TNG Flashback: Contagion

While Star Trek is often thought of as an "issues" series, where quintessential episodes offer commentary on modern morality, they'll just as often serve up a message-free action adventure episode. It isn't easy to do it well on a 1980s television budget, but The Next Generation pulled off a good one with the episode "Contagion."

The Enterprise responds to a call for help from their sister ship, the Yamato, which has been plagued by random malfunctions. Before our heroes can help, the Yamato is destroyed by a catastrophic warp engine malfunction. Picard then takes up the ill-fated ship's final mission, to investigate the possible homeworld of a long-dead civilization with dangerously powerful technology. When malfunctions begin to plague the Enterprise as well, the crew must not only struggle to save the ship from the Yamato's fate, it must keep a Romulan warbird at bay as their quest takes them deep inside the Neutral Zone.

"Contagion" is a bit of a detective story, and plays out at times at that pace as the crew tries to get to the bottom of both the ship's malfunctions and the ancient Iconian civilization. The episode strikes the tone very well, for the most part. For example, there's a noticeably long sequence in which Picard spends several minutes reviewing the logs of the Yamato captain, yet it's far from boring. There's a nice building tension as the clues are revealed.

Many notable "firsts" take place in this episode. Picard's interest in archaeology is established, and would be revisited many times throughout the series. He also places his first order for "tea, Earl Grey, hot" -- but ironically doesn't actually receive it, thanks to a computer malfunction. A Romulan warbird is given a name for the first time in the history of Star Trek (the Haakona), and we even get to hear a bit of the Romulan language by way of the auto-destruct countdown on the Haakona's bridge.

Director Joseph L. Scanlan has been widely reported to have clashed with the working style of the regular cast, but he certainly does some very unconventional and effective things here with the camera. There's a very unusual (and long) handheld shot in the teaser. He also employs lenses with a greater depth of focus, atypically tight close-ups, and a couple of strange straight-on profile shots. It all contributes to a slightly different mood that works for well for this episode.

Composer Dennis McCarthy steps up his game for the occasion, delivering flashier music than is his custom. Particularly good is his music for the Yamato's destruction (which utilizes just a touch of synthesizer), as well as Geordi's mad dash through the ship to reach the bridge, and an aborted Romulan attack on the Enterprise.

The idea of the Iconian civilization is an intriguing one, and the gimmick of their gateway travel system well realized through visual effects. It's also good to see Data's android nature be a liability rather than an asset for once; he's been conveniently immune to several diseases in past episodes, but here falls prey to a computer virus. Still, not all the ideas in the episode seem so clever. The solution at the end seems obvious; were computers still so novel in 1989 that the idea of eradicating a virus by restoring from a backup seemed so hard to conceive? And if the Iconian computer virus really was so sophisticated, how did it not infect the backup?

There's a lot of good acting from the main cast. Patrick Stewart coneys Picard's enthusiasm for archaeology without getting professorial. Riker and Troi share a good moment where she talks about feeling the tension of everyone aboard the ship. (Marina Sirtis has come a long way from intensely feeling every emotion Troi sensed in "Encounter at Farpoint.") Brent Spiner does a great job of playing the "infected" Data without making it hokey, and also gives a brilliant physical reaction to a moment when Geordi is electrocuted by an engineering console.

Speaking of which, it's a rough episode -- physically -- for Geordi. Besides having Data throw him off the malfunctioning console, he endures the turbolift ride from hell while trying to get to the bridge in a key scene. LeVar Burton (and at times, his stunt replacement) throws himself at the walls, trying not to seem silly. I would say he doesn't quite manage to avoid that, but a neat sight gag of being tossed up against the ceiling probably saves the sequence from being too big a joke.

Other observations:

• Pulaski appears in just one scene this episode, with no one else in the regular cast. It's yet another attempt to make her more McCoy-like, as she instructs junior medics in low-tech medicine during the ship-wide malfunctions.

• Riker has a great line: "Fate... protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise." Fact. He also lifts Picard's signature "make it so" near the end of the episode.

• Riker also doggedly refers to the Romulan commander as "Taurus" when everybody else (including the commander herself) says "Taris."

• I'm not sure I accept how suddenly Picard decides he must destroy all that's left of the Iconian civilization. The archaeologist in him would have resisted it more, I feel. I guess that's how much of a pragmatist he is.

• There's a nice bit of continuity between episodes, as Geordi mentions Maddox (from "The Measure of a Man") as an expert on Data's design.

• At the climax of the episode, when Picard is briefly a "captive" aboard the Romulan ship, it's strange that they don't even take his phaser away.

All told, "Contagion" is a quite fun episode that I give a B+.