“Home Soil”
Teleplay by Robert Sabaroff
Story by Karl Guers, Ralph Sanchez, and Robert Sabaroff
Directed by Corey Allen
Season 1, Episode 18
Original air date: February 22, 1988
Star date: 41463.9
Mission summary
The Enterprise pays a visit to Velara III, a Tattooine-like planet chosen by the Federation for terraforming. The leader of the terraforming team, Mandl, looks nervous and tries to discourage the Enterprise from stopping by. Picard knows something’s up (who wouldn’t want a hello from the inspectors?) and sends Riker, Yar, Data, and La Forge down to check things out. The rest of the terraforming team–Malencon, the hydraulics specialist; Luisa Kim, the biosphere designer; and chief engineer Bjorn Bensen–don’t seem to have any secrets. But when Mandl tells Malencon to get back to work, the specialist disappears into a room only to start screaming moments later. The crew finds him too late, badly burned by a ceiling-mounted laser drill. Though they beam him to sickbay, he’s dead, Jean-Luc.
Everyone but Data and La Forge return to the ship while Data re-runs the drilling program to find out what went wrong. Unsurprisingly, the laser starts shooting at Data. La Forge is able to shut it down, but only just barely. With no explanation, but lots of opportunities to be burned into Swiss cheese, the terraforming crew winds up beaming to the ship for safety. Mandl is outraged–they’re already behind schedule–and Picard begins to suspect that Mandl killed his specialist to protect some secret. He sends La Forge and Data back down to the planet, where they discover some kind of blinking light…thingy. They beam it to the Enterprise‘s lab. It’s fully inorganic, but its light flashes have no pattern, it hums when people are near it, and it seems to harness energy. Dr. Crusher asks the computer to hypothesize as to what this is, and the computer responds: “Life.”
Picard confronts Mandl, who eventually admits his team had discovered some… anomalies… on the planet, but since the Federation certified the planet lifeless he didn’t think much of it. Meanwhile, the blinky thing is reproducing, and its new clone army starts interfacing with the Enterprise‘s computers. It rejects attempts to contain it in a quarantine area and finally gets through to the universal translator, addressing the bridge crew as “Ugly bags of mostly water.” It–or they?–declare that they tried to make peace with the humans on their planet, but no one would listen, and now it’s about to get real. They declare war on the humans and start to screw with the ship’s systems.
Eventually our heroes put 2 and 3 and 8 together and discover that the terraforming technique of siphoning off the layer of saline water below the sand would kill these crystal energy…blinky…things. They need water (and a conductor) in order to link together in what Data calls a microbrain. Whoops. The crystal things are in control of the ship by now, shutting down systems left and right. La Forge hypothesizes that they might be photoelectric, and so Picard orders a shutdown of the lights in the room. In moments, the crystal blinkies beg for more light or they’ll die. Picard grants them just enough for them to surrender, apologizes for that particularly dick move, and beams them back to their “wet sand.”
Analysis
Now that we’ve heard the ugly bags of mostly water joke, we can all go home until season 3, right?
As a whole, I liked the idea of the blinkie sandy wossnames. A subterranean layer of water is entirely believable (just ask Europa), and saline water operating as a large-scale conductor for brain-like electric activity is notionally pretty neat. But gosh, science is just so hard, isn’t it? I’m not sure what I loved more: that this “microscopic” and “single-celled” organism is at least the size of a ladybug, or that they take “photoelectric” to mean “photovoltaic.” I’m really not a stickler for scientific accuracy–I can enjoy handwaving as much as the next ignorant once-upon-a-time humanities major–but this was too much even for me.
I appreciated that Mandl (or any of his crewmembers) weren’t actually evil or bad people. Mandl never argues that his terraforming project is more important than these life forms. He and Bensen didn’t understand what they were looking for because they would have never guessed the answer. It’s a mistake–a terrible mistake, but an honest one, and I’m glad the episode didn’t vilify them for it. I’m still not clear on how it takes only four people and a single station to terraform a planet, but I suppose my only frame of reference is Red Mars.
