I can’t imagine the ambassador would really be cool about staying on that little planet, alone with Cochrane, for the rest of “their” “lives.” But this is another product of its time issue: The reason they’ll be stuck alone is because Cochrane doesn’t wanna be bothered by an onslaught of Federation historians and Starfleet fanboys. The ambassador, if she’s still there at all, just gets to go along with what the man wants—it’s never brought up whether she can be asked what she wants.

So I guess overall I don’t think “Metamorphosis” is a very good episode. It’s in a cerebral, what’s-going-on sort of style, but then what’s the point of what’s going on? I read one time that theme isn’t a word, it’s a sentence: a story can’t be “about ambition” (for example), but rather, it has to be about how ambition can isolate you from those around you, or how ambition can make you lose touch with yourself, or how ambition will throw you into a world full of sharks.

I can’t nail down what “Metamorphosis” is about, thematically. What were the writers trying to tell us? And maybe this is an unfair question, since a television show has to crank out some number of episodes, and a writing team doesn’t have time to coherently unify plot, theme, and character every single week. Maybe we should just look at the Companion as a monster of the week, but it’s a monstrous kind of love, and there was a mad scramble to tie a bow over the conflict.