Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.
Yes, two chapters this week because they’re both short, about 8 pages between the two of them. So in the interest of time we’re going to read them both. Will it be worth making two chapters? We’ll find out.
Last time we learned about most of our remaining guest cast (I think there’s still a young couple to be introduced as I remember one being prominent in the sequel) and everybody’s connection to the experimental nerve regeneration process. This book comes out before the transporter was practically turned into a medical device. We did have some accidents that split people in two or sent them to an alternate universe, but it wasn’t until The Next Generation that we would see it restore people afflicted by a rapid aging disease or restore adults from the child form they were put into by the transporter. I’m not even sure why you’d need doctors in their future. Just use the last pattern in the buffer and heal their body. However, the future could also be shown to regrow limbs, though apparently not fix eyes that no longer or never worked.
This is one of the problems with trying to create advanced medicine when you want to invoke a plot involving some medical condition. Why did Worf need experimental spine surgery? You could almost suspect the transporter could put it back, and nanites could fix everything back in place. They have to come up with some reason it can’t be done just to make a medical drama plotline. I think Geordi has normal (or normal looking) eyes by the time of Picard. Luckily they can’t cure the common cold in Kirk’s time, so it’s time to see the early days of a process they may not even need later on.
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