But the thing that really grates on me is the resolution. First of all, if a single-celled organism can take over your ship, you need to seriously do another round of QC before putting that software live. Secondly, once again we have a life form that can read the ship’s memory banks and yet doesn’t know the first thing about humans or the Federation or its (peaceful!) mission. And thirdly, Picard essentially starves these things to death, forcing them to surrender or die. I don’t see how that’s diplomatic or, frankly, even ethical, considering the worst they’ve done is pout, lock the door to their bedroom, and hook up some Christmas lights, with maybe a minor electrical inconvenience here or there against the people who were going to wipe them off the map.
Ultimately, there’s really only about 20 minutes of story here and the rest is filled with pointless asides and investigations. Why does Troi send Riker to squeeze information out of a crying lady scientist? Does that serve any purpose whatsoever aside from creeping me out? (And why is she crying anyway? There are other desert planets out there…) Then there are the, like, six meetings called to try and bully a confession out of Mandl. The only thing more boring than sitting through a meeting yourself is having to watch other people do it.
Torie’s Rating: Warp 2 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: You’d make that face, too, if you had to wear a washed out kimono. Terraforming sounds cool and all, but is it worth having to go to work dressed like that?
Best Line: LIFEFORM: Ugly giant bags of mostly water!
But a close second:
LA FORGE: La Forge to Enterprise, we have a problem.
PICARD: Be specific!
Trivia/Other Notes: Walter Gotell, who plays Mandl, is probably most famous as Russian General Gogol in five James Bond movies.
Previous episode: Season 1, Episode 17 – “When the Bough Breaks.”
Next episode: Season 1, Episode 19 – “Coming of Age.”
Warp 2 sounds about right, and at least half of that is for “ugly bags of mostly water”. The broad outlines of the initial idea are also decent, but the execution just doesn’t work. On top of all the stuff Torie points out, if the saline layer that these things live in is subterranean, why do they need light to survive?
My guess is that the writers figured that since these things are silicon life, then naturally they can interface with the computer. The writing supervisors have already demonstrated that they have no understanding of how computers work, so why not? I also guess that the crying lady is crying because of the death of her coworker. Either they had an unstated thing going on or she is just being an emotional woman. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not sure I can.
Aaaaand it has just occurred to me that this is really just a rehash of “The Devil in the Dark”, isn’t it? Their utter failure to properly handle a theme already covered by TOS might actually be enough to knock this down to a 1.
Weird. I know I’ve seen this episode at least twice but I have virtually no memory of it.
I was amused that they went back to the TOS method of asking the computer to solve the problem. It’s particularly odd, though, that it was Crusher who did the asking. It’s appropriate in the sense that the answer turned out to be life, but there’s no way she could have known that, so why would she be asking?
Now I kind of want to use “Ugly bag of mostly water” as a signature.
Wait…if the blinky glowy things need water to live, then how does the crystal under its (very dry-looking) dome grow so enormously, to the point that it can speak intelligently and control large sections of the ship?
“Ugly bags of mostly water” (did the really put “giant” in there? It ruins the scansion TOTALLY!) is one of the single best lines of NuTrek (a.o.t. Trek Classic).
Otherwise, yes, “NO KILL I” indeed.
Completely irrelevantly, I remember voting a number of times on the pay lines against New Coke, and quite literally scrambling around the various nearby stores, stockpiling Classic in case they were serious about stopping its production.
I could have sworn I’d read the “ugly bag of mostly water” line somewhere else before this episode, and it was supposed to be a call-out to whatever story that was. I can’t find any trace of what it might have been, though.
I remember that when this aired it was the first – unbelievably – episode I couldn’t defend at all. A dismal “Devil In The Dark” retread. No real tension, poor acting, cheap looking sets and props and a dull resolution.
I especially hated the overly theatrical moment before the commercial fade out when Geordi and Data first discover the crystal whatchamacallits, where Geordi makes some pronouncement about the life form, and the light in his face starts dramatically BLINKING FASTER!! A cheap dramatic effect…up there with zooming in and out on the red alert light in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”
I’d make a ‘raspberry’ sound if I knew how to spell it.
