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TNG Episode “Genesis” Gets A Bad Rap
usskentucky
Member Posts: 402 Arc User
I find that the episode “Genesis” gets a bad rap. It’s listed among the worst episodes on several sites and generally panned everywhere I look. But I always find myself picking it to watch.
The slow transformation of the crew is spooky to watch, and when Picard and Data get back it’s like they’re having to explore a brave new world, but on their own ship. And I like the quirky stuff: Super Devolved Murder Klingon, Ape Man Riker, Frog Diana, and for some odd reason, Spider Barkley (wouldnt he also be an ape). This episode was also a Gates McFaddin directed flick. It’s among the first in which Diana and Worf are casts romantically. Spot has kittens! We learn nurse Ogawa is about to have a baby—a lot of lore. There’s also a real feeling in the episode that the good guys might lose, I guess, which makes the struggle of the characters more compelling. And anytime Picard and Data are riffing you know you are learning about humanity.
The slow transformation of the crew is spooky to watch, and when Picard and Data get back it’s like they’re having to explore a brave new world, but on their own ship. And I like the quirky stuff: Super Devolved Murder Klingon, Ape Man Riker, Frog Diana, and for some odd reason, Spider Barkley (wouldnt he also be an ape). This episode was also a Gates McFaddin directed flick. It’s among the first in which Diana and Worf are casts romantically. Spot has kittens! We learn nurse Ogawa is about to have a baby—a lot of lore. There’s also a real feeling in the episode that the good guys might lose, I guess, which makes the struggle of the characters more compelling. And anytime Picard and Data are riffing you know you are learning about humanity.
Post edited by usskentucky on
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/EditsForTheEditMonster!
Well, in a few centuries, we might be saying the opposite. What we think is true today can be different tomorrow.
No. Not it won't. No amount of your future woo will mean that the last common ancestor of mammals and arthropods, for instance, wouldn't have been around anywhere other than 550 million years or so ago or that spiders are in human "junk DNA", after all that they're suddenly the order of life.
It's a bad episode that is worse than Threshold and deserves everything it gets.
Though I will point out we diverge from spiders at the phyla level and not the order level.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Too true. Genetic Engineering might become as simple as putting on some makeup. Our descendants might be able to go clubbing looking like any of the characters we can create in Star Trek Online or Champions Online. Want to have wings, horns, and blue skin for a fun weekend and look like your boring self for work on Monday, then all it takes is a simple injection. What is impossible now might be possible in the future.
Exactly.
Hell, people STILL were ridiculing the Wright brothers on the day they flew....even after, I heard.
I thought it was going to lead to something later. Like them finding out that Reg was not 100% human.
Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.
-Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
Doubtful. DNA isn't a simple set of instructions stored in some central location, each one of your 37,200,000,000,000 cells has its own copy that it follows. On top of that, changing DNA doesn't magically change the form of your body, you'd have to go through total cell replacement, which would require something to ensure that the change occurs in an orderly fashion that doesn't result in a total collapse of all living material, leading to death. Further, expression of DNA is adjusted by things like hormones and environmental factors.
I could see it becoming easy to edit DNA so that, say, your skin will get darker over the next month or so by increasing production of melanin, but the sort of instant transformation you're talking about is not something that could be done with a simple injection a rogue T-cell (which a class of cells in the immune system).
Obviously, a drastic and instantaneous change of someone's body would not be a simple injection of rogue T-cells. Nanotechnology is a possibility. The point is that we don't know what future technology will be created and as a result we don't know what is possible. Obviously it is much easier to add wings, horns, and blue skin in a highly advanced virtual reality system where all 5 senses are simulated, but being able to change a person's DNA at will is extremely useful for colonizing alien worlds. It is far cheaper to adapt colonists' DNA to an alien world than it is to adapt an alien world to colonists.
I mean, Spider Barclay was super dumb, but other than a poor understanding of DNA, it was a pretty good episode. I thought, anyway...
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
Still thinking that Barclay was not human or not completely human with Spider Barclay. The TNG writers might have planned to reveal it, but it got scrapped. Then there is Spot turning into an iguana. The other transformations seemed to be consistent with their evolutionary ancestors.
