“Night Terrors”
Written by Shari Goodhartz and Pamela Douglas and Jeri Taylor
Directed by Les Landau
Season 4, Episode 17
Production episode 40274-191
Original air date: March 18, 1991
Stardate: 44631.2
Captain’s Log: The U.S.S. Brittain has been missing for about a month. The Enterprise finds it adrift in a binary star system. Life sign readings are inconclusive, likewise Troi’s empathic senses—there’s life, but she’s not sure what it is.
Riker beams over with Data, Worf, Crusher, and Troi. They find the bridge crew all dead at their posts—it looks like they were murdered—and a Betazoid hiding in a corridor just off the bridge, catatonic. He’s Andrus Hagan, a scientific advisor, and he’s the only survivor. Some were found barricaded in their quarters stockpiling weapons, others were obviously killed in combat in the corridors.
Crusher takes the bodies back to the Enterprise, where her autopsies reveal that they were all perfectly healthy, but they all killed each other. Captain Zaheva’s last log entry indicates paranoia, possibly schizophrenia and/or sleep deprivation. She speaks of having had her first officer killed after he sabotaged the engines.
La Forge and Data can get the Brittain‘s engines running again, but it doesn’t work. After four days with no answers, Picard orders La Forge to get the Brittain ready for towing. The ensign who accompanies La Forge hears voices on the ship, but La Forge doesn’t hear anything.
Troi has a nightmare that sees her floating unconvincingly in a weird cloudy field with a voice saying incomprehensible things. O’Brien has a fight with Keiko, then goes to Ten-Forward where Gillespie tells him about weird things happening on the ship, like people seeing ghosts. Picard hears the door chime ring half a dozen times with nobody there, to the point where when it does ring for real, he ignores it, forcing Troi and Crusher to knock on the door. They report that there are odd behaviors all over the ship.
Another six days pass with the Enterprise immobile. Data eventually determines that they are trapped in a Tyken’s Rift, a phenomenon that drains energy. Tyken got out of it by using a massive explosion, but nothing on the Enterprise can create an explosion that big, especially with power levels reduced. What’s worse, Tyken reported nothing like what happened on the Brittain or is happening now on the Enterprise.
Picard and Riker confess to each other that they’ve both been snappish and irritable, and had odd senses of paranoia. Picard orders Riker to take a nap, try to get some rest in the hopes of one or both of them managing to maintain control. Riker returns to his cabin and imagines snakes in his bed.
After hallucinating the turbolift crushing him, Picard confides in Data—the only one who seems unaffected—that he will be relying on the android a lot. (He also reminisces about his grandfather deteriorating from what sounds like dementia.)
Crusher, after imagining the bodies of the Brittain crew are all sitting upright, realizes that nobody on the ship has been having dreams—except for Troi, who’s been having nightmares. Examination of the brain tissue of some of the Brittain crew as well as that of a random sampling of Enterprise crew, reveals a chemical imbalance that is blocking everyone’s REM sleep. They’re not dreaming, and it’s causing all the symptoms they’re experiencing.
They try channeling power through the deflector dish, but the rift just absorbs the energy. Worf suddenly leaves the bridge. Troi follows to just barely stop him from killing himself.
Data takes over as acting captain, as Picard and Riker are no longer able to function. Troi has been continuing to sit with Hagan, and she realizes that his seemingly random babbling is very similar to the images and words she’s heard in her nightmares.
Troi theorizes that there is another ship trapped in the rift, and that they’re communicating telepathically—first with Hagan, now with Troi. But their telepathy is interfering with the REM sleep of other humanoids. Troi wants to use directed dreaming, a therapeutic technique she’s used on people with nightmares, to send a message back during her dreams.
Data hopes to combine efforts with the other ship in the hopes that they can collaborate on creating an explosion that they can’t create individually. He is going through an inventory of elements on the Enterprise, but Troi says this is too complex. However one of the images is of a hydrogen atom—an electron orbiting a proton—and Troi realizes that one of the nonsense phrases from her dream, “one moon circling,” might be their way of describing a hydrogen atom. If they’re thinking the same thing, they may be trying to communicate what it is they need. The Enterprise can easily send out a stream of hydrogen.
