Sometimes you just have to bow to the absurd...

[Trekker4747]

"Up The Long Ladder"

An episode I've always kind of liked in the much maligned Second Season of TNG -a season I think that is vastly underated.

There's a LOT of silliness in this episode -mostly in treatment of the Old Tyme Irish throwbacks from the discovered colony- but it's also a nice little episode with Picard coming to a reasonable -and obvious- solution to the colonies' problems.

Though I find it odd and disturbing that Riker and Pulaski so quickly and callously killed their developing clones. Either this "respect for human(oid) life" that future humans were supposed to have is over-stated or clones don't qualify for rights to life in their eyes. Really they should've looked at the clones, been mad, but mostly shrugged and said there's nothing they can do now.

Though I think it's odd to begin with that they simply just didn't donate the DNA they were asked for to begin with. What would've been the harm?

 

[Myasishchev]

^None. Or, at most, some kind of violation of property rights to one's genetic code.

But Trek writers are notoriously technophobic, so cloning often automatically equals bad, even though it happens spontaneously in one in every few thousand live births.

I think it's kind of crazy how quickly they mature, too. It's like, what, a few hours or days? I think the clones might have spontaneously combusted.

 

[Bones2]

Yeah, that killing of the clones really irked me the last time I saw this episode (which was years ago). I remember in a very early DS9 called "A Man Alone" a man kills his own clone, and Odo has the line "Killing your own clone is still murder". Which was much more like it, I thought.

 

[Myasishchev]

Yeah, that killing of the clones really irked me the last time I saw this episode (which was years ago). I remember in a very early DS9 called "A Man Alone" a man kills his own clone, and Odo has the line "Killing your own clone is still murder". Which was much more like it, I thought.

Bajoran law is more enlightened than the Federation's when it comes to clone rights, I guess.

 

[RAMA]

People get worked up for nothing with this episode...the Irish neo-transcendentalists were actually the whole reason te two colonies were to survive....it was a GOOD thing.

RAMA

 

[Bisz]

Their clones weren't developed yet, they weren't sentient living organisms yes, hence no hard done in killing them.

I do like this episode and can't understand why so many people list it as TNGs worst.