Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 2, Episode 11
“Contagion” is Original Recipe Star Trek in a very similar way to “Arsenal of Freedom” – not mind-blowing, but solidly entertaining with enough great hooks to be a memorable episode of The Next Generation’s second season. It’s comfort Trek viewing and contains a lot of characteristic themes – a long dead alien civilization of legend, another doomed Starfleet ship/captain, the threat of war, and Romulans!
The Romulans were mainstays of Trek since The Original Series, but were seldom featured due to the cost of their makeup (Klingons were cheaper, if occasionally accidentally racist). The Next Generation featured the Romulans much more as main antagonists which was an important point of difference from TOS and helped the series feel unique in comparison to its predecessor. “Contagion” is the first episode since the Romulans’ introduction in TNG in which they are featured. They mostly serve as a complicating factor in the ordeal that Picard and the Enterprise are dealing with, but it helps to round out the adventure and make for a more exciting time. Interestingly, this would be a common role for the Romulans and their unique style as enemies. They’re not the type of brutes to attack head on, but rather lie in wait and strike when the moment is right. Throughout The Next Generation, the Romulans become competitors to the Federation as they often seek to attain whatever plot Macguffin our heroes are striving for – as in here, or episodes like “Tin Man” or “The Pegasus.”
The Enterprise is en route to meet up with the USS Yamato, another Starfleet Galaxy-class ship that’s deep in the Romulan Neutral Zone. They’ve sent a distress signal because of ship-wide malfunctions they’re suffering from. Its captain, Donald Varley, is apparently an old friend of Picard’s. He complains of an avalanche of system glitches that have almost totally disabled the Yamato, as well as a serious one that caused the deaths of an entire engineering team when a shuttlebay forcefield randomly shut off. The reason he’s risked war with the Romulans by entering the Neutral Zone is because he’s found the homeworld of the ancient Iconian race. And not just for archeological curiosity – Varley claims that enough of the Iconian’s super advanced technology exists to give the Romulans a worrying tactical edge should they find it.
The Yamato’s signal degrades as a dangerous build-up of energy is detected from its antimatter storage. Picard and the bridge crew watch helplessly as the ship suddenly explodes before their eyes. I like Picard’s brief pause of horror before his command instincts kick in and he orders their shields up to protect his own vessel. The Yamato’s saucer section hull disintegrates completely as all life aboard the ship (over 1,000 people, like the Enterprise) is extinguished. Worf then reports a Romulan vessel entering sensor range.
They’re unable to determine if it was the Romulans who destroyed the Yamato, although its Commander Taris denies any involvement. Again, the behavior of the Romulans is in line with their style of tactics – because they were outgunned 2-1 by the duo of Galaxy-class ships they did not make their presence known. But now that one of them has been taken off the board, Taris feels emboldened to appear and perform some customary saber-rattling. Played by Carolyn Seymour in a number of Star Trek appearances, she portrays a Romulan perfectly and embodies a cold steeliness that matches Picard’s. She orders Picard to vacate the Neutral Zone, who replies that he will only when he has fully investigated the cause of their sister ship’s destruction.
After some investigation, La Forge determines that a freak accident in the Yamato’s engine core caused its destruction, not the Romulans. A number of safeguards should have prevented such an occurrence and for some reason they all failed. He speculates that Varley’s hypothesis of a design flaw in the entire Galaxy-class may be the culprit, and they’re running diagnostics of the Enterprise’s systems just in case.
Picard accesses Varley’s personal logs. One of my oddly-specific favorite tropes is “character watching (or reading) a series of log entries that details a steadily deteriorating situation.” You know how it ends, so there’s some helpless tension in watching it play out. Picard searches for entries regarding mentions of Romulans or Iconia, and gets a compiled playlist of Captan Varley’s Neutral Zone adventures. Because his character was so quickly dispatched, it’s nice to actually go back and see some more of him before he died. Thalmus Rasulala gives an appropriately grave performance in his captain’s log entries as Picard watches silently.