That seems to do the trick, as the other ship is able to use the hydrogen to create the necessary explosion, freeing all three ships. (Well, two ships, since we don’t see the Brittain for some reason.) Data then sets course for a starbase and orders everyone to bed, with no mention made of the Brittain, nor of trying to communicate further with these aliens who are, among other things, responsible for the deaths of 34 people on the Brittain.
Can’t we Just Reverse the Polarity?: Keiko lets loose with an impressive stream of botanical technobabble when she’s describing her day to O’Brien.
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: Troi is the only person on the ship who dreams, finding herself constantly in the world’s most unconvincing special effect, floating in a cloudy area while having aliens say cryptic things to her. But she does figure it out eventually, thus saving everyone’s bacon (with help from Data).
If I Only Had a Brain : Data’s presence is the only thing that keeps the ship going, as he does not sleep or dream. (At least not yet…)
There is No Honor in Being Pummeled: Worf has an elaborate altar set up to help him kill himself. One gets the feeling that he got it ready as things were growing worse, and finally decided to take his own life when the deflector-dish trick didn’t work. He believes he is no longer a warrior, that he’s not strong enough to face what they’re fighting.
In the Driver’s Seat: Ensign Rager returns until she forgets how to input coordinates, at which point she’s replaced by Ensign Lin.
Syntheholics Anonymous: When Gillespie starts rabble rousing in Ten-Forward, Guinan tries to calm him to no avail. Eventually, he starts a bar brawl, which Guinan cuts short by firing a really big gun into the ceiling. “That was setting number one. Anyone wanna see setting number two?”
No Sex, Please, We’re Starfleet: In an interesting foreshadowing of things to come, Troi offers her hand to Worf when she walks him out of his quarters following his abortive suicide attempt.
I Believe I Said That: “Sir, as my final duty as acting captain, I order you to bed.”
Data, sending Picard to bed without his supper.
Welcome Aboard: John Vickery plays the first of three roles on Trek, and the only one where he doesn’t have a prosthetic forehead. He’ll be back in the recurring role of Rusot in the end-of-the-Dominion-War story arc on Deep Space Nine, and play a Klingon lawyer in Enterprise‘s “Judgment.” He has one of the best voices ever, though this episode doesn’t make nearly enough use of it.
Duke Moosekian is only worth mentioning for his name. He was born Shaun Duke Moosekian, and most of the time he’s credited as Shaun Duke, which is a much more boring name. He played Gillespie, who was mainly there to show how the rest of the crew was reacting.
Trivial Matters: Apparently Marina Sirtis has a fear of heights, so the terror on her face when she was floating in a harness in the dream sequences was genuine.
The trick of channeling power through the deflector dish is the same one they tried against the Borg in “The Best of Both Worlds.” It didn’t work this time, either.
REM sleep is usually pronounced as a word, not an abbreviation, but aside from one line from Troi, everyone said “are-ee-em sleep,” making it sound like everyone was going to bed while listening to the band for which Michael Stipe is the lead singer.
Make it So: “Eyes in the dark—one moon circles.” This is a relentlessly mediocre episode. Points for getting the science right—lack of REM sleep would have these very effects—though it also requires two time jumps to make it convincing. The Enterprise spends ten days in the rift before they even figure out what it is, which strains credulity given what we’ve seen Starfleet sensors accomplish before. But it takes that long for the cumulative effect of lack of REM sleep to be noticeable, so it needed to be that long for the plot to work.
For an episode with “terrors” in the title, it’s nowhere near as suspenseful as it should be. The promise of the teaser—the crew of the Brittain all killed violently—is never really followed up on. Aside from the abortive bar brawl, and O’Brien’s rather cruel treatment of Keiko, the only effects we see are the bridge crew all acting hazy. There’s very little sign of the violence that hit the Brittain, which drains the suspense from the episode. There’s not enough of a sense of urgency. The episode has similarities to “The Tholian Web” from the original series, but that episode had much more of a sense of danger, not just from the crew going crazy (seen via Chekov’s breakdown), but from the Tholians.
