokey); interior organs where duplicates are found are either backups in the sense of one being damaged the other can still operate (there's just no on/off switch as such) or for the multiple units operating in greater efficiency...
It's a real testament to the non-doctor scenes' quality and acting that buoy and keep this episode going.
My score is ultimately 5/10, which is depressing because a couple of mild and mundane script changes were all that's needed to have kept this as being one of Trek's all-time finest entries. Every other subplot was nuanced and thoughtful and sublime. Except for Dr Preachathon(tm) and her seasoned one'd frenemy o' the week(tm). There was simply no need to contrive the guest Doctor to be such a baddie just to make Crusher look good, especially with meretricious yet simplistic and sophistry-laden dialogue. That was just done in another attempt to prop up Crusher. But, as they say, "like son like mother". If Wesley could be written by making everyone else look dumb, it's inevitable the same will happen to other characters in some episode eventually. Bev got her turn in this story.
That said, "Ethics" is still worth a watch as the non-Doctor plot strands are surprisingly compelling, especially for season 5's shiny new format, but I wouldn't do this type of format every week.
How might you rate this story?
