Jammer's Review
Star Trek: The Next Generation
"Force of Nature"
Air date: 11/15/1993
Written by Naren Shankar
Directed by Robert Lederman
Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan
The Enterprise ventures into a corridor of space in search of a missing Starfleet vessel but instead finds a disabled Ferengi ship, then later a debris field that's actually a trap used to disable the Enterprise. It was set by the inhabitants of a nearby planet used to raise awareness; two of their scientists, Rabal (Michael Corbett) and Serova (Margaret Reed), claim the cumulative use of warp drive in this narrow corridor is causing irreversible damage to their space and planet. Also, there's a lot of dialogue about Data's cat.
Structurally, "Force of Nature" is about as inelegant as it gets. For the first half of the episode we essentially have a B-story where Data and Geordi crawl around Jeffries tubes and talk about Spot the Goddamn Cat. This material is so clearly padded (and then abandoned) that I'm pretty convinced the writers realized they didn't have enough story to fill the hour and so they tried to turn what should've been the teaser (and absolutely nothing more) into 10 minutes of irrelevant subplot. Then we get the disabled Ferengi ship, which is ham-handed to say the least (the Ferengi captain is a hostile idiot who makes threats and wild accusations despite any evidence and his inferior position that's completely at Picard's mercy) — and again, is dropped so soon after it's introduced that it feels like filler.
Finally we get the meat of the story with the alien scientists, who are desperate to prove theories that have been skeptically received for years, which is that warp drive is damaging their space. When it doesn't look like Serova is getting the immediate response she wants from the Federation, she pilots her ship into the rift and breaches the warp core, killing herself in a radical demonstration that opens a spatial rift that (sort of) proves she was correct. Serova does this despite the fact that Picard was fully prepared to take her recommendation to Starfleet, whom we have no reason to believe won't take it seriously. Serova is, in short, the story's dramatic catalyst, but not a particularly believable one. There are some okay scenes in the wake of this, including Geordi navel-gazing and his conversations with the reasonable Rabal, brother of the late, radical Serova.
The last act, in which the Enterprise must enter and escape the rift to rescue the survivors of the missing ship, drowns in a morass of who-cares technobabble. It makes you realize just how bored this kind of rote recitation of jargon must make the actors. It's action of the most thankless kind, where the camera shakes while people urgently yell out jargony jargon words, and it's supposed to be exciting, but it really is not. Better, but not good, is the heavy-handed final scene in the conference room, where we get the fallout from the revelation that warp drive might actually be causing damage to some areas of space. (The story is sketchy on the details, so as to not lock Star Trek into a situation where one can't trek the stars.)
This is a Trekkian Message Show with themes delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The real-world corollaries might register as topically relevant if they weren't so laughably obvious in their delivery. To summarize: warp travel is equivalent to carbon emissions, which is causing damage to space, with the long-term devastating environmental effects being equivalent to global warming. I will say that this is not one of Trek's more enlightening or effective allegories. (The Federation's immediate short-term precautionary solution is to institute a speed limit of warp 5, which comes across as more silly than anything.) The one irony I will note, writing this 19 years after "Force of Nature" aired, is the sad state of where the issue of global warming has since ventured in America — with accepted science being pathetically reframed as debate by absurd and shortsighted economic/political denial.
Come to think of it, the fact that the Federation enacts a speed limit immediately after the events of this episode says something when you consider what we haven't done to address carbon emissions and other ecological problems in the 19 years since this episode aired. Perhaps this episode is the ultimate allegory of indictment, meant to be analyzed decades after it was made! Now there's a concept!
Okay, or not.
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15 comments on this review
I like Spot, and think discussions of him/her are some of the funniest bits on TNG. If this had appeared in a better episode, I don't think you'd have minded.
The Spot business was indeed filler, written to replace what would have been a much more interesting sub-plot in which Geordi's sister comes aboard to try to help him through the loss of their mother. The story would have revealed Geordi as a bit of a control freak, refusing to accept that his precious technology could ever be the cause of environmental damage and concentrating on that issue precisely to avoid dealing with the lack of control implied by his mother's unexplained disappearance, and his sister would have helped him to face his issues. That story was dropped because it was yet another never-seen-before family member coming aboard in a season full of such stories, which is an understandable concern. But what they replaced it with was so much crap that I'd much rather have had another family story than How to Train a Cat Using Tuna in Your Bra.
And after all that, the warp speed limit was Never Heard From Again except for one off-hand reference in which it was specifically suspended for political reasons.