And then in the end, the Enterprise just flies off, apparently leaving the Brittain behind, with no attempt made to communicate with the aliens. If nothing else, they should perhaps have been told that their attempts at communication resulted in the death of 34 people. For that matter, what happened to poor Hagan after they left the rift? Did he recover?
Plus, Troi floating in space is quite possibly the lamest special effect in TNG‘s entire run.
Jonathan Frakes once described this episode as a “yawner,” and that’s as good a word as any. Unfortunate that an episode about sleep disorder mostly just puts the viewer to sleep.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido reminds everyone that it’s the nominating period for the Parsec Awards. You should totally go to their web site and nominate the podcasts he’s involved with: The Chronic Rift, The Dome, HG World, and, of course, Dead Kitchen Radio: The Keith R.A. DeCandido Podcast.
The only thing I had remembered from this episode was the communication between ships using the hydrogen pictogram, which I always thought was pretty cool.
3? You are a kind and generous soul, Keith.
I think this is my least favorite episode of the fourth season. This moves along way too slowly to keep my interest. Maybe we, as the viewer, was supposed to be experiencing what the crew was? No thanks. I’d rather watch the show, not live it.
The one good part was Guinan bringing out the ray gun.
I thought the spelling of the ship’s name (“Brittain”) was unlikely unless it was named after a person, so I did some research. The Wikipedia page for the episode says the ship’s name is “Brattain,” with the footnote reading:
^ The name on the studio model was incorrectly spelled “Brittain” on the ship’s hull. (The Star Trek Encyclopedia).
All that antimatter on bard, and we need to use hydrogen to make a big explosion?
And it does, every single time I watch it. I literally cannot make it through this episode without going to sleep. When I think of one episode that I loathe in the series, this is the only episode I can come up with. Troi flying through the green mist is burned into my brain. I would have given it a 0.
I think the 3 is fair. 1 point for having a beginning and an ending, 1 point for Guinan’s gun, and 1 for….I got to see Discovery circle us for about 30 min today. 3 points from me, 2 points from everybody else.
Is it just me, though, or does it seem like a lot of plots hinge on the fact that Data is an android and thus not subject to the frailty of humans (and other biological species)?
Not TNG’s finest hour, certainly, but I would bump it up a point or two for, like “Darmok,” having aliens that communicate in a way that’s sort of, ya know, alien (that is, besides Betazoid voice-overs and Vulcan head rubs).
Additional Trivial Matters:
John Vickery also played Scar in the original Broadway cast of “The Lion King.”
The crew would suffer mass sleep disorder again in season 6’s “Schisms.”
Marina Sirtis didn’t find the Troi-Worf romance very plausible, positing in an interview that the writers “had watched “Beauty and the Beast once too many times.”
Rancho@6: This was such a useful plot device that they used it again and again, with Odo and the Holodock taking the ‘sufficiently inhuman to be unaffected’ position. (With occasional support from Phlox and the Vulcans)
Vickery also showed up on Babylon 5, again in forehead makeup, as the Minbari warrior, Neroon.
I can’t recall ever finding the Troi character credible. Sirtis’ trademarked expression of pained constipation just didn’t convey that she was empathic or even useful. Tam Elbrun and even Lwaxanna, as annoying as she was, were far more credible as empaths with a touch of alien-ness. The only moment in the series that redeems Troi’s existence is when Capt. Jelico orders her to stuff herself into a standard uniform.
StrongDreams: I wouldn’t go that far. She had her moments, most notably in “Skin of Evil” and “The Bonding.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad,
OK, I guess she has a few moments as a credible character. Mainly I don’t find her credible as an empath or as someone with an alien upbringing. And the pained look she always uses just turns me off.
Yes, a mediocre episode, but what really bugs me is the climax. Hydrogen is the most common non-dark-matter substance in the universe, by a huge margin. I can’t believe a) that it would’ve taken Data and Troi so long to realize they had it aboard (you’d think it would’ve been the first entry in the inventory, since it is element #1) and b) that the aliens didn’t have any of their own. It’s even stupider than the “out of deuterium” plot device in Voyager: “Demon.”