It’s a nice scene that gives us a lot of background info in short snippets through Varley. Beginning with the discovery of an ancient piece of technology on another world that baffles the Yamato’s engineers (“I’m like a caveman confronted with a tricorder,” Varley notes), it eventually leads to the discovery of the Iconian homeworld. Varley eludes a Romulan ship chasing them and his ship later gets scanned by an Iconian probe. Later, a visibly frustrated Varley laments that he can’t properly explore Iconia (a lifelong dream of his) because of his ship’s maddening system failures. Leaving to rendezvous with the Enterprise, he vows to convince Picard of the importance of this mission and to continue it without him if need be, for the safety of the Federation may depend on it. His final words seem to resonate with Picard, who gets up to enter the bridge. As he tries to walk through the doorway, the doors momentarily glitch…
Data brings up the Yamato’s records of the Iconian probe scan. The visual of the probe is simple but cool, as a flickering blue sphere that sends out strange bolts of lightning. It looks truly alien. Picard diverts the Enterprise to the planet where the probe was encountered, despite it being very close to the Romulan side of the Neutral Zone. He assumes the Yamato’s mission in order to prevent a war.
Wesley barges in on Picard, clearly with something on his mind. He dissembles a bit and asks about the Iconians. This episode is the first to mention Picard’s interest in archaeology and other cultures, which would go on to become one of his primary character traits throughout the series (also the basis of his friendship with Varley). He regales Wesley with tales of the ancient Iconians and their reputation as “demons of air and darkness,” due to their apparent ability to appear out of thin air. Spooky!
But Wesley admits that he’s actually upset about the deaths of all the people aboard the Yamato. It’s good that the episode puts some more emphasis on this through Wesley Crusher, and it makes sense that a teenager would be rightfully horrified by the sight of 1,000 people dying right in front of him. He seems more bummed than fully PTSD non-functional, which is itself kind of impressive. Picard attempts to assuage his feelings with the wisdom that any amount of death always should be disturbing, but is interrupted by his malfunctioning replicator.
What happened to the Yamato has now begin to afflict the Enterprise as all sorts of minor system failures begin to pile up. The ship arrives at the planet that Captain Varley believed to be Iconia, and they find a lifeless world that had apparently been bombed from orbit about 200,000 years ago. A probe launches from the surface identical to the one that scanned the Yamato, and Picard plans to capture it in hopes of figuring out what it’s done to both of their ships. A panicked La Forge tries to tell Picard not to, but communications seem to fail at the most inconvenient time, along with several turbolifts he tries in reaching the bridge. The one he finds his way into almost kills him before spitting him out onto the bridge without his VISOR, where he blindly yells at Picard to destroy the probe. They do, and La Forge notes that if the probe had scanned them, they would have been totally doomed.
La Forge has figured out that the automated probes transmit a program to any approaching ships they scan. Because of the extreme sophistication of the Iconians’ technology, the program overwrites the software of the ship’s computers, inadvertently causing all the problems they’ve been having. It’s not a purposeful attack, but the results can be just as devastating. Although the Enterprise wasn’t scanned by the probe, the logs of the Yamato that they received were infected, and so the Iconian program is slowly making its way through their systems. La Forge admits that the advanced program is far too complex for them to control or even understand. Like putting too many air apps into an iPad!
Dr. Pulaski gets a requisite scene where she gets to show off her acerbic wisdom to a helpless medic who apparently doesn’t know how to do his job without the magic doohickies we’ve come to expect on Star Trek. It’s kind of silly. I’m sure there’s a point to be made about how the people in Trek are way too dependent on technology (just as we are), but it seems like medical personnel really should know basic first aid, even in the 24th century. We’ve seen plenty of instances when crew are stuck on planets without their wondrous tech and have to improvise. Seems like something any Starfleet crewmember should be prepared for!
Against Riker’s objections, Picard leads an away team with Worf and Data to Iconia to try and find out some answers. As the Enterprise continues to deteriorate, it looks to be a one way trip unless they can figure a solution out.
Without warning, Taris’ Romulan ship decloaks and arms its weapons, only to suddenly disarm them. Riker hails them, and Taris does some more threatening, and even claims Iconia for the Romulan Empire. But her ship seems as equally fucked as the Enterprise, as their systems continually go haywire. Riker theorizes that the Romulans also downloaded the Yamato’s transmitted logs and got more than they bargained for. Another probe is launched at the Romulan vessel, and Riker screams at Taris to destroy it. Fortunately she does, which shows some intelligence on her part.
Picard and co. locate a control center on the surface that seems to have been spared destruction. Picard notes that the characters on the control panels resemble some other ancient languages he’s studied, and that they could be child languages of a parent Iconian tongue. Data mentally cross-references all of those languages to try and patch together an understanding of Iconian to work the controls. He’s invaluable!