Why are the silly things able to take over the ship? Easy because the only drama these producers know is ‘ship in danger!’ A drama of purely human scale events is simply not enough, so something must always be a major threat. Of course by making everything a major threat, then majro threats become minor ones andwe get a run away effect of silly stakes for escalating situations.
I agree this is a retelling of The Devil In The Dark, but done in crayon.
Not much to say about this ep, but I suppose I am in the minority in feeling it is defensible. Remember one of the primary (mostly forgotten in later seasons) tropes is the “seeking out of new life and new civilizations,” and this is TNG’s take on the trope.
Sure, sure, “Devil In The Dark” crawls to mind, but there you had a very entitled humanity ultimately being shamed into regretting its actions against a sentient lifeform. The OS episode was very much a product of its era. Recall, Kirk’s first instinct was to kill the creature. Everyone involved, even Spock going in, had a narrow, tightly confined definition of life and intelligence.
This episode is infused with the more circumspect TNG values. No one here did a calculation that the creatures weren’t worth as much as the resources their existence prevented or slowed from extraction. The scientists weren’t the “then we’ll use clubs!” Neanderthals of the earlier series (was there any doubt that if the Horta had not been accommodating of the miners’ goals its continuance as a species would have been tolerated; it was useful, therefore it was exploited). Here, the notion this was life deserving of respect and even deference on its own merits was a given going in.
So… fresh spices to an old recipe.
I find it interesting that TOS’s concept of advanced metahuman life was generally disembodied “pure energy,” while these early TNG eps seem to posit that life as being crystalline in form (crystals being a big thing in the 80s, recall).
One forgiveness I am willing to extend is that there was some kind of writers strike in and around this period, which probably accounts for at least some of the lassitude and meandering slowness, and amateur feel, of a lot of these episodes. Then you had bourbon-soaked Papa Gene-O and his attorney life partner mauling these scripts with their greasy pawprints, oy vey. So…
I guess what I am saying is I credit this episode for at least TRYING to grapple with a difficult SF task, thinking about and portraying how new life forms might operate and how sentient intelligence might express itself. Even Asimov confessed it was a nigh-impossible task.
It’s a focus that gets totally lost in a decade of “aliens” with putty on their noses and So-Cal accents. I give it points just for trying.
I liked that it was a life form in a place where they didn’t expect to find one. That, if I remember correctly, was about the time that they had discovered all that unexpected life around the volcanic vents at the bottom of the oceans. I liked the “Ugly bags of mostly water” line and I liked that the crystals had been trying to communicate. The admission of having seen the forms in the sand but not making anything of them didn’t sit with me. I’m not saying that the team should have been made out as bad guys for this. I think there should have been was more in the discussion about the communication attempts to make it clear that the differences in world-views between the two species led to patterns the crystals thought should stand out still looking random to the Humans because of their complexity.
Had they any idea of where the series would be going, they could have used this episode as a set up for some interesting episodes down the line. Imagine the Federation offering to help correct the damage and, offer accepted or not, this set the diplomatic stage allowing the crystals to become allied with the Federation during the Borg Crisis. What stories could have been told following that trail.
#8, @Lemnoc: You make compelling points, and I sympathize. There are hints in this episode of issues that would be handled later, in more compelling episodes. (One must later episode comes to mind: “The Quality of Life”, I think it’s called, in which Data ends up defending the case of sentience for a group of artificially-intelligent probes that have begun to act up in odd ways.)
But there’s not enough here to like. “20 minutes of story” indeed–once LaForge and Data find the blinky inorganic life form and transport it to the ship, the mystery’s basically over. A few pointed questions to the shipboard computer and it’s solved: the blinky crystals are alive, and all debate about that question more or less dies. One of two things should have happened.
First possibility: Enterprise drops by the terraforming colony earlier on, only when the first hints of trouble were cropping up. In this case the mystery could have been prolonged.
Second possibility: there’s more of a fight over whether the crystals are actually sentient or not. There’s a lot that *could* be disputed that was not disputed in the episode. OK, so the crystals are producing complex emissions of some kind; there’s precedent for that. Radio emissions from Jupiter are quite complicated but certainly not regarded as evidence for sentience.
