“Up The Long Ladder” (2×18)
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This is a pretty trashy episode that doesn’t hold together particularly well, but I had a good time with it.
I love stories about long lost human colonies, and this episode gives us not one but two: A Mennonite-style agrarian colony facing decimation from solar flares, and an antiseptic technocracy who have come up against the limitations of their scientific and technological know-how.
The Mennonite colony is basically The Quiet Man without any nuance or subtlety. Just about every offensive Irish stereotype gets trotted out here. It’s in really bad taste. But I still found myself enjoying the earthiness of it, the livestock and hay on board a starship reminding me of “Firefly” a bit. These people aren’t Roddenberry’s idealized 24th century humanity, which means they’re allowed to have flaws and personality.
The high-tech colony is even more of an outlier, because it had sustained itself through genetic engineering, something that is rarely explored in Trek due to the bans resulting from the Eugenic Wars. And here is an entire civilization that exists solely via genetic engineering, vast cities populated with copy after copy of the same five people. It made sense to me that Pulaski would not be able to help; the Federation bans on genetic manipulation means that human medical science wouldn’t have progressed much in that are over the intervening three centuries.
But the idea of replicative fading is a very late-eighties conception of cloning; the analogue is a fax of a fax of a fax of a fax, with generational loss each time. But while we haven’t mastered human cloning in the early 21st century of our timeline, we have mastered full genome sequencing. It seems like it should have been a simple matter to create five pristine digital copies of the five survivors’ genomes, and then make all copies based on those digital files.
And while it makes sense to forgo regular reproduction in order to prevent inbreeding over subsequent generations, it doesn’t make sense for the five survivors not have had children with one another. If they had paired off and had multiple kids through each genetic pairing, and then cloned the babies, they would have had at least a couple dozen different people to duplicate rather than just the same five people.
It was also frustrating that using the dispossession of the one colony as a solution for the other colony wasn’t even considered until the last act of the episode, given that it was obvious from the beginning.
But nor would that necessarily be the only solution: Surely they could recruit Federation citizens interested in embarking on a new adventure to further diversify the gene pool and not turn the women of the first colony into brood mares.
There’s a certain irony in Riker being the one most adamantly opposed to being cloned, given that that’s basically what happens with Thomas Riker a few seasons later. And I can’t imagine that pro-life audiences reacted particularly well to seeing Riker vaporize the cloned embryos with his phaser.
I would guess that the current people in charge of Trek would find this episode embarrassing, with good reason, and wouldn’t want to revisit it. But I for one would be interested in seeing how the combined colony is getting on decades later in the “Picard” era, or better yet centuries later in the “Discovery” era.
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