TNG - "Up The Long Ladder"

[TachyonDrift]

No topic came up on a search, so I'm assuming this on e hasn't been raised. If that's an error perhaps this could be shifted or something?

Anyhoo...

I'm in the process of doing script doctoring on the TNG episodes with a view to solidifying a head-canon version.

I'm currently working on UTLL. Obviously there are major issues with the broadcast version, which Chuck demonstrated perfectly, but I have a question I'd be interested in feedback on.

I cannot for the life of me work out a reason why over two hundred years the mariposan clones would not have been mixing their DNA in the usual fashion, even if it was in addition to cloning. After all, mixing up the DNA is the best way to avoid inbreeding, which everyone outside of [choose your own target] knows, even if these guys (in my script they're the flight crew rather than the original colonists themselves) don't get the xerox effect.
As such, the variety of people on the planet would not, in fact, be noticably twinny. The plot can stay the same, fresh DNA needed, (although that's presuppossing every single other option available to them, which I'd not mention except it's amazingly evident that it's absent).

Anyhoo, anyhoo, the main reason I came up with for the Mariposans to all be direct linear clones (even those this STILL would end up with direct clones of different ages, which would be similar looking but not the same, so the idea is still kinda dumb) is that the entire flight crew was one gender. That fixes the 'no shagging' issue, and potentially could explain better the reluctance to even think about shagging the Bringloidi - they've never seen a real % before, so they're kinda repulsed by the notion of non &-& activity. Which i might have chosen to dump entirely, but when you cut out all of the utter shit Bringloidi stuff from earlier scenes, you start running quite short of air time and ought to add replacement, hopefully better, stuff, and the Mariposan / Bringloidi disliking each other was an area that lasted less than a minute on screen and was really the only place where anything dramatic might happen.

So, leaving aside the question of why, given the ten or so generations, absolutely zero people have dedicated their lives to studying genetics and ergo worked out how to do a spot of minor chromozone jiggery-pokery to end up with added t'other gender to the mix and then ending up with the same issues mentioned earlier, because, my god does this episodes have real issues, I'm wondering if peeps here might show a preference for which gender the flight crew were?

I genuinely don't give a hoot, it won't change any of the writing or characterisation, I was just idly pondering if making it an all woman crew might be more interesting in some way.

This has turned out to be a long post to ask a short question I doubt many, if any, would give a damn about, but hey, c'est la guerre.

[clearspira]

Wasn't it established that they find sex disgusting and that is why they do not reproduce normally?

[TachyonDrift]

Yes, that to me is a ridiculous idea, especially as they state that they came to that position. So they were fine with it when they landed. Maybe if they'd explained that due to the need to spread the DNA as far as possible they'd end up with a pro-incest society, but they didn't do that, they just hand-waved it away to force the plot home and set up a god-awful joke.

YMMV, of course.

[TheStarWarsTrek]

Didn't they say that only a few colonists survived, and that's why they had to reproduce through cloning? With that in mind them finding the idea of sex disgusting dosn't seem that far fetched to me.

[clearspira]

Didn't they say that only a few colonists survived, and that's why they had to reproduce through cloning? With that in mind them finding the idea of sex disgusting dosn't seem that far fetched to me.

Exactly my thoughts. Its like what Chuck said about Clint Howard.
If you find the last few remaining people ugly, you're not having sex with them. No one has genitals that are fuelled by ''but the world needs you!'' Not to mention the fact that there are plenty of people in real life who find sex disgusting, they just tend to be forgotten or ridiculed in our hypersexualised culture.

[TachyonDrift]

Didn't they say that only a few colonists survived, and that's why they had to reproduce through cloning? With that in mind them finding the idea of sex disgusting dosn't seem that far fetched to me.

Yes, specifically five, three chaps two chapesses. I am fully familiar with the episode, I've been going through it line by line for several days. You kinda have to do that when you're re-writing the script.

I do not follow how you get from that start position to either your (and the show's) conclusions.
I wonder if, perhaps, this would be a case of not being able to see why it could not be so, and therefore seeing it as reasonable. I'll agree, there's no reason why this could not have happened, it's a question of whether or not it is the most likely outcome.

Why would five adult humans start finding the idea of rubbing uglies repellant because they're now isolated?

Why would they think cloning was the only option?

These make no rational sense. You could MAKE it make sense, but they didn't, there's no dialogue that does this, it's just presented as extant.

Besides which, whilst I'm certainly more than happy to discuss this abortion of an episode, (I'll even be happy to upload my revised script if it'd be of interest) the question is; does anyone have a particular opinion on which and / or why the surviving flight crew ought to be gender A or gender B.

[Darth Wedgius]

If you're going to make them monogender, I'd have them all-female. If they are male then you have X and Y chromosomes and you can in principle make females. If they're all females then there's not a Y chromosome to be had and you won't get any male births.

Even though the Y chromosome is our smallest, that's still 59 million base pairs. I'm going to guess that's not easy to build from scratch.