Agree with everything mentioned (pretty crap ep, Guinan’s gun is a bright spot, etc.). I think the biggest travesty was the total wastage of a great ghost-shippy-esque setup. Which, now that I think of it, is a big bugaboo I had with “The Naked Now.” Let’s take something chilling and freaky and eeriely lonesome (a drifting ship of dead bodies) and turn it into an extremely boring and not-scary episode (or in the case of “The Naked Now,” an extremely stupid and not-scary episode).
I don’t think they ever learned how to write for Troi. Not saying Sirtis is Laurence Olivier, but I think the potential for her character was consistently squandered.
“Are-ee-em” — HA! I noticed that too! Night swimming…
Oh come on, Christopher, what about the entire concept of the Kazons having a water shortage? That’s much dumber. (Oort clouds! Comets!)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@15: Agreed, the idea of a spacefaring race having a water shortage is almost as silly as the explanation for Ocampa being devoid of rain, i.e. the claim that it lacked “nucleogenic particles” in its atmosphere. First off, “nucleogenic” would refer to an isotope resulting from a nuclear reaction; I think they were misusing the term to refer to condensation nuclei, the atmospheric particles around which clouds and raindrops form. Second, those nuclei tend to be made of dust, clay, soot, salt, etc., so there’s no way a dry desert planet’s atmosphere is going to be devoid of such particles for long — even if some magical process eliminated them all, wind erosion would replenish the supply pretty dang quickly.
But being out of hydrogen is still even dumber than being out of water.
@16,
Maybe they didn’t know what color it should be.
This is a STNG episode I have only seen twice. The second time I watched I looked at John Vickery and went Hey That’s Neroon but he still doesn’t do much here. So I guess Guinan’s gun is still the best part, and even though Troi gets to do something; this is really boring episode 3 works.
MikeS: With my usual caveat that the warp factor ratings are the least important part, gobby gobby gobby, I gave it a 3 because the episode ultimately was inoffensive — it wasn’t actively awful, just dull — and they got extra points for getting the science right, an increasingly problematic thing for Trek as it went on (culminating in the “science? wuzzat?” of the Abrams film).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
So no-one is going to mention the dodgy arse shot from the dream sequences (i.e. the first photo)? My wife walked in during that scene – her comment was “that’s an unfortunate angle…”
I think I might have given it better than a 3 – I definitely liked this episode better than I have liked others. I enjoyed the setup and the mystery and trying to guess what the cryptic dream phrase meat, but I did think there were quite a few plot holes and loose ends, as others have mentioned (the Brittain, dealing with the alien species, etc) – I was actually a bit skeptical that they would use the phrase ‘one moon circling’ to describe Hydrogen, and I also think it’s a bit of a leap that their message meant they needede hydrogen so they could detonate it. Don’t they have a word for atom or ‘Hydrogen’ for that matter? I think that kind of falls under my general disbelief regarding the Universal Translator conventions. Either everybody can communicate perfectly, or they have to resort to cryptic stuff like this, as the plot demands.
Oh, and for some reason, the creepy voice in the dream kept reminding me of Lord of the Rings when you put on the Ring and hear Sauron’s voice, haha.
And, @phonos – I actually immediately thought of this post:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/04/hey-everyone-stop-taking-this-picture-no-i-mean-it
Except that I don’t THINK they were purposefully trying to be tittilating, but then again, I could be overly optimistic.
Lisamarie: I had no problem with their term for hydrogen translating into “one moon circling.” Not every language has the same ways of describing things as English, after all. Indeed, that was more realistic than it would’ve been to be just a straight-up translation.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Several problems with this episode as mentioned above but my main problem with it is the Dr. Jack from Lost scenario (if its not a trope it should be). This is where a “leader” is ALWAYS wrong with any decision but when the episode requires their decision making to be perfect it is pitch-perfect. LOL! 3 is about right.
@12 StrongDreams: I thought you’d enjoy this tidbit: Entertainment Weekly ran a just-for-fun comparison between TNG and Love Boat, and found that both Julie, the cruise director in LB and Troi in TNG were “sexy, but annoying.”
