I'll echo that even the worst episodes contain something good. There's almost always something like a good character moment or some tight dialog or new world-building, even if it's just a little peek at a new section of the ship. And now we must mark the official end of the usefulness of this post, so bail out now unless you're bored. Consider this your first, only, and final TLDR warning.
And the Children Shall Lead gets one of these things right and a couple of them wrong. On the plus side, we get some nice new footage of the Arboretum set that was built and filmed for Elaan of Troyius but edited out. I'm always happy to see new sections (or even just details) of the ship. So I am happy this episode exists, even if I can't remember any other bright spots.
However, that UFP flag ... great idea, but the execution is awful: tiny, flat, lifeless, and lacking in artistry, like it was designed by a nerdy engineer-type like me instead of by skilled artisans. It's just plain ugly, and weak, and not befitting the multi-planet consortium it represents. I can easily imagine a band of half-buzzed Klingons beaming down to a planet, seeing this thing, and laughing themselves into a stupor.
But here's the most irritating thing about this episode for me. Worse than Melvin Belli and the chants and the fist-pumps and the magically appearing mirror on the bridge, all of which I can mind-wave away as an interpretation of wacky alien weirdness. No, what really gets my goat is something that probably bothers nobody else on the planet, and is probably foolish to even confess, but here we are:
Those damned ice cream cards. They're inconsistent and magical; a regression in world-building. They don't work like any other library tapes/memory tapes/data cards we've seen in any other episode, not even other food cards. They are (uniquely) color-coded to their contents, which would have been a minor nuisance except that a few of them are striped in two or three different colors to correspond to the combination of flavors in that ice cream. As if, after more than two years of world-building, Star Trek has suddenly forgotten that data cards have labels, usually invisible to the camera but readable to (and actually read by) the crew in multiple episodes.
Worse, though, they apparently make whoever wields them telepathic and clairvoyant. Out of the millions of possible ice cream combinations, Chapel (before meeting the brats) has pre-chosen seven cards. The children will end up requesting/receiving seven selections -- hey! just the number of cards Christine brought! One of them will be a random clunker, but the other six will precisely and magically correspond to exactly the six flavor combinations demanded by the minions of malice. Four of them call out Vanilla! Chocolate! Cherry! Banana! and there's chaos as they all mob the nurse and grab cards in a free-for-all, each getting just the one they wanted.
Some of it makes sense: white is probably vanilla; brown is probably chocolate. But how is the red one magically cherry rather than the more common strawberry? It's lucky that yellow turned out to be the requested banana rather than French vanilla or pineapple or lemon or lemon meringue or spleen of tribble. There are actually two white cards. How does Tommy know which one to grab? One of them is the vanilla he wants, but the other has been contrived to tick off Steve, as we are about to see.
Chapel has exactly three cards left now, and she will need just that many to finish out the scene (a magic trick in space that would probably earn a Fool Us trophy from Penn & Teller). Steve is all butthurt and doesn't pick a card, so Christine gives him the other white one. This card, to Stevie's disappointment, is vanilla and coconut. He sulks and whines that "They're both white," and she rubs salt in his wound with "That was your unpleasant surprise." (Damn, kid, you're lucky it wasn't vanilla and coconut and marshmallow.)
So the little bratwurst now decides he's not too good after all to just make a choice, and he asks for "Chocolate wobble and pistachio." Amazingly, that was one of Christine's clairvoyant predictions, and one of the two selections she has left. She hands him a two-tone card striped in brown and pale green. But he changes his mind at the last minute and requests Chocolate wobble and pistachio and peach. Can you believe it? Only one card left, and it's a never-before-seen three-striper adorned in brown, pale green, and ... peach! Nurse Chapel, resident genius and girlfriend of the creator, declares that this combination of flavors which Stevie just specifically requested is "going to be a wonderful surprise."
A year or two back, for one of my prop projects I did a lot of detailed research on data cards, sometimes frame by frame. I eventually had to forcibly de-head-canonize this scene. It's just so stoopid.
So anyway, much ado about nothing here, of course. But you were warned, so don't expect my complaint department to take your call. It does kinda get my goat when they just change how an established part of Federation technology has been working, to satisfy somebody's desire for plot magic in a poorly executed scene of a grossly botched episode. But hey, back to that arboretum, amirite? Worth the pain.
