135. Where Silence Has LeaseFORMULA: The Immunity Syndrome + Encounter at Farpoint + Let This Be Your Last Battlefield
WHY WE LIKE IT: Nagilum is a fairly creepy creation.
WHY WE DON'T: Pulaski is entirely too mean to Data, and the story jerks the audience around.
REVIEW: I found myself constantly frustated by Where Silence Has Lease, from the teaser on. In that teaser, we have Worf and Riker in apparent danger on a planet surface, but it turns out it's all a holodeck fantasy. While on repeat viewings, you would know this is Worf's callisthenics program, it's still a red herring, one of many we'll have to get through watching this episode. And when you see it again, it's an extended fight scene that takes too long to make its point (Worf's bloodlust) and has no relation to the subsequent story.
That story features an intriguing villain, one of many Star Trek godlike entities, this one interested on running experiments on the crew. Unfortunately, it takes a very long time for Nagilum to make an actual appearance, running us through various illusions before doing so. A second appearance for the Romulans on TNG turns out to be nothing at all. And then we have a couple characters running around on a mixed up Yamato. It's one inconsequential set piece after another. Meanwhile, we have Pulaski treating Data like equipment in her most forced confrontation with the android. The dislike many fans feel for her stem from this very scene, in my opinion.
Nagilum should have showed up sooner because once he's there, the episode gets a bit better. He's interesting to look at, and Picard's solution to save his crew from suffering leads to a couple of pretty harrowing scenes. The captain wasn't bluffing either! Unfortunate that Nagilum appears a bit more stupid than necessary when sending illusions of Troi and Data to Picard's cabin, but those illusions make good points. Saving grace: Riker's emphatic agreement to cancel auto-destruct. Still, it takes much too long for Where Silence Has Lease to get interesting, and once it does, it's pretty much all over.
LESSON: That THIS is death.
REWATCHABILITY - Low: The concept, while a bit derivative, had potential, but I don't like being toyed with any more than Picard does.
Comments
Bad points:
-The sexism behind the Pulaski "your construction is also different". Because OBVIOUSLY the males are the "standard". (Although I do like the "not likely" when asked to demonstrate copulation).
-Picard's "let's get out of here and send a science team to investigate this extremely unusual and possibly one-of-a-kind phenomena". That's the captain of the Enterprise, the "Explorer-class" vessel, deciding that doing some actual exploring is a bit too much like hard work and wanting to get back to delivery supplies or running a geological survey or whatever boring crap they do every single other day of the week.
- I'm not entirely sure I like the bit in the teaser where Worf looks like he's about to attack Riker. For one thing, according to Worf himself this wasn't supposed to be an intense sessions, and for another it makes the Klingons look a bit too much like animals. Are they saying that after an intense fight they'd start killing each other unless a superior officer was there to shout at them?
- Data smiles at least twice. I'm haphazardly watching these and I know that sort of thing happened all the time in season 1, but I thought it had stopped by now.
And is it me, or does Picard start exposing his beliefs in Intelligent Design at the end? He'll be removing all the files on evolution from the ship's databanks next.
(I'm not saying that I disagree with Picard, necessarily. At the time I probably agreed with him, and it was a surprisingly religious statement coming from the extremely secular TNG. But it was also before Creationists realised that ID was a way of getting religion into the science classrooms.)
(This is possibly a bit of a spicy issue for a Star Trek blog. Although the post is 5 years old... I'm impressed you responded!)
The whole ID argument is well after my school days, and back then, catechism was taught as part of the regular course load from 1st to 7th grade in French Canada (so everyone was assumed to be Catholic, which was very close to the truth). It's not a creationist faith, so no contradiction there, but the two "versions" co-existed, one as a fable the other as science.
So in my life, Intelligent Design was used the other way around, as an argument to convince Creationists that science wasn't incompatible with belief in God. For me, a God that creates a universe that includes the Big Bang, evolution, etc. is a much greater being than one that can only create the world whole, with all the stuff already in it. It denies God's creation of time as well as space.
It's no surprise it didn't really convince anyone. People who care this deeply about such things do not so easily change their minds OR suffer intellectual arguments about matter of faith.