“Ugly bags of mostly water!”
This episode is so freaking bad I often forget it exists; it is not the worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s in the bottom five, and any gymnastics it does to keep itself off the bottom of the barrel are solely due to its heritage as a shameless clone of quite a good original series Star Trek episode, “The Devil in the Dark,” the one where Spock mind-melds with the big glowing rock pile. In spite of its visual silliness, the original episode worked, and so “Home Soil” bears a bit of its moralistic virtue as a very pale carbon copy; also, there’s the thing with Data and the lasers. Otherwise, though, holy fuck.
As one of the first episodes of Next Gen I ever watched, “Home Soil” has a kind of primal urgency to it that raises my nostalgia cockles when revisiting; I still think Malinson’s offscreen death in the first act – as nothing but a series of shrieks and slams, behind a locked door – is one of the more sickly thrilling moments in the first season of the show. But everyone, and I mean everyone, on the terraforming station acts like such a plot-forced dweeb throughout the proceedings that it’s difficult to look at the “mystery” plot as anything other than a foolish contrivance.
I was quite into James Bond when “Home Soil” aired (well, still am), so the presence of Walter Gotell – General Gogol from the Roger Moore era – as terraforming kingpin Mandl delighted me. He’s awful in the episode, of course (though his pained “I create life! I don’t take it!” still makes me grin), but he’s no worse than any of the other terraformers. Elizabeth Lindsay as loopy-doopy scientist Louisa Kim consistently gives the best demonstration of “hand acting” you could ever hope for from a performer. Seriously: watch her introduction to the terraforming process, and watch those arms flail about like a first-year business exec trying to describe a powerpoint. Someone needs to put handcuffs on that woman. Riker’s automatic efforts at flirting with her, even when she’s tucked away in her quarters in a bathrobe sobbing her eyes out, are hysterical.
I would have to assume that this episode was my first introduction to the concept of terraforming, which is a science ficton workhorse of which I have become quite fond. I had not seen Star Trek II at this point – though one wonders, in the Star Trek universe, at which exact point the Federation abandoned any further development of Genesis devices, and returned to step-by-step, year-by-year, decade-by-decade terraforming projects? Regardless, terraforming remains a concept that fires my imagination (given that it may yet become the salvation of the human race, and all). Were it not for the time scale involved, a terraforming project would make a canny setup for a Star Trek series.
What stands out for me in “Home Soil” is the degree of stability at which the key Enterprise performers have arrived. The material’s shite, but Spiner and Burton, for example, as Data and Geordi, are fully in their “zone” as a pair of leads. There isn’t any of the usual riffing comedy between the two in this case, either; I’m referring only to the strength of the core characterizations, and the easy chemistry between the two actors which develops into the series’ defining friendship. As run-and-jump action heroes, Geordi and Data state their cases credibly in “Home Soil;” they are scientists with military training and a problem to solve, and it comes off wonderfully, especially when they discover the root of the mystery, and speculate upon its sentient life. Too bad it turns out they’re fighting sand.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek – now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.