I heard Marina Sirtis speak at a convention in 1992, and I think she knew that there were problems with her character. She enjoyed episodes like “Power Play” that let her be “mean for a week,” and those like “The Child” and “The Loss” that featured Troi more prominently. She said that during a scene in one episode, where she concedes to another character that “you might have just as easily been right,” she was actually thinking ” Nyah, nyah, nyah!” Gates McFadden, too, often complained about the number of times that Crusher could have been stronger than she was portrayed in scripts. That is one of the issues both actors took to Jeri Taylor when she took a leadership role in the series.
I know lots of people find her irritating, but I always really liked Lwaxana episodes because she made everyone uncomfortable and it forced the characters to behave in ways that were a little different from their usual tropes. Particularly added a little complexity to Troi, who was always mortified and on edge when she was around; a nice change from the perma-serenity.
Apparently I’m the only person in the universe who was bothered by the idea that “an electron is like a moon” is an archaic artifact of our earliest attempts at understanding atomic structures and not even remotely likely to be a universal conception of atomic structure.
@Skwid, I completely agree. Even 15 years they taught us the evolution of the representation of atoms and electrons (starting with plum pudding, etc.) so I thought this was mightily strange. However, if the aliens needed hydrogen, the most abundant non-dark matter available as others pointed out, then maybe this conception fits them. It certainly doesn’t work with 24th century federation science though (come on Data!) lol
@Lisamarie: These pictures are awesome! I’m so glad you linked to them!
@20 Yes I will mention it. My roommate and I used to watch this episode and comment that because of the harness, Troi has one of the biggest space-wedgies in the history of science fiction (television & movies).
I should mention that I would give this episode a slightly higher rating, but I admit that’s a personal bias. Growing up, my grandmother was paranoid schizophrenic, so the fear and realism of approaching insanity made this a decent episode for me. I think most of the characters portrayed it pretty well, and it always was a middling episode for me (but I do understand why it is rated so low, it doesn’t exactly have a wide appeal).
On the complaints about the “translation” of “Eyes in the dark, one moon circles,” keep in mind that it wasn’t an actual transmission in words, it was a telepathic contact that Troi experienced while in a dream state. So that phrase Troi perceived was her subconscious mind’s interpretation of the raw concepts the aliens sent her, more symbolic than literal. “Eyes in the dark” and “one moon circles” were her brain’s dream-analogies for the image of the hydrogen atom that the aliens sent her.
This is one of my favorite episodes, I was surprised to see this disdain for it, but I guess I shouldn’t have given how slowly it moves. I think even given that, though, people are still underrating it. This one is all about the building tension, the creeping dread of nothing in particular– the unknown is supposed to be more scary than the known, and this episode is one of the few things that makes that make sense to me, the horrifying sense of losing your ability to be reasonable, and losing touch with reality. I’m also kind of surprised no one mentioned the music, I really think it does a good job of accentuating the creepiness.
Not only did Frakes describe this episode as a “yawner,” but he also said the Troi dream effects were “shitty.” An understatement, actually.
@31, yes, it gets points for being a good concept, but it’s the execution that stinks. Royally.
Actually, Troi said “rem” rather than “arr-ee-em” once too. In fact, she did it first. I know. Because we just watched this, and it was driving me CRAZY the whole time, and when Troi pronounced it correctly I shouted at the screen that this was maybe the *one time* that they should listen to her.
So it was pronounced correctly twice in the episode. And the fact that they actually got the science right on that one brought me immensely more joy than it apparently did you. But the pronunciation also sent far more burrowing insects into my medulla oblongata, so I guess we’re even.
@21, lisamarie,
“I was actually a bit skeptical that they would use the phrase ‘one moon circling’ to describe Hydrogen,”
I suspect that that was because that was not the message the alieans actually sent. The actually sent “HYDROGEN”, but I always took that as Trois’ brain interpreting the Hydrogen message the best it could.