Okay, you're forgiven. I will inform the irascible mustelidae community.
And as far as that series goes, I suspect the Defiant rarely settled for Warp 5.
The first half is (as you said) all over the map. The tension-filled part of the episode is boring season 7 material -- lots of technobabble and boring music.
But the worst part is how significant the conclusion should be to everything later in Star Trek -- but it isn't. There's some talk of the Warp 5 speed limit for the rest of season 7 (in "Pegasus" and "All Good Things ..."). But after TNG goes off the air, there's no mention of the speed limit or the danger to space.
There is some sort of reference to how Voyager's engines were designed in a way to prevent this problem (maybe in one of the encyclopedias?). But nothing on air is mentioned, and none of the DS9 vessels appear different.
Season 7 is just such a waste. Other than the finale, "Parallels," "Pegasus", "Lower Decks" and "Preemptive Strike", we're lucky to get mediocrity.
1) Cut out the filler crap at the beginning.
2) Make the female scientist less whiny and the Ferengi less stupid.
3) With the time leftover from the beginning, go forward a few weeks where the Federation has more of a plan to combat the problem. A scene with Geordi and Picard talking about "promising results" with new technology designed to avoid the problem would have been huge.
But everyone is wrong, it is not direction, or message, or acting, or plot, or music, or writing.
See, like all entertainment, what makes people come watch it, is that they want to LIVE in this universe. they want to BE the heroes. No one wants to live in universe with a "warp speed limit" and the fucking horrible starfleet beurocracy that was surely created. that is similar to why the last Indiana Jones failed. the 1st three were fun because you want to BE Indiana jones, but no one wants to be the 68 year old professor. That is the secret to entertainment.
Star trek was at its best from the TOS to mid season 4 TNG. Starfleet and the enterprise stopped being the guys you wanted to be. Look at all the episodes with Ro laren, or Wesley, from the 5th season onwards. No one wants to be that starfleet. The boring beurocratic one. TOS was about not judging people by their gender or skin color. Now star trek is about NOT warping somewhere cool.
F-that.
(I admit, I essentially quoted Phil Farrand here. But come to think about it, he does have a point.)
On the other hand, the discussion about warp speed limits and Voyager's special nacelles would seem to suggest otherwise. I just always felt like people blew this issue way out of proportion because it seemed (at least to me) to be fairly minor. To use the pollution analogy, this would be more like a problem with smog or heavy metals in a river, local concerns, not something with global implications like carbon dioxide or CFCs.
It has raised though. From this chart I found on the National climatic data centre, it looks to be about .2-.4 degrees (since the episode aired), I dunno, seems "significant" to me, considering its a global mean.
From what I've read/heard from scientists on GW, is that global average increase that they're predicting is actually slow - deceptively slow, because a global average increase of 1.2 degrees in 20 years actually carries a lot more punch than laymen tend to think, in the form of rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events. Don't forget there's also feedback mechanisms, rising population levels, and a segment of Earth's population that is only now becoming heavily motorized/industrial.
Its baffling that anyone is skeptical of this, or that people think that there's a debate raging in scientific fields. There isn't. Go to skepticalscience.com if you want to see a list of all the scientific institutions that support the consensus. Or to desmogblog.org, to see all the great exposition done on the disinformation spread on GW (Probably why so many people think that there's no consensus - therefore its not that baffling, but anyway...). Desmogblog did a tally of how many peer-reviewed research papers denied GW vs how many did. Something like 3 to 2000. Unless most of the world's climate scientists are participating in the world's biggest, most elaborate conspiracy (to what end, I'm not sure), we have a real problem on our hands.
In her take on the subject, Picard had a difficult decision to make, and took responsibility for it. He could allow an alien civilization to die, if the Federation continued to use warp technology as before, or he could cripple the Federation to save them. He chose the Federation. There was real drama, and real tragedy, all of it rooted in people we care about, and true to their established character and motivation.
Having that spec script as a basis for comparison, this episode seemed even worse than it was. In the aftermath, it was no surprise that its speed limit was more thoroughly disregarded and unenforced than the 55 mph limit of today.
Not much would've saved this snoozer, but one easy fix is to replace the nobody scientists with someone we care about, especially in the spirit of 7th season bookends. Leah Brahms is an obvious choice. Another option is Mirasta Yale. In "First Contact," she represented technological progress. Now she's thrust into the 24th century (she left her planet, remember) and she discovers the future's not so clean. The same theme would've been served by an encore appearance by, say, Berlinghoff Rasmussen. Or both. Or all three!
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