From: rfd@po.CWRU.Edu (Richard F. Drushel)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.current
Subject: My $0.02 about "Time's Arrow II"
Date: 27 Sep 1992 19:35:28 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Reply-To: rfd@po.CWRU.Edu (Richard F. Drushel)
NNTP-Posting-Host: thor.ins.cwru.edu


	Okay, this was indeed a strange puppy...Time travel stories
are hard enough to keep straight (have to avoid paradoxes, y'know),
but this one worried so much about paradoxes that several major
continuity gaffes were allowed to fall through the cracks.

	(1)  Where did the away team get its period clothing?  They
clearly had no money (hence the run-in with the landlady over rent).
If they resorted to the old Kirk/Spock trick of stealing clothes off
a clothesline, where did Beverly and Deanna get their earrings and
brooches?  And how did Beverly *also* come up with a nurse's uniform
and granny glasses?

	(2)  The story shows a *fundamental* misunderstanding of
the disease cholera.  Cholera is a highly contagious, highly virulent
gastrointestinal disease, spread by contaminated water supplies, which
causes severe dehydrating diarrhea (can be fatal in 6 hours without
fluid replacement).  So why do they all seem to treat it as a
respiratory disease?  The old Forty-Niner had advanced tuberculosis,
for certain.  And Beverly's remark in the morge, "It's not virulent"
is just untrue, unless she was thinking in terms of 24th century
cure by magic hypospray (if so, she should have qualified her remarks
to reflect the state of 19th-century medicine).

	(3)  All the talk of "electrochemical energy is being drained
from their nervous systems" was pseudo-biological babble of the worst
kind.  What does that statement mean?  The sum of all the action
potentials in a human nervous system doesn't add up to a flashlight
battery's current.  Or do these "ghouls" specifically feed off the
Na/K ATPase which maintains the transmembrane ionic gradients in
the nervous system?  Do the writers even know what the Na/K ATPase
is?  I doubt it.  I just *hate* it when a show turns itself inside
out to make its physics plausible (only arguably true for this
episode, however), but comes up with biology which is not even based
on the simplest things in modern knowledge.

	(4)  Picard poking an S.O.S. into Data's static RAM is the
worst deus ex machina device I can think of in ST:TNG.  Only 2 Soong
androids exist, and nobody knows enough about how they work to build
any more; yet here is Picard, in the dark, just opening up the lid
and miraculously finding a 1-key interface into Data's brain.  It's
completely out of character for Picard--it reverts to the old Kirk
chestnut of telling all the highly trained technical people how to
do their jobs.  I could believe him taking a nail and *scratching* a
verbal message onto a circuit board or something, but not rewriting
Data's mind!

	(5)  Data's 500-year-old head was yellowed, dishevelled and
beaten up.  So why does it suddenly look brand-new when reattached
to Data's body?  I thought this would be the opportunity to use the
"deterioration" to let Brent Spiner show his age :)

	(6)  Sam Clemens saves this episode.  The actor who played
him did a great job.

	(7)  The "mystery" between Picard and Guinan is another one
of those "ho-hum did they or didn't they?" tidbits that the writers
have lamely tried to tempt us with.  Wil 'n' Deanna, Bev 'n' Jean-
Luc, Geordi 'n' the holodeck.  If all they can do is tease, then
they should just forget it.

	(8)  How did Data's body end up back in the cavern on
Davidia II?  Nobody picked it up and carried it through the
gateway that I saw...

	(9)  How come Picard defended the Crystalline Entity's
right to feed off of the terror of dying humans as simple hunger,
while the Soul Ghouls must be immediately destroyed for doing
essentially the same thing?

	(10)  We saw Data's head and Clemens' watch explicitly left
in the cavern.  What about the eyeglasses?  Were they Beverly's?
You would think that, since they went to such trouble to show
parting shots of the watch and the head, that they would have done
the same for the glasses.

	Oh well, *another* failed cliffhanger episode...Now I can
catch up on all the other SpoilerReviews here to see what the rest
of you in NetLand think...
-- 
Rich Drushel ** rfd@po.CWRU.edu *** Biology Ph.D. Student ** Cleveland FreeNet
Co-Sysop, Coleco ADAM Forum --- Assistant Sysop, Science Fiction & Fantasy SIG
"Solda pung apfashat ro des-marno, / Marn ladir o armag noth yeni arno. / Hell
miryat it, / Jambo iat it, / Os lasse wei ticip kati baldo." / Old Ennish poem