“Isn’t that a little like curing the disease by killing the patient?”
You want a good example of how to do a bottle show well? “Where Silence Has Lease” is one of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s best, and for bottle shows, among the most elemental. The majority of the action not only takes place on the Enterprise, but on the Main Bridge itself (a few scenes in Picard’s quarters follow, along with ancillary sequences in Engineering and elsewhere), and the scripted intrigue – a puzzle in space, which ensnares the Enterprise – is interesting enough on its own terms to drive the drama. It’s a sharply-written script, with some of the season’s best lines, and the episode provides further development for Dr. Pulaski, whose skills as a scientist are brought to bear supporting the crew’s efforts to figure out the rift.
The episode even cleverly manages to acquire a bit of cheap scale by using the Enterprise’s sister ship, the Yamato, as an alternate location for an away mission – a ship which is, of course, identical to the Enterprise and thereby allows re-use of the Bridge with an alternate lighting design. “Where Silence Has Lease” is the first Star Trek episode directed by Winrich Kolbe, a prime figure in the Trek directing pool who would go on to helm the final episode of Next Gen, the pilot episode of Voyager, and numerous other key episodes of those series and Deep Space Nine.
I’m a fan of the design of Nagilum, the entity who traps the Enterprise in some sort of celestial rat’s maze. Played by Terminator’s Earl S. Boen in some sort of bizarre amalgamation of makeup and optical distortion, Nagilum is a memorable one-off for the series. Also memorable is the sequence in Picard’s quarters where the captain tries to explain to Data and Troi (actually, it turns out to be Nagilum) his notions of the meaning of death. On the subject of death, the episode is not shy: Nagilum’s swift dispatch of the episode’s redshirt – who dies clutching his skull, howling with pain, before balling up on the deck of the Bridge like a murdered spider – is startling.
“Where Silence Has Lease” also introduces one of The Next Generation’s key runners: Worf’s calisthenics program, which tickled my fancy immensely as a schoolboy. The idea of getting up in the morning and taking a jaunt in the Holodeck against various computer-generated monsters using various computer-generated hand weapons is great stuff. The fact that Worf always seems to end up fighting Skeletor in these simulations only makes it more enjoyable. But on a more tactical level, the calisthenics runner can also be seen as the series’ first attempt to truly develop Worf, now that he is properly a Bridge officer, and having demonstrated the potential scope of his alien-to-human behaviour in the first season’s “Heart of Glory.” Picard opens the episode by worrying about Riker, who has gone into the Holodeck with Worf – and may therefore be exposed to aspects of the Klingon psyche that are best left unexamined. Picard’s concern is justified: having dispatched Skeletor, and lost in the animal-like thrill of the hunt, Worf nearly kills Riker too!
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season 2 is available now.