After tapping some buttons, Data accidentally brings forth a floating doorway that scrolls through images of other locales. It’s a small detail, but I like that the blue orb and energy bolts visually connect to the space probe designs. They wonder if it could be a gateway to other worlds and a basis for the Iconians’ “air and darkness” reputation. Picard theorizes that the Iconians might not have died out from being bombed, but rather escaped to other planets and passed down their cultural influence. He also realizes how dangerous this technology would be in Romulan hands.
Data questions the Iconians’ legendary status as conquerors, as nothing about the facility seems militaristic. It seems more akin to a transporter room than anything. Picard admits that his unscientific vibe is that the Iconians might have been misunderstood by history, and that what we know about them was written by the victors who feared them. Which is all A LOT of speculation to judge a society on given that you’ve seen literally one room of theirs, but I like where their hearts are! It reflects the more nuanced and humanistic tones of Star Trek, and makes both the faceless Iconians (and the episode) more interesting as a result.
The Enterprise bridge makes an appearance on the portal’s live feed, which seems to provide them a way out without having to rely on the ship’s buggy transporters. Data tries to access the Iconian systems, but gets a full zapping in response and collapses. Now blinded and barely functional, he reports that the Iconian program is now trying to rewrite his systems. Picard orders Worf to take Data through the portal the next time the Enterprise appears, and to destroy their tricorder which contains all their scans of the Iconian technology.
It’s a plot point that breezes by with some cursory “this knowledge is too dangerous to keep!” vibes. Which is a notion that we’ve seen pop up in Trek, as well as plenty of other media. It’s silly and seems pretty un-Trek-like, even. Why must knowledge of the Iconian’s technology be destroyed, exactly? The main thrust of the plot is to keep it away from the Romulans, but what’s wrong with the Federation having it? In essence, it just seems like a much more sophisticated version of tech they already have. It speaks to an inherent and very curious contradiction that Trek embodies – the franchise is built around super advanced tech, but it can’t be too advanced! That’s, uh, cheating? Computers make everything possible, but also, you need to destroy them and get back to your roots because they’re ruining everything. OK, that’s kind of true, actually.
The Iconians’ portal technology is based upon hard science beyond current Federation understanding, but it’s something that they’ll unravel at some point given enough time and research (I mean, especially if someday the fabric of space time throughout the galaxy was destroyed, thus making warp drive impossible. Can you imagine such an improbable occurrence???).
This is just the basic theme of scientific advancement, and something that “Jetrel” emphasized in its obvious atom bomb-Oppenheimer allegory. The science it out there, waiting to be discovered, like the splitting of the atom. You can delay it, but at some point it will get figured out by someone. So might as well be the Federation and not the Romulans? Plus there’s no way to be sure that every single bit of the tech was destroyed on this entire planet. This one single conspicuous control tower was somehow missed by all the Iconians’ enemies and sat around for 200 millennia, remaining perfectly functional the entire time. What about underground facilities? There’s not a single glowing blue spherical hard drive anywhere on the planet or floppy disk that has some valuable info? And like Worf says, this planet is much closer to the Romulans’ side than the Federation’s, so it’s already a tactical disadvantage to leave it here.
But anyway! So we’re not allowed to visit other planets in this very specific way or else, so Picard vows to destroy everything. Data suggests launching all the probes, but overriding the launch bay doors so they all go kablooey. He relays the sequence of commands to Picard, who will stay behind after Worf leaves to enter them. Worf appears on the Enterprise bridge with Data over his shoulders, and rushes him to engineering to try and save him.
La Forge doesn’t know how to help Data, and even briefly mentions that if Dr. Maddox were there they might have a chance. Oh yes, by all means! Let’s get that creepy fucker in here so he can loudly slurp cottage cheese directly from the container into his mouth and fix Data up with all the love in his heart. Fortunately, that issue becomes moot when Data suddenly, uh, dies. He even literally flatlines and Geordi gently closes his eyes in that way that all TV and movie corpses can easily do. Just like in real life, I think if you tried to do that with Data the eyelids would probably spring back open like a Furby with dead batteries. But that’s not very somber.
