1.18 — “Home Soil”
Plot: The Enterprise investigates a terraforming operation on Velara Three. While the away team tours the facility, an engineer is murdered. The crew must solve the mystery, and in the process makes first contact with an unfamiliar, inorganic life form.
Thoughts: It’s interesting to see the crew’s wonder at the miracles of gradual terraforming, 79 years after the first test of the Genesis Project. Terraforming–how revolutionary and heroic! Sure, it’s desalinate the water and slowly introduce microorganisms for now, but it’ll be billboards and outlet malls before you know it. Pave paradise and put up a parking lot. Progress!
Has it been said before that Data is third in command of the Enterprise? Riker does give him the bridge at one point, but the scene cuts away before we get to see Data command the ship.
The organism claims to be so advanced, but evidently not in its manners. “Ugly bag of mostly water,” indeed! The Internet claims that we’re only about 60% water, not 90%. http://water.usgs.gov/edu/propertyyou.html. So nyah, nyah, rude inorganic life form!
There’s nothing wrong with this episode, per se. It’s too bad that the dialogue fails to be naturalistic (just a bunch of choppy exposition split up seemingly randomly among the actors, with little sense of character), the direction is lame (strange blocking, overuse of closeups), and the story is predictable and flat. You can stop an all-powerful organism, that can easily commandeer the whole ship, by turning out the lights in its room–really? Did it evolve on a planet with no day/night cycle?
I appreciate that the episode has an authentic science fiction premise, larded with trademark Star Trek optimism about learning to get along and find mutually beneficial solutions. It just isn’t very exciting. It’s mostly memorable for the highly quotable “ugly bag of mostly water” line. I give it a grudging Grade: Pass.
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