Why I'm Not Captain of the Enterprise

WHy I'm not Captain of the Enterprise

I enjoy science fiction. I like watching Star Trek, all of it, even the blasphemous DS9 and Voyager. I like Enterprise. It took me a while to get into Next Generation, because the old series impacted my scifi outlook at such a young age, not to mention the damage Star Wars caused.

I watched an episode of TNG called The Host over the weekend, and it irritated me in a distant sense. The storyline went as follows: Alien ambassador with the

hots for Dr. Crusher gets hurt, is revealed to have a symbiote, a Trill. The disgusting parasite must now live in a new host, but available trained hosts are days away at maximum warp, and of course the mission would be compromised, and two planets would be engulfed in genocide if the crew of the Enterpise were to just take off to save the alien blob. Riker decides he can be a host, but the parasite will mess him up but good, probably killing him before another suitable host can be found. Fortuantely, he hangs in there anyway and the parasite is transferred to a proper organic lackey and the end credits roll, but not without leaving the audience wondering if Beverly Crusher is gonna have some hot girl on girl action with the new host, but with her old lover's memories.

My problem with the episode in this case is that nobody understand basic physics. I mean, ok, I can suspend disbelief for a while and allow the plot to advance to the point where Riker is seriously screwed up by his parasite. (For biological reasons, they couldn't place the Trill in stasis.) But it didn't have to be that way, not at all. because the Enterprise has warp drives.

Look, any faster than light drive can also act as a sort of time machine. Not inthe sense of going back in time like Star Trek IV, but in simple relativistic terms. After Riker completes his mission, instead of letting him die slowly on the sickbay table, they should have tossed him into a a shuttlepod. Then, he accelerates at maximum impulse until his velocity is close to the speed of light. He then takes a short five minute nap. Then he decelerates, and the Enterprise is there waiting to take him onboard and pull out the symbiote for a new host.

From the Enterprise perspective, however, they could take a week to fly off and meet the Trill ship (which was plodding along at some low warp factor) and snag a proper host, then fly back to catch up with Riker, who is merely in normal space. From the Enterprise point of view, days passed between letting Riker go and picking him up, but for Riker, it was only a few minutes.

THAT is the proper use of a FTL drive, but nobody ever did anything like that with the Enterprise. Of course, it's only because the writers never seem to know anything about basic relativistic physics, except in one episode where Q loses his powers, and makes an offhand comment as the solution to a major problem