In "Genesis," why didn't Picard simply order Data to thrash the early Worf creature, instead of Picard having it chase him around the ship? Pretty risky decision there by the captain, when Data was certainly easily strong enough to subdue Worf without killing him. vs.
He needed Data to use his science skills to quickly come up with an antidote rather than tackle Worf? There wasn't time to subdue Worf and also work on a medical solution?
I think it was Data who first volunteered to run around the ship as prey for Worf. Besides, it would have undoubtedly taken seconds for Data to knock out Worf, even this Worf.
Not neccisarily, I mean it was punching through the door, which takes a lot of strength, Data might have gotten some nasty damage. Plus it might be hard to take on the Worf monster without killing him.
Data is good at maintaining a strong grip, though. And he seems to be bulletproof in ST:FC, which suggests that neither penetration nor concussion should jeopardize him. Lore is immune to the attacks of the regular Worf in "Datalore", so all Worf could add here is piercing with the fangs and a few percentage points to the muscular strength... Unless his poison also affected Data? The way Data got poisoned in "The Naked Now". Although I've always thought Data was not affected in that episode for real, and merely played along with the rest of the crew, thinking "this must be a human thing to do"! Timo Saloniemi
Data is much faster than Worf. How could that Worf even get a good shot on Data, if the latter didn't want it to happen?
This. Time was running out and Data's scientific aptitude was needed more than his strength. Seriously, if this is the only plot flaw you found with this episode, you're doing OK!!
For the characters to have any common sense would require the writers to. Clearly this is not the case given the premise of the episode is "turn the crew into mutants and attack Picard and Data!"
Why not, after they get aboard and realise that something is wrong, pump the ship full of knock-out gas, leaving them free to roam the ship in safety? Common sense has to give way to story telling.
There'd be limits to that, too. The effects of the gas would only last so long, requiring a second dose and a third and a fourth one before everything necessary could be achieved. Somebody would eventually die. All the more so because our two heroes could not know how long this "so long" would be for each of the exotic lifeforms currently on board... And whether they could be stunned at all. Timo Saloniemi
(shrugs) Given the state of the ship it's also quite possible environmental controls needed to deploy "knock-out gas" were offline.
Once he got started, it didn't take Data that long to find a cure. Also I think a well-regulated gassing would be better than an massive electrical shock.
Yes, and don't forget they've got children on board too, who would definately need a lower dose than adults. The problem with gas is that today, certain forms can be used as an anesthesia. But these are carefully regulated by doctors on an individual basis, since there is no such thing as a universal dose that affects everyone the same way. Enterprise (the show, not the TNG ship) gassed the whole ship in their Ferengi episode, (which wasn't even a very good episode anyhow). But at least Enterprise had mostly human adults. I don't think Genesis in TNG would have been a better episode for using this trick.
Better question, do they really expect us to believe such a thing happening is even remotely plausible? Just unreal the audacity of these bastards. Seriously insulting.
Well, was there a way to knock out monster Worf without killing him? One thing I don't get though is that monster Worf was some kind of crustacean carnivore, when modern Klingons seemingly are mammalian. Then again, Barclay turned into a spider, so perhaps it's species from many hundreds of millions of years ago. Perhaps the very distant ancestors of Klingons were as such, but they evolved into more mammalian forms. p
The mechanism there does not require the witnessed lifeforms to be ancestors to the characters. Rather, they are "what might have been", lifeforms created by activating genes that normally stay dormant. That's not particularly unrealistic: the genes for producing chitin shells and webbed eyes are quite possibly in us somewhere, even though they have never manifested as spiderlike shapes in the course of human evolution. Timo Saloniemi