The Trouble With Edward

**(2 hairy scallops out of 5)

If the story of Alien: Resurrection was compressed to 14 minutes, recast with tribbles, and was scored with a slide whistle, would it be a comedy? Let's find out!

Genial Captain Pike sees his officer Lynn Lucero off on her first command. Starship Cabot is seeking to cure a famine among the Calatians of Pragine 63. The crew includes a dangerously unstable... scientist, I suppose, named Edward, who found a slow breeding, potentially intelligent variety of tribble. It does not seem to match the tribbles Dr. Phlox already used last century as a quickly replenished meat source for his pets, possibly without telling anybody else, as was the style at the time. It does not carry the same scientific name as the ones from Keiko's classroom a century hence, letting them slightly off the hook, canon-wise, if not morally. Against Lucero's orders Edward genetically modifies the creatures with his own DNA to become rapid breeding because... Edward can breed rapidly, I guess? Also maybe his DNA defies the laws of mass conservation since these Edribbles reproduce faster than Mogwai in a town swimming pool and it doesn't seem like the Cabot crew were even feeding them, let alone feeding them after midnight.

Anyway, for some reason, this all goes awry, until not even vacuum backpacks can get rid of all the adorable monstrosities. Edward dies suffocated under his creations, and the ship is lost, and the planet is lost. Evacuated, I guess, but evacuating a starving planet sounds like it's just going to mean more lingering deaths. Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy!

At the now-standard Shadowy Board of Inquiry, Captain Lucero places all the blame on Dead Edward the Idiot. Don't say it is a poor workman who blames his tools, for Edward was certainly a tool. Edward’s “study” included skinning the creatures, eating one or two, feeding one to his colleague without telling him, and observing that these Cuddly Meatballs are slow and die easily in a fall from a desk. If they were intelligent (and nobody seems interested in determining that one way or another) Edward claims he could cause them to be born brain damaged. All of these things are jokes, you see.

How was Edward in Starfleet without being fired? What am I supposed to make of Lucero trying to put Edward (a Protein Specialist, unless that’s more of his bullshit) onto Climatologist duty? Let’s assume I don’t have the training to be a Starfleet captain or a scientist, yet I feel like changing the man's entire field of study overnight during a planetary disaster was an unrealistic expectation on the Captain’s part, especially if she already thinks he's an idiot. Was there realistically no earlier way Lucero could have solved this verbally? Firing Ed before he can make mistakes this big, or killing the mistakes themselves with fire, or stunning him and dragging his pasty ass to the escape pod and detonating the ship would also have been acceptable. And funny!

There's a post credits commercial for Tribbles Cereal. What is that meant to be? Who is the target audience, in universe? Television is not even supposed to exist in this century. Did Edward shoot a breakfast food commercial in the insanely retro style of the 1990s and cast somebody’s kids and mock up cardboard boxes and genuinely expect everyone to buy and eat live, unskinned animals first thing in the morning?

I have to believe none of this was ever sent out on the news services otherwise WHY has nobody on the Enterprise in “The Trouble With Tribbles” EVER. HEARD. OF. TRIBBLES???

These are talented performers who make me laugh, but I'm sorry, I don't buy it. And by it, I mean spicy tribble breakfast cereal.