The Quality of Life
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Well, there's no direct mention here of the Prime Directive
or strict non-interference ethics, but since the story so neatly
expands upon a Prime Directive theme seen previously in
season one's "Home Soil",
not to mention
the Genesis Project seen in
Star Trek II & III,
it seemed only right to have a few words.
Specifically, a lot of energy and dramatic screen time in this
episode seems to be devoted to figuring out if the exocomps
are alive or not. I force myself to ask why, and to ask,
if the Star Trek crew believed as I do, and as I indicated
in my reviews mentioned above, that everything in the universe
is indeed alive, what use is actually being served by making
the determination?
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Surprisingly, it all seems to boil down to the human need
to be in control of things, to objectify. We draw a line
in the sand, and say these things are alive and these are "dead",
just so we can satisfy our conscience as we treat the "dead"
things to exploitation. If everything were alive, we would
no longer be able to exploit resources, or push objects
around carelessly. And maybe that's not such a bad idea.
Perhaps in my universe,
exploitation would be the only issue, and it would be more obvious
from the start. This episode eventually gets there, and does
the issue justice. Perhaps going about things my way would
just be quicker, with fewer distracting issues,
and being a bit less dramatic. Still, I have this episode
to thank for figuring all this out!
This episode has a lot of good twists in it, and always seems
to have a knack for choosing a path that will both be highly
dramatic and raise the
best questions for debate, all while still finding its way to
a suitable "feel good" ending. Healthy marks,
although better still would have been going directly to the
exploitation issue rather than getting so stuck on its
"alive or dead" trigger.
Personally, the early "self-preservation" questions seemed
the most hokey, since sci-fi usually abuses this idea by
having it spontaneously arise out of nowhere.
Writers often don't seem to be able to
envision machines coming alive without
anthropomorphizing them to automatically include all
basic animal traits. But I think the exocomps have a believable
excuse here, since their main function is to repair machines,
and they are adaptive, and they have a knack for constantly
seeking the best possible solutions....
So suddenly it doesn't seem too
far fetched that they should want to repair their own selves,
prevent damage to machine systems including themselves
and countermand slow-thinking human methods for
doing so. The exploration and demonstration of their characters
that build throughout the episode make it believable by the time
you get to the end. I'll buy it.
Incidentally, a lot of the episode's over-arching time pressure
comes from this scientist's desire for her "drilling" apparatus
to get a good recommendation for use on other Federation sites.
But really, what's the rush? Picard comments at one point
that 48 hours is not too long to wait for this setup to prove
itself.... Well, why aren't we waiting 48 weeks, or even 48 months
to let this thing prove itself to be reliable. Does
she really need new Federation contracts for an unproven system,
adding more pressure onto her over-pressured lifestyle,
in a society that doesn't use money? Take the time to get past
the problem-riddled stages, then look for recommendations...
So far, season six is turning out to be my favourite of Next Gen,
and this is another of the best episodes. Good one!
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