TNG - Genesis

Plot – Genesis feels like any number of Voyager whacky science episodes (Threshold is a great example) and you have to wonder if Brannon Braga thought this episode was enough of a success to use as a template on the next Trek show he was going to have a huge influence on. Its rationale is simplistic in the extreme and is waved aside by a few lines of medical babble so the writer can get on with the freaky stuff like Barclay the Spider and Troi the Newt. What Data and Picard are talking about is pure nonsense but it just goes to show that if you get decent actors to deliver dialogue in an appropriately grave and realistic way you can convince an audience of anything. Almost. What this essentially boils down to is Picard and Data exploring a darkened Enterprise from 30 minutes with the occasion flash of a decent make up making an appearance. It feels like one of the longest episodes I have ever watched.

Character – I realise Reg is a total hypochondriac but I have to question Dr Bev’s bedside manner when she fails to comfort a patient who is clearly perturbed in favour of purring over a cat that’s due to drop a litter of kittens. The idea is to show us a busy day in Sickbay with Command Officers playing the fool in their day to day lives with their lives, worry worts checking up on medical databases and self-diagnosing, dealing with feline pregnancy and learning that a member of the team is pregnant. It does have a certain hustle and bustle to it.

Performance – Only Dwight Schultz is going for it when it comes to really suggesting an alien instinct is controlling his mind. He’s gabbling dialogue and twitchy movements do suggest that something on a fundamental level is wrong. However, it is so hilariously over the top I can barely watch through my fingers.

Patrick Stewart does everything that Genesis asks of him but I can’t help but detect a heaviness to his performance here. It’s as though he has looked around at the madness going on and thought ‘what on earth am I doing here?’

Production – There are a few shock moments that genuinely live up to that title. Dr Bev being sprayed with Worf’s venom is done in such a flash that the result made my heart skip faster. The sight of the bloodied crewman sitting at Ops alone on the darkened Bridge is memorable.

A huge round of applause to the makeup team who are the only people that walk away from this episode with their reputation intact (not even the show manages that). Those gill flaps on Troi’s neck are extraordinarily convincing.

Best moment – Reg and Data discussing the father of Spot’s babies is exactly the sort of sweet nonsense that this show pulled off so well. Data sounds like every anxious parent when he says he is going scan the kittens when they are born and find just which of the make cats on board are the father.

Worst moment – This is pure b-movie Trek of the lowest kind of intelligence. What an episode like Genesis needs is a seasoned Trek director at the helm and one who has an intimate knowledge of the actors and the ability to tell them to tone it down a little bit. Scenes of Worf tearing about a carcass at dinner and dashing about his quarters turning into a ruddy great monster couldn’t ever be filmed in a subtle way but Gates McFadden (in her one and only assignment) chooses to get the camera right down his throat which makes for hilarious and humiliating viewing. It’s never a good thing when you feel sorry for the actors in what they are being asked to do.

‘I need a bath. You have the bridge’ – is it that inessential that a command officer is on the Bridge that a crewmember can just pop off an get in a bath?

I wish they hadn’t done that – What is it about the ship bound Trek shows that refuse to portray characters in relationships but then take the plunge at the eleventh-hour. I’ll leave you to decide whether Troi and Worf or Seven and Chakotay is the least convincing of these but the former is on display here and exposes everything that was wrong with the idea; from conception to execution. Troi and Worf are two characters that simply are not supposed to have a romance, they are hideously mismatched, have zero in common and the chemistry between the actors is non-existent. You compare this to the razor-sharp wit and sexual chemistry between Dax and Worf and it is even more apparent.

A reason to watch this episode again – Genesis is so uncomfortable to watch it feels as though I have skipped back to the first season again. Ridiculous, out of control performances, a goofy premise (possibly the goofiest on TNG), a poor production and a reliance on cheap shocks to keep the audience interested. I love a good b-movie when it is done particularly badly but this has just about the right level of TNG competence to keep it in the vanilla zone. The moment when Troi starts bathing with her clothes and Worf invades her quarters and bites her in the face I think might be the scene where season seven of TNG officially jumped the shark. The moment when Picard and Data investigate Reg Barclay, Spider-Man and Troi the Amphibian I thought I had taken a dose of mind-altering drugs that I could never make a return from. When Spot the Cat turned into a Newt with a pink collar I was certain of it. I can’t even enjoy this as a guilty pleasure. It’s like that moment after you’ve had a wank and sit there looking at your hand thinking ‘what the fuck am I doing?’ It’s 45 minutes of that. The cheapest, trashiest Trek ever.

½ out of *****

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