WHY WE LIKE IT: Mercifully short?
WHY WE DON'T: Dumb gross-out humor.
REVIEW: Commander Riker and Dr. Crusher are part of the small away team initiating First Contact with cauliflower-brained aliens who, quite unfortunately, have a snot-based culture. And so after the previous episode's space fart, Very Short Treks leans hard into juvenile comedy steeped in bodily fluids. I mean, on the one hand, there should be a lot of aliens whose behavior is abhorrent to human (and humanish) sensibilities. The Vulcans are too cold for us, the Klingons too boorish, the Tellarites too argumentative. This unnamed culture is just comically into things that we find disgusting. There's snot everywhere. They lick eyeballs. The microwave fish and watch reality TV. As with Holiday Party, there's basically one joke (with variations).
I do think that the crew's reactions are funny, and Jonathan Frakes' voice in particular sells the astonishment well. (Notably, Riker is called Bill in this, which would be one of those TAS mistakes.) And in terms of not putting a lot of credence in the story, it ends with the TNG crew destroying the aliens' new warp drive to postpone (/cancel) First Contact, which of course would never happen. So I'm free to ignore the continuity on this one - la la la - but then again, none of the Very Shorts have been particularly credible.
LESSON: Hygiene is a cultural concept.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-Low: It's still kind of fun to see the other crews in Filmation-vision, but can we get the fingers out of our noses, please?
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