Turns out I'm not the only one baffled by the extreme hate for "Move Along Home"

[conuly]

Poll #19286 DS9 Question

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

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What do you think of the episode "Move Along Home"?

View Answers

LOVE IT OMG IT IS THE BEST!
2 (11.1%)

Well, it's okay.
4 (22.2%)

It's not great, but I don't get the hate for it
11 (61.1%)

HATE IT
1 (5.6%)

KILL IT WITH FIRE
0 (0.0%)

To hear people talk, you'd think it was another "Spock's Brain" or "Threshold"!

Comments

[cactuswatcher]

How about it's not all that bad, but it has one of the most memorable, really annoying, sequences in all of Star Trek. When you mentioned DS9's anniversary it was the first thing that popped into my head, not all the good things over the years in the series!

[miss_s_b]

I love Spock's Brain!

[conuly]

Maybe there's a whole secret community of people who do.

[conuly]

That's a valid view.

[aurumcalendula]

It's not my favorite episode, but I was amused by the fact that they (imho) basically got dropped into something out of a TOS episode

[conuly]

LOL, yes! Mysteriously powerful beings (in only this one area) who wreak havoc unintentionally and it's never mentioned again.

[archangelbeth]

It at least has some amusing, quotable bits, plus gals in bikinis, IIRC.

Threshold, on the other hand, made me scream. (That's the Star Trek Veeger, er, Voyager one, right? Where they turn into giant newts? Because the thing that made me scream the most, aside from "that is plainly devolving, you twerps, not evolving!" and other eye-rolling bits, was they didn't take the babies back! I mean, look, you know how to revert the newts to people, but NO, there was shying away from the complicated to leave human-descended life forms on an alien planet! *screams*)

[conuly]

There IS no such thing as devolving, and there's no reason humans couldn't evolve into non-sapient organisms one day.

But that ep is stupid for other reasons.

[archersangel]

i don't "hate" it, but don't care for it enough to the point that i skipped it during the big trek re-watch i did on netflix a few years ago.

[miss_s_b]

Nah, I think I'm just weird

[rivendellrose]

I've always assumed my confusion about people's reactions to this episode is based on the fact that I was, like, eleven when I saw it. I was bemused to discover in a rewatch that I remember the entire rhyme.

It's not a good episode, but for my money there are worse episodes of first, and even second, possibly even third, season DS9.

[conuly]

Agreed on all parts except for the being eleven part.

[archangelbeth]

Hmmmmm. I'd generally say that "becoming non-sapient, and also a reptile/amphibian" is devolving in the sense of "becoming less complex" -- Miriam Webster has "degenerate" in there. I'd be surprised if the loss of sapience were a "natural progression" of humanity without some seriously weird gengineering. (I mean, if they'd had a technobabble of "without the evolutionary pressure to preserve sapiency, these environmentally-triggered progressions have gained ascendency" line... ...no, I refuse to fixfic it. I'm just gonna go la la la and pretend that one never happened unless I decide to write a STO Foundry mission where the abandoned newt babies have somehow established a civilization and must be dealt with.

...right after I feed the Risian Dance Instructors to the Borg.)

I think Voyager really failed for me in trying to be episodic, resetting everything nearly-back-to-default, rather than at least having character arcs/complications early in there, such as could've been done by catching and bringing along the poor little newtlings. (I really like Seven of Nine, though. Even more from playing a Libborg... *halo*)

[conuly]

I don't know how we're measuring "complexity", but I don't see how we know that the salamanders are less complex than humans - nor that this is necessarily a bad thing if it was. A species which can survive and reproduce is successful. One species is not more or less advanced than another, so long as they're both able to survive in their habitat.

I'd be surprised if the loss of sapience were a "natural progression" of humanity without some seriously weird gengineering.

Human intelligence comes with some seriously high costs - it makes childbirth AND infancy extremely risky, it makes us inordinately dependent on our parents and grandparents for a very long period of time (meaning human societies have to spend energy taking care of individuals who aren't very productive just so they can increase the survival odds of the young), and all that brainpower costs a lot of energy.

"Big brains" is an evolutionary gamble that has paid off hugely for us thus far, but maybe there's a reason not many species have gone this route. And it's not really necessary. I mean, sure, humans are an astonishingly successful species - but so are fruit flies, and they don't have much in the way of brains.

Of course, humans do tend to select for intelligence (at least a little), so you're right, even if it becomes a massive liability then you wouldn't expect to see it go away, not even if we had an "island population" of humans, like those elephants that become tiny or those mice that become enormous or all those flightless birds... but two individuals can't evolve anyway. Calling Janeway and Paris' transformation "evolution" is ridiculous. They changed due to weird technobabble, not evolution in any sense of the word.

But what they did not do is revert to an earlier ancestral state, which is what devolution would be if such a thing existed. Which it doesn't.

I think Voyager really failed for me in trying to be episodic, resetting everything nearly-back-to-default, rather than at least having character arcs/complications early in there, such as could've been done by catching and bringing along the poor little newtlings. (I really like Seven of Nine, though. Even more from playing a Libborg... *halo*)

I would've done Voyager so differently, like OMG. They threw away the Maquis "two teams forced to work together", they threw away Seska (so pissed about that) in favor of "lol, Cardassians, they're so backstabby!!!", they made Neelix a clown....

[archangelbeth]

Calling Janeway and Paris' transformation "evolution" is ridiculous. They changed due to weird technobabble, not evolution in any sense of the word.

YES THAT. I mean, even if that were some kind of possible human end-state, the human tendency to select for sapience (at least enough to operate a replicator!) would tend to count against it...

Though on the "devolution" scale, regressing to giant newts would seem to seem to be evoking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procynosuchus ? ...I wonder if the original draft was a "regression" thing, which would've made more trope-sense, anyway, passing through a chimp-ish state of "must steal status female" poor impulse control before fulling regressing to a Procynosuchus-like form and brainz. I mean, it'd still be technobabble, but the tropes would be more satisfying.

My impression of the early season(s) of Veeger were: "I like most of the actors and Mulgrew is OMG, but my gods, what are the writers SMOKING?" But yeah, consequences of the set-up, punching-down on Neelix, raaaargh!

(I started liking Talaxians -- to my utter surprise -- when they showed up in a STO mission series and I realized they were space hobbits. Bam. Everything makes sense. They're little space hobbits. They like food. They like company. They're congenital civilians (okay, except the player character ones). Now I just want to pat them all on the head and set them up in the Shire so they can be happy.)

[mab_browne]

I'm in the 'not great but not that bad' camp myself.

In relation to the comments above wouldn't say I love Spock's Brain but there are, imo, worse TOS episodes. Omega Glory and Assignment:Earth count amongst them. And we'll always have 'what is brain!'....

[conuly]

I'm not much on TOS, to be honest. I've seen a very few eps.

[cellio]

But then, I hate pretty much all the Ferengi stuff.

[conuly]

Not an unusual opinion. (But even then, it's not even the worst Ferengi ep!)