Title: Contagion
Airdate: 3/20/1989
Plot Summary
When the Enterprise comes to the aid of her sister ship, the Yamato, the captain is fighting all kinds of system issues. He’s in the Romulan neutral zone on an archeological hunt for the Ikonians, an ancient civilization of supposedly incredible power. Before the captain can explain everything, the Yamato’s technical issues turn critical and the ship explodes. The Enterprise begins to take up the Yamato’s mission, but then begins to experience the same issues the Yamato was having. Can they find the Ikonian ruins and solve their issues before another catastophe?
Make It So
Picard goes down to the planet with Worf and Data to investigate the Ikonians. He realizes that perhaps the Ikonians were not conquerors but were conquered themselves, or destroyed. They do have incredible transportation technology and rightly decides to investigate and finally destroy it so it doesn’t fall into Romulan hands.
Number 1
Riker has to go toe to toe with a Romulan warbird with a starship that can’t even bring up its shields properly. He still helps them by telling the Romulans to destroy the probe.
Fully Functional
Data nearly dies but is able to repair himself. He’s also helpful in figuring out the Ikonian language, though with a few false starts.
Today Is A Good Day To Die
Worf goes down to the planet and is able to keep impeccable time.
Phase Inducers
Poor Geordi gets thrown around the errant turbolift and then ejected with force onto the bridge. He then gets shocked by a control panel and thrown 10 feet by Data to try to help. Poor guy had a rough day. He does end up saving the ship though.
Counselor Cleavage
She’s quite worried about the Romulan’s and does her best to council Picard on whether or not they should leave the neutral zone. She also advises Riker on getting everyone something to do to get their minds off their worries.
Doctor Not Bones
She has a brief moment in sickbay having to teach another staff doctor about a splint, which should be something they still teach given all the away missions and tech failures that happen on these shows.
Shut Up, Wesley
Wesley has a tough time with the Yamato’s destruction. He mistakanly believes that everyone is just ok with it but understandably is young and hasn’t had the training yet.
Guinan?!
Not here this time.
Canon Maker
We finally bring up Picard’s love of archeology. He mentions he was interested since the academy, which we meet one of his professors later on.
We also get the first time he order tea, earl grey, hot. Though he never got any tea funny enough.
The Ikonians would kinda sort of make a return in DS9.
Canon Breaker
For some reason Wesley is manning the shields at his helm station. It’s not like they didn’t have a replacement security officer at the weapons station.
They mention that the Romulans have phasers, but Romulans use disruptors.
A Little Bloody Nose
The Yamato blows up killing around 1000 people, assuming it has the same amount of people as the Enterprise.
Technobabble
The Enterprise basically got a computer virus. They shut it down, loaded the backups and all was well. This is pretty accurate to what we do now.
Library Computer
In the last shot when the two ships leave, you can see the explosions on the planet where Picard set the self-destruct. I love attention to details.
Please Repeat Your Communication
“If it should become necessary to fight, could you arrange to find me some rocks to throw at them?” – Riker finally letting his frustration with the Enterprise’s issue get to him.
I Know That Guy:
Thalmus Rasulala plays the doomed Capt. Donald Varley. Not a huge filmography, he did a bunch of blaxsploitation films in the 70s.
Carolyn Seymour is the Romulan commader Taris. She’ll play another commander later on as well as a scientist in another episode. She’ll also be in a couple of episodes of Voyager.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
I like this episode, but I seem to be in the minority. We have a bit of a treasure hunt, an engineering problem, the Romulans, what’s not to like?
Part of the reason I see why people don’t like it is how obvious it was to fix the Enterprise. Just shut it down and load from backups. Sure, that’s obvious in 2026, or even 2006, but in 1989? The idea of computer viruses was not really mainstream yet and how to deal with computers in general was still just in its infancy. Believe me I know, I’ve been in I.T. since the mid 80s. What they came up with was ahead of their time, so let’s cut them some slack.
The destruction of the Yamato was a good way to start with a bang. We basically get to see the Enterprise blow up, since they are the same model. Wesley’s reaction was also very believable.
I also like the whole Indiana Jones plot, a race to find an ancient civilization and the mystery around them.
Sure it was darn lucky that the gateway put him on the bridge of the Romulan ship as opposed to halfway across the galaxy but eh, nitpick.
Just a fun episode in my opinion. Maybe it doesn’t age well as technology has advanced but I appreciate how forward thinking they were.