The impact of this death has about 5 seconds to set in before Data open his eyes and pops back up again, apparently none the worse for wear. La Forge realizes that some sort of self-correcting mechanism within Data figured out a way to keep him alive. I guess Data has some sort of immune system? Kinda makes sense. Like putting too much Malewarebytes Freeware Version into a Windows Balloon Server!
La Forge surmises that his anti-malwarebodies must have just turned him off, wiped the affected memory, and turned him back in again. Heh, of all the wacky computer mumbo-jumbo in Trek that rarely holds up, this is probably the most realistic solutions they’ve ever featured. Have you tried turning Data off and then on again? Careful with the turning him “on” part, though. I hear he’s fully functional.
Apparently this means Data forgot everything that happened on Iconia? Or more? It’s made clear that the Iconian program spreads through systems like wildfire (it killed Data in like 15 minutes), so it seems like Data’s whole brain would’ve been infected. La Forge posits that if they just shut the Enterprise’s systems down and wipe the computers, that should get rid of the Iconian program. He says he’ll be able to restore the Enterprise’s data from protected memory.
Which all sounds logical… except for restoring all the ship’s programs? That seems like an entire all-hands-on-deck engineering crew task. In “For the Uniform,” a wiped Defiant had to be reprogrammed from scratch, a task that O’Brien needed to spend weeks doing. That seems more realistic of a timeline! Of course, maybe the Defiant should have had protected memory as well? Unless Eddington’s virus deleted that, too. I’m not even the IT guy, why am I problem-solving this???
Meanwhile, Picard enters the command sequence to Destroy Everything, and it seems to work too well as the room starts exploding around him. With no time left, he walks through the portal and ends up on the Romulan bridge. Taris holds him responsible for what’s happened to her ship, and says that she’s unable to stop their self-destruct mechanism. But at least he’ll die too, so that’s a plus. Picard gets to have the coolest and smarmiest exit ever as he’s transported out by the Enterprise, which is apparently totally functional again. If Taris had a hat she’d totally throw it on the ground and stomp on it.
Having rescued Picard, Riker contacts Taris and graciously shares the “hold it down until it stops blinking” solution so that she doesn’t die. What a swell guy! But also sets a course to leave in case the Romulans can’t figure it out. A carefree Picard muses about how exciting these gosh darn away missions are! It’s a pretty abrupt ending as the two ships fly off. Can I at least get a wistful summation or something here?? Kirk would’ve given one. And Spock would’ve thrown his two cents in. And then Bones woulda been like, “Shut up, Spock. I’m racist and I hate you.” Paramount/CBS logo!
“Contagion” doesn’t go super deep, but it’s a competent episode that showed the growing confidence of The Next Generation’s second season. The Iconian material is some decently entertaining material, and the complicating factor of Romulan involvement ups the tension and shows how much more of a multifaceted show TNG was quickly becoming.
Stray Observations:
- This would be the only TNG episode to feature another non-Enterprise Galaxy-class ship. An illusion of the Yamato appeared in “Where Silence Has Lease,” and various other duplicates of the Enterprise were shown in episodes like “Parallels” and “All Good Things…” It wouldn’t be until Deep Space Nine where we saw other ones en masse again, where their batting average improves slightly.
- The Iconians seem reminiscent of the T’Kon Empire, the extinct civilization from Season 1’s goofy “The Last Outpost.” And Voyager’s “Dragon’s Teeth” would draw heavily from the Iconian mythos with the Vaadwaur, another nearly extinct race of people who could cross light years with special technology but were bombarded from above by their unified enemies. One of my favorite motifs of Trek is the implication of past eras of galactic empires, much in the same way that civilizations on Earth rise and fall, sometimes to be forgotten and rediscovered by later peoples.
- Seymour would show up again as a totally different Romulan commander who is basically the same character. She was badass in both roles and should have been a recurring character! It would have been a better choice than Sela.
- An Iconian portal would later be discovered in the Gamma Quadrant and be the basis of Deep Space Nine’s “To the Death.” It’s a good thing we destroyed that tricorder!
- In Voyager’s “Prime Factors,” they encountered another species with similar transporter technology who could cross distances of 40,000 light years with their folding space spatial trajector thingamabobbers. It didn’t really seem to harm that species, except perhaps for making them a little douchey. But Papa Picard says we can’t have nice things!
- Presented without context:
“Thanks, Data. I noticed.”