Up the Long Ladder

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Star Trek: TNG episode
"Up the Long Ladder"
Brenna the Bringloidi tries to seduce Riker in "Up the Long Ladder".
Episode no.	43
Prod. code	144
Airdate	May 22, 1989
Writer(s)	Melinda M. Snodgrass
Director	Winrich Kolbe
Guest star(s)	Barrie Ingham, Rosalyn Landor, Colm Meaney
Year	2365
Stardate	42823.2
Episode chronology
Previous	"Samaritan Snare"
Next	"Manhunt"

"Up the Long Ladder" is an episode from the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The USS Enterprise-D receives a distress call from a human colony from the planet Bringloid V, which is in danger from solar flares from a nearby star.

The colony turns out to have been founded by the crew of the SS Mariposa, a DY-500 class cargo freighter launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR, Earth on 2123-11-27 and destined to the Ficus Sector.

The colony, led by an Irishman named Danilo Odell, has reverted to a pre-industrial rural lifestyle. When rescued onto the Enterprise-D, the colonists are at first amazed by the 24th century technology on the ship, but they quickly adapt to it.

When the colony has been rescued, Odell informs Captain Jean-Luc Picard of another colony, also descended from the Mariposa, located half a light year away. The Enterprise-D also visits this colony, which has taken to calling itself Mariposa.

The Mariposa colony is strikingly different from the Bringloidi colony. The Mariposa colonists have kept their advanced technology, but when the colony was founded, there were too few survivors to establish a stable gene pool. This caused the Mariposans to turn to cloning instead, strongly rejecting biological reproduction, and as a consequence, any sign of intimacy. For almost three centuries, every Mariposan has been the clone of one of five original colonists, and now the colony is in danger of dying out because of replicative fading: genetic errors will soon cumulate into a terminally fatal stage, making all subsequent clones inviable.

The Mariposans ask the Enterprise-D crew for a sample of their DNA, so they could create new clones. The crew refuses, so the Mariposans kidnap Commander William Riker and Doctor Katherine Pulaski to steal their DNA. When Riker and Pulaski find out, they visit the colony's cloning labs and destroy the new clones.

Alarmed, the Mariposan prime minister Walter Granger once again turns to Picard and his crew. Doctor Pulaski tells them they need new breeding stock to establish a real gene pool instead of cloning. The Bringloidi colonists would serve as a perfect source for this gene pool.

The Enterprise-D crew and the members of both colonists agree to integrate the Bringloidi and Mariposa colonies. However, monogamic marriage will at first be temporarily suspended, to ensure fast development of a healthy, sustainable new generation. Thus each man will have three wives and each woman will have three husbands.

[edit] Trivia

The name the first colony, Bringloid V, originates from the Irish word Brionglóid meaning dream.
The name of the episode comes from an Irish saying: "Up the long ladder and down the short rope, to Hell with King Billy and God bless the Pope, if that doesn't do, we'll tear them in two, and send them to hell in their red, white, and blue!"
While Picard is doing a computer search, there is a listing for a ship SS Buckaroo Bonzai commanded by John Whorfin, on a mission to "Planet 10, Dimension 8" (all referencing the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension). There is also a listing for a ship making a "diplomatic mission to Alderaan" (referencing Star Wars), and Commander Gene Roddenberry, on a mission to "Explore strange new worlds" (referencing Star Trek's creator).