YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S2E11 "Contagion"

• Canon Fodder:
  • The Iconians and their gateways inspired many Star Trek novels, and eventually made a reappearance in the canon series in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "To the Death."
  • They also went from a fascinating (if possibly dangerous) archaeological footnote in the two TV episodes to driving the plot of most of Star Trek Online.
• Fridge Brilliance: This episode marks the first time that Picard orders "Tea, Earl Grey, hot", but due to the Iconians' Contagious A.I., he gets a potted plant, instead. It's possible that the computer misheard his request as "Tree, in grey pot".
• Harsher in Hindsight: Picard speculates that the Iconians were Not Evil, Just Misunderstood and were suffering from a case of history being Written by the Winners. Star Trek Online would shows us that, while he isn't too far off the mark about their history he is very, very wrong about them when they return...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When discussing exactly how the Yamato was destroyed, the Enterprise staff act as though the Failsafe Failure the ship suffered from was something that was only likely to happen under extremely specific, highly unlikely circumstances. In future entries in the franchise, these failsafes almost never work anyway (albeit they usually fail for reasons of battle damage, rather than the spontaneous failure the Yamato seemed to suffer).
  • The entire episode has an element of this, due to the march of technology. In 1989, "turn it off and turn it back on" wasn't exactly well known (this was still the early days of the computer revolution), which means that no one on Starfleet's most advanced starships ever think of what has become tech support's first axiom.
  • One of the first malfunctions on the Enterprise is when Picard asks the replicator for his usual Earl Grey tea and gets a small potted plant instead. This is almost exactly what happens when Janet malfunctions in The Good Place.^note She gave everyone decorative cactus instead.
  • Dr. Pulaski being unwilling to trust the turbolifts is this considering what would happen to Diana Muldaur's character Rosalind Shays in L.A. Law.
• Never Live It Down: The Yamato engineering crew are often ridiculed for getting their ship destroyed by not thinking to use the 24th century equivalent to System Restore to eliminate the Iconian virus. However, Geordi's solution works for the Enterprise because the virus hasn't yet spread to the backups of the critical files in the computer core, whereas it's indicated that the similar backups on the Yamato would have been corrupted at the same time that the Iconian probe screwed up everything else on the ship, meaning that the same solution would at best have achieved nothing, and at worst sped up the ship's deterioration.
  • Geordi specifically mentions restoring from the "protected" archive, seeming to mean something the virus couldn't rewrite, like an optical disk or whatever. But that raises the question of why nobody on the Yamato or Enterprise (at first) thought of reinstalling Windows from the CD sooner.
• Unintentional Period Piece: This episode was definitely written in a time when computers and software were not ubiquitous. The very idea that they downloaded the files of the Yamato to the Enterprise when the former was experiencing widespread system malfunction sounds crazy to anyone even mildly tech-savvy in the 21st century, who would immediately suspect a computer virus of some kind might be the culprit, especially if the issues started shortly after encountering a mysterious alien civilisation. Most modern viewers will understand the problem and the plot within seconds of Picard explaining the situation even though it takes the crew several hours and violating the Neutral Zone to even begin to comprehend what is happening to them.
  • The idea that an uncloaked Galaxy-class starship (let alone two of them) could hope to sneak into a demilitarised zone monitored and partially controlled by an interstellar empire without being detected is pretty outdated, since even today's Sol and Earth-based satellites and radar systems would likely have picked either of them up. Both the Yamato and the Enterprise should have been detected before they even crossed the border if the Romulans are using detection systems centuries ahead of our own, and the notion that they could get to the Romulan side of the zone while only being stalked by a single Romulan ship, rather than a thousand of them, should have never entered either Captain's head.

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