Contagion by: Steve Gerber and Beth Woods and directed by: Joseph L. Scanlan

 

“Contagion” is written by: Steve Gerber and Beth Woods and is directed by: Joseph L. Scanlan.  It was produced under production code 137, was the 11^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, the 37^th episode overall, and was broadcast on March 20, 1989.

 

The 1988 Writer’s Guild of America strike truncated the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and in doing so, the production staff went through several changes, often episode by episode in terms of who was in what role, who was hired, and who was fired.  The first four episodes had to be written and put into production incredibly quickly, and this creates a knock on effect for the rest of the season where if there was a viable pitch for an episode it essentially would be accepted and put into production.  It’s not a season with many returning writers, but several of the new writers brought onto staff would only contribute one episode.  “Contagion” is another such episode from the writing team of Steve Gerber and Beth Woods, Gerber being the more notable writer of the pair having created the Marvel character Howard the Duck.  That is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the episode, because “Contagion” is one of those episodes that’s just kind of a standard piece of science fiction.  The biggest influence is drawing on “The Neutral Zone” to continue the Romulan plot that Star Trek: The Next Generation has laid down, by having the Enterprise enter the neutral zone after the Yamato, a ship that also entered the zone which promptly explodes.  There is then a Romulan ship and the contagion of the title is actually a computer virus that despite the crew’s best efforts infects both the Enterprise and the Romulan ship.

 

The premise of a computer virus taking over the Enterprise and slowly destroying things is actually a great idea, very much looking at how computers have changed since the 1960s.  There is also an attempt at writing the episode as cosmic horror, the dialogue at points implying that the virus is both alive and evolving and the eventual reveal that it is from a planet with sufficiently advanced technology.  The addition of the Romulan ship is there to add extra tension as both sides still hate each other and interestingly Gerber and Woods don’t make them work together, but has Picard be the one to actually save the day by restarting their computers.  Yes, this episode resolves with the most common response to tech support of turning the computer off and on again to reset things.  What’s odd is that this is an episode that takes its first half quite slowly, several logs from the Yamato are shown and the mystery is allowed to build.  Then the problem becomes that the resolution of the episode is one that just kind of comes too quickly.  Exacerbated by the episode having quite a few scenes in the first half that really are just repeating what we already know, something that has become a recurring issue for this season in particular.  There’s a brief sequence where Data is dead and resurrected in an artificial attempt to raise the stakes of the episode as it was slowly limping towards its conclusion.  Carolyn Seymour is the guest star of this episode as the Romulan, Taris, giving a particularly memorable performance even if as the primary “human” antagonist she isn’t actually in the episode much.  Joseph L. Scanlan is probably the show’s second best director behind Rob Bowman at this point and he shoots the episode well, at least communicating the emotion of the scenes and the tension even if the plot is fairly weak.

 

Overall, “Contagion” is fine.  It is a perfectly average episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  It takes a premise that is honestly a fantastic one for science fiction in general, however it doesn’t actually do much with the premise despite interesting attempts at worldbuilding of an ancient civilization almost entirely off-screen until the very end of the episode.  It’s stretched too much to really elevate into a good time, but it’s also not an actively bad episode like so many of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first two seasons have been.  5/10.