Aboard the USS Cabot new minted Captain Lynne Lucero played by Rosa Salazar, takes her first command. Her excitement is diminished upon meeting geneticist Edward Larkin, played by H. Jon Benjamin, who is not a team player, to the point of insubordination.
The Cabot is assigned to solve a planet’s food shortage and while most of the crew is working together to find solutions such as making the land more suitable for farming, Edward is more focused on his solution, the modification of the tribble. When he starts with them tribbles are believe it or not slow to breed.
Not after Edward makes them stunted mentally and born pregnant with the addition of his own DNA. Now with tribbles popping up everywhere on the ship and having a population boom , the crew can’t keep up with removing them.
The Captain orders the crew to abandon ship, but Edward refuses to leave, causing his death when a flood of fluffball tribbles flow over him. The rest of the crew escape just before the hull ruptures. Somehow the furry nemesis survives causing ecological deveststion calling for the evacuation of a whole planet, as well as making its way to the Klingon empire making this a political issue.
This story gives a bit of background for the Star Trek Original Series episode “the trouble with tribbles” where we find out the Klingon Empire has gone as far as fighting a war against the tribbles. All this is summed up by Captain Lynne when she is before a Star Fleet tribunal where she states “he was an idiot” when explaining how she lost a single crew member, referring to Edward.
EPISODE Written by Graham Wagner. Directed by Daniel Gray Longino.