And you could have made the character of Mandl far more of an obsessive than he was shown to be, if you felt the story needed a villain who didn’t *care* whether the terraforming effort was destroying another lifeform or not.
Basically, after a reasonably strong start, the episode just sort of conks out.
@ 1 DemetriosX
If they’re subterranean why do they need light to survive, and if they need water then how can they survive in a bell jar for so long, as etomlins @3 points out?
@ 2 Toryx
Maybe scientists of the future aren’t trained to find answers, but just to ask the right questions.
@ 4 CaitieCat
I should note that “No Kill I” is a stock phrase in my apartment, for everything from drinking the last of the milk to leaving dishes in the sink.
@ 5 S. Hutson Blount
I was thinking that, too, but couldn’t find any evidence of a prior instance.
@ 6 dep1701
This got me looking up raspberry, which apparently is also known as a “Bronx cheer.” Well, that was more interesting than this episode, so yay!
@ 7 bobsandiego
The problem with the ship in danger being constantly used is that there’s no tension. At least on away missions, there’s an implication that something could go wrong and that you couldn’t get back to your base.
@ 8 Lemnoc
Hence our first instance of the term “Spock-blocking”!
You have an interesting point about how we envisioned aliens. Pure energy became malevolent crystals (this was seriously an 80s thing) and has now, in contemporary media, become clones/robots. Perhaps it’s because I’m mostly a product of the 90s, but I gravitate toward the clones/robots model a lot more easily. Once the line between “us” and “them” blurs, you can tell much more interesting stories about how we define ourselves and what makes us unique, if anything. With crystals and energy, any story ultimately becomes a disposal problem. Why does it take as long as it does for Picard to beam the crystals back to their homes anyway? Take out the trash, Captain!
@ 9 Ludon
I didn’t get that, either. These people are scientists. Science is about predictability. If something is happening that is outside the scope of normal parameters, why aren’t you looking into it?? If the sand is actually making shapes, isn’t that, you know, weird?
The Borg offered such storytelling opportunities. It’s a shame it takes so long to get to them.
@ 10 etomlins
I would have liked it more if the crystals hadn’t hijacked the computer systems to speak in English. If there had been an ongoing question of sentience and intelligence, and confusion over whether there was indeed communication happening, that could have been interesting. It also could have been more boring, so I don’t know there was any way to save this episode.
@11 torie – Oh I wasn’t saying the ‘ship in peril’ is a good cructh it isn’t. Instead of doing real dram we have tachnobabble and false danger. We know the ship isn’t going to get crunched — this isn;t Blake’s 7 after all — and beacuse the solution is always some slight fo hand the audience doesn’t know about — not something organically from character like the Corbonite ploy — it’s limp and tasteless storytelling,
So sorry to be sounding off on this one so late. I’ve been sort of busy lately, and it was tough to muster up the enthusiasm to comment on this one.
I think everyone has already covered the several issues with this episode. I also got the “Devil in the Dark” vibe, but I was more bothered that they didn’t even reference the other silicon lifeforms they’ve encountered, such as the Horta and that giant crystalline entity from a few episodes back. Perhaps they had already decided that acknowledging TOS wasn’t doing them any favors and pulled back on that, while continuing to freely rip off their stories.
I could have sworn the “bags of mostly water” line came later in the series, but it makes sense that it was the only memorable aspect of this episode. At least it had that much. Overall, I was intrigued by the setup and like the idea of them discovering a new, radically different life form, but the implementation was crippled by hefty exposition and ridiculous plot developments. But at first, this episode reminded me a lot of those classic Doctor Who episodes, and I could imagine Tom Baker blundering onto the terraforming station and forcing his help on them. Heck, for all I know, there was an episode just like this.
This one had some big, if not entirely fresh, ideas, but it failed to capture my interest. I’m not blaming sleep deprivation entirely for the fact that I kept dozing off while re-watching this, and I had no inclination to go back to see what I had missed. (Not much, it turns out.)
Warp 2.