But I think you run into a different problem, in that they could ask the crew for gametes (sperm if the colonists are all female, or eggs if they are all male) and make test-tube babies from that, then use their incubators on those. Or just do artificial insemination if pregnancy doesn't scare them too much. I think a lot of the male crew would be OK with a quick wank to save a civilization. Not all, because now they have children they may never see, but that never seemed to stop the Kirk Manuver.

[clearspira]

Genuinely I think I prefer the basis of the script we've got over any of what i'm reading here.

From what I can see, events played out like this: the Mariposians crashed and with it most of the crew died - only three men and two women survived and most of their equipment was intact. And as Chuck keeps pointing out, if say the inertial dampeners failed prior to the crash, that could easily explain why their ship would be mostly intact only now with blood red paint on the walls.
Their choice for survival was sex or cloning, and seeing as genetic diversity would have killed them just as readily as all that disgusting sex, they chose cloning.

And y'know what, i'm calling it now: they were disgusted by sex because they were either asexual or homosexual, meaning that it wasn't sex but male/female sex that repulsed them. It is the cleanest and best way to explain their attitudes.
Remember this is a 1980s show, and moreover, one famous for burying anything but vanilla sexuality under fifteen feet of earth - it would never have been mentioned on screen. But in 2019 we know that sexuality and gender is far greater in scope than anything we see in season 2 of TNG. And if the Federation is as liberal as it is meant to be, then the possibility of five people not being cisgender is huge.

[FlynnTaggart]

Why would five adult humans start finding the idea of rubbing uglies repellant because they're now isolated?

Why would they think cloning was the only option?

Most likely the original survivors didn't find sex nasty but in a bad way, most likely they were perfectly okay with it but chose to clone because the genetic diversity and just regular survival of a colony from 3 dudes and 2 dudettes probably ain't great. Not to mention probably not wanting to subject the people to be breeding farms, they might be colonists but its entirely possible the survivors were not couples before hand, just random people who happened to survive. I think it would be pretty effed to asked someone to bang some random person they may have never met before and have no sexual or emotional interest in. Cloning boosts their numbers without forcing people to breed who might not want to, certainly the better option then forcing people to mate.

Would you want to be forced to get busy with someone, forced to impregnate or be impregnated by a virtual stranger? Your entire existence dedicated to making more people? I mean thats kinda what Chuck was alluding to with the clones becoming "breeding stock", "each woman, from both groups, had to have at least three children by three different men" with "monogamous marriages would not be possible for several generations" (parts copied from Memory Alpha) sounding messed up akin to being forced to bang Clint Howard. IT IS horrifying even without a taboo against banging, a person reduced to their sexual organs with no choice of partners or reproductive rights, just make babies whether you want to or not. You needn't be repressed as they were portraying the Mariposans to be to not want to be forced to be a baby factory.

More then likely the taboo against slapping the downstairs parts is cultural though probably also on purpose, generations of people reproducing through cloning might start to find old school reproduction disgusting, bestial and degrading how we might (as an example) view how rapey sex was in the past. Not to mention its probably better for their society to not be reproducing in the under the sheets method to not cause massive problems with inbreeding and a divided society between the clones and the borns thus there might have been some purposeful effort to create a taboo around sexual relations.

[Darth Wedgius]

Some alternatives for the colonists in the original scenario:

Freeze some of their current cells and make copies from that. There are a LOT of cells in the body, and they can keep making copies from those cells as needed, instead of making copies of new copies each generation. They will run out of cells eventually, but a lot further down the line.

Ask for gametes from the crew, and then ask for more gametes every generation from the UFP at large. Children can then be produced by in vitro techniques or artificial insemination. "Computer, activate Emergency Inception Hologram. Soundtrack: Barry White."

Breed between themselves and ask the Federation for help correcting inbreeding-generated genetic errors at the embryo stage. The UFP frowns on genetic engineering, but not "corrective DNA resequencing for genetic disorders." Inbreeding is mostly a problem from getting two copies of one or more bad genes. Correct one of each of the problem genes and you're OK. Correct both of each set and your descendants won't inherit that problem from you, but the Feds might not want to go that far.

Ask for cloning volunteers from the Federation at large. The colonists won't turn into goo by the end of the episode, so the new DNA doesn't have to be from the Enterprise crew. Get the frozen cells collected and shipped by Ferengi Express or some humanitarian (sapient beingitarian?) organization.

Ask for new colonists to integrate into their colony. That's basically what they were doing anyway with cloned Rikers and Pulaskis. Unless they consider cloning to be a part of their cultural identity they can't sacrifice. I suppose this was more or less the solution they were forced into, anyway.

Any combination of any of the above.

As an added benefit, they get longer life-spans from some of these. The clones seem to be generated as adults, so they probably lose a couple decades. Though there is the downside of those awkward teenage years.

It was a silly problem from a sub-par episode, IMHO, though an episode with a few nice touches.