Emergence

** (2 stars out of 5)

Prospero Data, or possibly pasty Johnny Depp as Wizard Gandalf, rehearses The Tempest for Picard. "One final creative act before giving up his art forever." But the Captain and the android narrowly avoid being run over by the Orient Express. Wouldn't you know it? The holodeck's broken again...

A magnascopic storm in the Mekorda sector, for lack of a more delicate term, knocked up the Enterprise. It has become fruitful and is great with child.

The ship suddenly jumps to warp 'luckily' avoiding a theta explosion the sensors weren't designed to detect, but then did somehow. SCIENCE! The circuitry is full of brightly coloured crazy straws, perhaps appropriate to the drunken way the ship is behaving...

Holodeck gunslingers and medieval knights are doing jigsaw puzzles on the train. All in all, a mobster delivers another brick to a wall. Worf shovels coal to get them to Jeffery Tambor Beta VI and all the vertion particles the ship can eat. We've never heard of vertion before, but clearly it's the cosmic equivalent of pickles and ice cream.

The replicators and transporters created a brightly coloured hairball in the cargo bay, then coughed it up. There is much rejoicing... while D Jr. wanders off by itself. Deejur? Nobody names it.

Picard hopes that whatever the hell got built from their fantasies will be honourable. But, really, isn't it more likely to suffer from the Living Spaceship equivalent of fetal alcohol syndrome?

It might be the writers of "Emergence" who were inebriated. Let me get this straight: Enterprise spontaneously grew an imagination, reproduced, and reverted to normal function so it conveniently cannot take any responsibility. The carbon units infesting Enterprise are unable or unwilling to investigate the Strange New Life because uh... it ran away really fast or something. That looks pretty bad in a report, so what are they celebrating? That even their ship is a terrible parent?

It's the unfunny version of the episode 'The Practical Joker' with an unsettling dash of 'I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant'. If instead of dropping infants into toilets you dropped them into outer space. (In case you didn't guess, yes, I feel sorry for the Little Lamp. That is because I am crazy.)