And the Children Shall Lead gets one of these things right and a couple of them wrong. On the plus side, we get some nice new footage of the Arboretum set that was built and filmed for Elaan of Troyius but edited out. I'm always happy to see new sections (or even just details) of the ship. So I am happy this episode exists, even if I can't remember any other bright spots.
However, that UFP flag ... great idea, but the execution is awful: tiny, flat, lifeless, and lacking in artistry, like it was designed by a nerdy engineer-type like me instead of by skilled artisans. It's just plain ugly, and weak, and not befitting the multi-planet consortium it represents. I can easily imagine a band of half-buzzed Klingons beaming down to a planet, seeing this thing, and laughing themselves into a stupor.
But here's the most irritating thing about this episode for me. Worse than Melvin Belli and the chants and the fist-pumps and the magically appearing mirror on the bridge, all of which I can mind-wave away as an interpretation of wacky alien weirdness. No, what really gets my goat is something that probably bothers nobody else on the planet, and is probably foolish to even confess, but here we are:
Those damned ice cream cards. They're inconsistent and magical; a regression in world-building. They don't work like any other library tapes/memory tapes/data cards we've seen in any other episode, not even other food cards. They are (uniquely) color-coded to their contents, which would have been a minor nuisance except that a few of them are striped in two or three different colors to correspond to the combination of flavors in that ice cream. As if, after more than two years of world-building, Star Trek has suddenly forgotten that data cards have labels, usually invisible to the camera but readable to (and actually read by) the crew in multiple episodes.
Worse, though, they apparently make whoever wields them telepathic and clairvoyant. Out of the millions of possible ice cream combinations, Chapel (before meeting the brats) has pre-chosen seven cards. The children will end up requesting/receiving seven selections -- hey! just the number of cards Christine brought! One of them will be a random clunker, but the other six will precisely and magically correspond to exactly the six flavor combinations demanded by the minions of malice. Four of them call out Vanilla! Chocolate! Cherry! Banana! and there's chaos as they all mob the nurse and grab cards in a free-for-all, each getting just the one they wanted.
Some of it makes sense: white is probably vanilla; brown is probably chocolate. But how is the red one magically cherry rather than the more common strawberry? It's lucky that yellow turned out to be the requested banana rather than French vanilla or pineapple or lemon or lemon meringue or spleen of tribble. There are actually two white cards. How does Tommy know which one to grab? One of them is the vanilla he wants, but the other has been contrived to tick off Steve, as we are about to see.
Chapel has exactly three cards left now, and she will need just that many to finish out the scene (a magic trick in space that would probably earn a Fool Us trophy from Penn & Teller). Steve is all butthurt and doesn't pick a card, so Christine gives him the other white one. This card, to Stevie's disappointment, is vanilla and coconut. He sulks and whines that "They're both white," and she rubs salt in his wound with "That was your unpleasant surprise." (Damn, kid, you're lucky it wasn't vanilla and coconut and marshmallow.)
So the little bratwurst now decides he's not too good after all to just make a choice, and he asks for "Chocolate wobble and pistachio." Amazingly, that was one of Christine's clairvoyant predictions, and one of the two selections she has left. She hands him a two-tone card striped in brown and pale green. But he changes his mind at the last minute and requests Chocolate wobble and pistachio and peach. Can you believe it? Only one card left, and it's a never-before-seen three-striper adorned in brown, pale green, and ... peach! Nurse Chapel, resident genius and girlfriend of the creator, declares that this combination of flavors which Stevie just specifically requested is "going to be a wonderful surprise."
A year or two back, for one of my prop projects I did a lot of detailed research on data cards, sometimes frame by frame. I eventually had to forcibly de-head-canonize this scene. It's just so stoopid.
So anyway, much ado about nothing here, of course. But you were warned, so don't expect my complaint department to take your call. It does kinda get my goat when they just change how an established part of Federation technology has been working, to satisfy somebody's desire for plot magic in a poorly executed scene of a grossly botched episode. But hey, back to that arboretum, amirite? Worth the pain.
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