20 Years of Star Trek TNG: 'Unnatural Selection' Review

Unnatural Selection (Series Two, Episode 7)
Rating: 2/10


By this stage of the second series of "Star Trek: the Next Generation" it was time for a Dr Pulaski story. This naturally meant that there had to be "weird illness of the week" wheeled out by the authors, and without any embarrassment some plundering by writers of the original series episode "The Deadly Years". Transpose some crusty doctor versus cool logic versus the captain and you almost get a McCoy/Spock/Kirk triumvirate showing up as Pulaski/Data/Picard. Plenty of other reviewers hate this episode...my opinion? Well, it's not one of the best; by a long shot!

• Three Reasons To Watch This Episode

1. Gee this is tough. I guess you have to watch "Unnatural Selection" on the simple grounds of not watching it means you'll not see the complete series. I wish I could say something more positive as a first recommendation point, but I can't.
2. Okay, perhaps the tension between Picard and Pulaski finally gets a decent airing in this episode and it only took about 38 minutes and an aging disease to get them hugging. In some ways treading the same path with Pulaski's character as seen by the curmudgeonly, patient's health at all costs, transporter-phobic Bones McCoy with Kate Pulaski is an unimaginative path to tread but until her appearance on the show (and perhaps unfortunately no longer after her character left) conflict between the lead members of the NCC-1701D's crew was hardly noticeable. as much as Bev Crusher was a far more likeable foil to Picard, the 'will she/won't she' potential romance story between her and Picard was in my opinion moribund by the end of the first series. It's easier to enjoy the character clashes of Pulaski and Picard at this stage of 'TNG' then it was to watch Bev and Jean Luc make goo-goo eyes at each other.
3. Colm Meaney as 'Chief O'Brien' (no first name) finally gets a decent shot at on-screen camera time. Admittedly he doesn't have a vitally important role aside from throwing in some serious technobabble when Picard tries to reason out how they can use the transporter to save Pulaski. On the other hand he gets to sit at the conference table, contributes some fairly significant skill to all the tasks he is alloted by the command staff and shows the barest of glimmers as to how cluey he is when appearing four years later on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine".

• Three Reasons Not To Watch This Episode

1. It's a boring rehash of an earlier TOS show which has a silly premise and an even sillier resolution. Genetically superior children with telepathic skills make everyone they come into contact with prematurely die from old age? Sorry, give me the Babel virus from DS9 anyday. On top of that we have the transporter used as a deus ex machina to bring everything back to normal by show's end. This is just another example of some technical B-S with no internal logic curing all character ills as well as the plot failures of the writers.
2. The make up for the aged Pulaski is pretty ordinary. Okay, so 21 years after the filming I guess it's not quite fair to criticise a show for having unimpressive make up on one character. Yet it has to be said and as Pulaski's aging is a focal point of the episode it should have been done far better.
3. Technobabble goes flying left right and centre here. as mentioned above Chief o'Brien goes at it hammer and tongs with some rubbish about transporter traces and buffers and stuff, whilst Pulaski and the Darwin Lab scientists get all excited over DNA self-replication. The worst of Trek always happens when we leave the character's personalities, their internal and external flaws, their conflicts and their friendships. Meaningless jargon spruiked by faux-experienced actors just loses any internal suspended disbelief in Trek's basic premise.

• Best Moment

Remarkably it comes as the coda to the episode. As the Enterprise-D comes to the quarantined USS Lantree whose crew were the initial victims of the super-aging syndrome we get Muldaur's Pulaski giving the narration. It's not that special as a piece of voice over, but what is meritorious is that it's not Picard or another higher up narrating the closing of the show. It would have to be one of the rare instances where someone outside the higher command ranks of the USS Enterprise D (i.e. Picard, Riker and Data) get the chance to voice their own logs. Plus it's a rather sobering scene as the Lantree is blown to smithereens by a photon torpedo.

• Worst Moment

Hard to pick one alone as this is such a humdrum and lame episode. My choice is between the great hair hunt carried out by Riker and Data, and O'Brien going the technobabbler down in the transporter room.

• Blink and You'll Miss It

In an homage to then leading Soviet dissident and Nobel winning physicist Andrei Sahkarov, the shuttlecraft used by Pulaski and Data to diagnose one of the super-kids from the Darwin station is named after the Russian.

"You'd think for all the brilliant scientists here we could have scored a Nintendo Wii and not this lame chess game. But noooooo!!"

share on: Facebook