Final Frontier Friday: ‘The Trouble With Edward’ – Science Fiction

Welcome to Final Frontier Friday! Were doing something a little different this week and reviewing a new episode. The newest episode, in fact. Im referring of course, to The Trouble With Edward, the latest installment of the second season (or whatever were calling these production blocks) of Short Treks.

Penned by Graham Wagner, The Trouble With Edward functions as a prequel of sorts to the original series episode to which its title so clearly alludes. If theres one thing that should be apparent after the first two seasons of Discovery, its that this can be sticky territory. Discovery, after all, is often at its best when it embraces the spirit of the original Star Trek without trying to shoehorn itself into that shows continuity. That being said, when those continuity ties have worked, theyve actually tended to work quite well (case in point: any time Anson Mount is on screen as Captain Pike). But when it doesnt work? It gets a bit rough. The first season, in particular, is replete with examples of the latter. So which category does The Trouble With Edward fall into?

Lynne Lucero, a newly-minted captain, bids Captain Pike a fond farewell as she prepares to transfer to the Cabot to begin her first command. Once aboard the Cabot, Lucero meets with her staff in preparation for their mission providing famine relief to the inhabitants of Pragine 63, a planet near the Klingon border. The meeting is fairly by the numbers until its time for protein specialist Edward Larkin to bring everyone up to speed on his own pet project: tribbles. Specifically, tribbles as a food source. The only problem, he says, is that they breed too slowly, but thats nothing a little genetic engineering cant fix. His colleagues are taken aback and Lucero asks if tribbles are intelligent. Not immediately realizing that its an ethical question, Larkin reassures her that theyre easy prey before adding that he can engineer some brain damage into their genome. Lucero orders the tribble project suspended and reassigns Larkin to climatology.

The Cabots crew scrambles to respond to a lab breech Larkins augmented tribbles have gotten loose and begun breeding out of control. Its instantly clear to everyone what Larkin was doing, though he merely points out that it worked. Despite their best efforts, the crew is unable to clear the tribble infestation which eventually begins to threaten their oxygen supply. Lucero eventually has no choice but to order her crew to abandon ship. True to form, however, Larkin continues to argue with her. Rather than board an escape pod, he insists that his own intelligence and the success of his work be acknowledged.

Instead, he is overcome by what can only be described as a tribble tsunami as the pods are jettisoned. Sometime later, Lucero stands before a board of inquiry. Admiral Quinn is stunned at how disastrous Luceros first command was: In the space of two weeks, she lost not only a member of her crew but her entire ship in a debacle that resulted in a genetically modified invasive species being released on Pragine 63, all of which she has laid at Larkins feet. When asked how she can blame all of this on one man, she simply states, He was an idiot.

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Final Frontier Friday: 'The Trouble With Edward' - Science Fiction