Sometimes the fools that were laughed at turn out to be right, most other times they turn out to be fools.
The existence of one improbable concept does not automatically presuppose the existence of another, unrelated, improbable concept.
Heavier than air flight was always a scientific possibility because we can observe birds (who weigh more than air funnily enough). The people that laughed at the Wright Brothers did so as they couldn't join the dots. You just deciding DNA dosn't work the way it does and declaring anything is possible is the same as those people, not the Wright Brothers.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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The big thing was how fast people changed. Picard started to change mere hours after exposure. It's like the writers think internal organs don't exist...
2 other things: why didn't the doctor get at least a reprimand for doing something so risky and stupid? or maybe that happened off-screen after the ep was over?
TNG and TOS often played up morality tales about the dangers of genetic engineering, this seems to have been one of them. But... if the Feds are against that sort of thing why is it normal medicine?
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Because a Doctor needs to get a PHD in Barclay to make sure that nothing goes terribly wrong when Barclay is around.
My character Tsin'xing
In the future, it might be, science and technology always changing, improving and so on. Technology ahead of us will look 'magical' to us, as we would look magical to stone age people.
And as our understanding improves, we become capable of feats that would be considered as magic by our ancestors. Lasers, Lighters, and Nuclear Bombs could all be considered as magic if we took them back to 1000 years ago. Shining a Laser on someone's eye could be considered as blinding someone from a distance. A Lighter is creating fire in the palm of your hand. Using a nuclear bomb a 1000 years ago would make people believe that an extremely powerful and evil wizard worked their evil destructive magic.
In 10,000 years, our descendants would be capable of scientific feats that might as well be magic as far as we are concerned. So what will be possible and what won't be possible is not something that we can determine due to our limited understanding of the universe. All we can say is that based on our current understanding of the universe, it is impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The genes to express as "spider" do not exist in the human genome.
For starters, this episode has fallen victim to Science Marches On; we now know more about DNA, and that those genes aren't "junk" but are in fact an essential part of the instruction set for growing a living being. They're not involved in proteins, but they do transcribe into RNA - they're not just some kind of silly "evolutionary leftover" like the human coccyx.
And then there's the fact that the last common ancestor of mammals and arthropods (not just of humans and spiders, but of their entire Linnean class) would have existed during the early Cambrian era, around 550 million years ago. I can see a human whose DNA gets scrambled expressing as a Neanderthal (except that the writers seemed to confuse Neanderthals, close enough to Cro-Magnon to interbreed, with possibly some sort of Great Ape), and possibly even as some other variation on the theme of primate (I think Picard was starting to express as a lemur), but not cross-class like that. (I can't speak to what happened with Troi or Worf, as we're not privy to the ecology or evolutionary history of either Betazed or Qo'noS, but we know more than some folks here seem to think about the history of Earth.)
(Note: Yes, I know that changing the genome of an adult won't turn them into something else. That's something I'm willing to overlook for the sake of the story - there isn't a lot of dramatic tension if they have to reverse what happened before Picard fathers a child that turns into a lemur.)
> On the other hand, it treats DNA like LEGO blocks, that you can just snap together in any old order to get creatures to which the subject is only related in the very vaguest sense (the last common ancestor of mammals and arthropods, for instance, would have been around 550 million years or so ago - spiders aren't in human "junk DNA", they're a completely different order of life).
>
> /EditsForTheEditMonster!
When HASN'T Star Trek treated DNA like LEGO blocks. Forget humans and spiders, if the franchise had any sense of how any of that worked, then Spock wouldn't exist. Spiders and humans are at least from the same PLANET, but even if you include the ancient humanoid panspermia nonsense from "The Chase", the last common ancestor of humans and Vulcans predated the formation of life on either planet.
End of the day, Star Trek is soft science fiction written by English majors. You want biology in your sci-fi that makes a damn bit of sense, try Julie Czerneda.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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But points for making the effort of actually TRYING to use real science: they even used the terminology correctly, unlike Voyager with its "crack in the event horizon".
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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The real problematic scene was probably where it was somehow regained its mass in the vacuum of space after having shed most of its water. But conversation of energy (or momentum, or mass, or anything) is never really a strong suite of science fiction shows.