TNG Flashback: Home Soil

Following hot on the heels of the most boring episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season (to that point), "Home Soil" tried its utmost to steal that title.

Curious to see firsthand the process of terraforming, the Enterprise looks in on a group of four scientists working to remake a lifeless planet. The evasive leader of the group tries to steer the ship away, but Troi senses his duplicity and Picard decides to investigate. When an accident kills one of the terraformers and almost kills Data, the crew discovers an inorganic life form living on the planet, which now threatens to destroy the ship as retribution for the war they say was started by the "ugly bags of mostly water" (humans).

This episode suffers from a multitude of problems. Perhaps the foremost is its utter predictability. There's no doubt as to what the crew will eventually discover on this "lifeless" world, and it's almost painful at times to watch them slowly catch up to the audience's intuition. Indeed, our heroes seem to go at least two or three times through a cycle of "could it be life? / there's no way it's life / but might it be life? / it couldn't possibly be life / unless it is life." It's almost like every act-out for a commercial break brings amnesia over all the characters.

The writing is so bad in places that it calls attention to the Herculean lifting the actors are trying to do to make it plausible. Brent Spiner has an oddly... halting... dialogue delivery in a scene where he investigates a malfunctioning laser; it almost suggests he was directed to vamp for time. LeVar Burton is saddled with an awful monologue describing the amazing beauty he sees... while looking at a tiny dot of blinking white light. But at least the main cast manages to do a little better than the horrible guest stars. The acting by the terraformers isn't uniformly bad, it's bad in a variety of ways: one is too haughty, one is too monotone, one is too hollow. (And one barely gets any screen time before getting killed.)

The investigative aspect of the plot seems like it might have some legs, but its high point is a long scene in the medlab where the characters end up basically asking the computer to do all the intuitive work of the scientific method for them. The lazy writing makes the characters look equally lazy.

It all winds up with a trite resolution. The ship never seriously seems threatened before the crew figures out that turning off the lights is all it takes to neutralize the inorganic life form. And the final moment of the episode is not a wrap-up scene, but a hasty log entry voiced by Picard over a shot of the Enterprise flying away.

Other observations:

• The terraformers' leader, Mandl, insists that while he saw the signs of non-random patterns on the planet, he never interpreted it as life. If that's true, it's hard to explain why he tries so hard to get rid of the Enterprise at the start of the episode. What does he have to fear from people looking at a couple of swirls on the surface of the planet's sand if he truly thinks they're nothing?

• Troi and Yar are tasked with investigating the backgrounds of the terraformers, to speculate on who might be a murder, as well as who have known what, and when. But when it comes to looking into the one female on the team, Troi tells Riker he may have better luck with her than she would. Basically, she seems to be telling Riker to go romance her. Wow.

• The universal translator is used to communicate with and give voice to the inorganic life form. But the computer's voice is so processed and the language so broken that you actually can't understand a fair amount of the dialogue.

This episode is only better than "Too Short a Season" in that the main characters do actually have a role in the plot. Maybe the phrase "ugly bags of mostly water" is good for a laugh too. But we're still talking about the dregs of the series here. I give "Home Soil" a D-.