| The Next Generation | |
| 48 | |
| Shades of Gray | |
| 42976.1 | |
Laughing Boy and X-Ray Charles are the first survey team on Surata 4. It's a quaint little world, entirely composed of swamp. They're bound to take some precautions in this potentially hostile environment, aren't they? Of course not! Riker needs no more protection than his phaser and that silly beard. Have these guys never heard of NBC suits?
What terrible fate awaits our unprepared heroes? Plants. Big predatory vines with enormous spikes and a taste for blood. I guess it makes a change. This evening for the entree, we have Riker's leg! It's just a flesh wound. What're you gonna do, bleed on me? This early in the episode it probably needs medical attention. One to beam up...
I don't think so! The transporter found unidentified microbes, and the biofilter can't screen them out. Dr Pulaski beams down and authorises a medical override of the standard quarantine procedures. Naturally they beam him into a sterile confined room, in case he's carrying something nasty, don't they? What was I thinking! He's now the centrepiece of sickbay, with not a containment field to be seen!
This treatment is really quite strange, as a very similar thing happened in an earlier episode when Dr Pulaski was struck down with an aging sickness that the transporters couldn't fix. Their solution was to reconstruct the doctor from her previous transporter records. Couldn't they have done this with Riker as well? No, because transporter surgery has been outlawed - as it would be just too useful and you wouldn't need meddling doctors!
The microbes have attached themselves to his nervous system, and are multiplying at an incredible rate. Eventually they will reach the brain, and... will say "You can see for miles in here!". Now if they get to another part of his anatomy that he actually does the thinking with, he'll really be in trouble! Troi visits him with words of comfort and he promptly drops into a coma.
Riker is fading fast, so what does the doctor recommend? Direct neural stimulation with electric currents. Yes, she's going to intentionally give him a whole series of epileptic seizures. Don't you all want to live into the 24th century where medicine is so advanced? I'm surprised that she didn't prescribe leeches!
The random firings in his brain give him... flashbacks. At first they're all warm and fuzzy, and William Riker's wet dream fantasy double the growth rate of... the microbes, so Pulaski ups the voltage and switches to the dark side! The negative emotions produce endorphins that inhibit the organism's growth. Give me a break.
Incredibly and entirely predictably he recovers, but I doubt we ever will - twenty seven minutes of random flashbacks, only to be saved by his ContractShield™. Blaarrgghh!