Wow, are people harsh. I am going to disagree with everyone and say this is one of my favourites! The ending was lackluster, but I loved the spooky setup. the scene with Crusher in sickbay is one of those scenes that will be forever etched in my memory. Plus, the science was mostly right. Obviously the aliens had hydrogen, but perhaps the aliens simply had no method for projecting it into the right spot of a tykens rift? Do you?
And again, I always go back to liking the straight sci-fi stories, like this one. If this was a book by Arthur C. Clarke, I would totally read it, and probably love it. And I suspect most here would too.
This is the first episode, while rewatching, that I had absolutely no recollection of. Probably because it is so unmemorable. A great shame that John Vickery is so wasted. My immediate thought was also, “oh, Neroon, fantastic” because he is so compelling in that role that it is his performance that made Elite Neroon one of the most memorable recurring characters on B5. Here he just stares and babbles incoherently.
This is definitely an instance where I wasn’t that enthralled with the episode, but I liked the score. Kudos to Ron Jones once again!!!
Wow, I completely disagree with this assessment. I did question why they couldn’t use the Brattain’s warp core to destroy the anomaly, and yes, the Troi FX were cheesy (it was TV in the early ’90s, after all), but other than that I absolutely loved the episode. Everything fit. I thought there was plenty of suspense (we essentially had two mysteries, which made perfect sense alone and together), and the sense of danger was there, as we watched the crew members rapidly deteriorate. They were still over a week away from what happened on the Brattain, but they were already at the tipping point. They had very little time left while they could still think straight enough to come up with a solution to the problem.
Anyway, I completely disagree with a rating of 3. I give it a solid 8.
All right, that does it. You people need to sit down and actually watch these things again, and not go by memory or abide by the opinions of the rewatcher. This is one of the strongest stretches of one of the strongest seasons of TNG. Wesley is gone, the cast have settled into their characters, the writers have learned what works from three previous seasons, and they haven’t yet run out of good ideas. I just watched this episode for the first time in over a decade, and thoroughly enjoyed it–it’s an easy seven or eight. Easy. If you LOVE this show–and it deserves love–then you’ve gotta average a good bit over five once you get past season one, and to give this episode a three is absolutely ridiculous. Top ten of all time? No. Solid entry in a very good run of episodes? WITHOUT DOUBT.
@38: Comment slightly edited to keep things civil–feel free to disagree with Keith or other commenters, but don’t make it personal. Thanks.
I’ve always had a liking for Night Terrors; I will always watch it when I know its going to be on. Maybe because I like stories that examine dreams and what meanings they contain; in fact with some of the weird, surreal imagery this is a story not that far away from the works of someone like Wes Craven or David Lynch.
There is a genuine spookiness to much of the episode, especially when the power begins to fade and the sets begin to darken, and its helped immeasurably by the atypical, creepy theme music. Some scenes are way out there like the turbolift caving in on Picard, or the eerie sight of the Brittain crew sitting up in the morgue.
And there’s a real sense of impending doom; you do believe for a time that the Enterprise crew are not going to get out of this one, which makes it all the more satisfying with the explosion at the end and the lights on the Bridge come back on to full strength, and I always feel a great sense of triumph and relief that they’re out of danger. No, I like Night Terrors a lot, so there.
Ok, commenting into the aether here, as I doubt anyone checks this anymore, but I’ve absolutely loved reading this blog and the comments (my boyfriend and I are currently going through the series for the first time…and I’ve found there currently aren’t a lot of people who really want to have this kind of in-depth conversation about TNG). For this episode, though, I really, really disagree with the rating, and I just have to say, even if I’m the only one that hears, that I thought this episode was really solid.
1) Troi actually DOES things that are both in character and extremely helpful–for once, you can understand why she belongs on the bridge. She singlehandedly, and believably, saves Worf because she’s able to sense his breakdown and because she has the training to effectively talk him down. She works in tandem with Dr. Crusher to figure out what’s going on, as the doctor and psychologist should, and she’s able to catch onto the way an alien culture might view/communicate a hydrogen atom. This is why she’s on this ship.
2) The answer to the mystery is just great, and almost as interesting as the mystery itself (which is really hard to do in mystery plots). The plot reminded me of some of the best elements of a great Doctor Who episode–the mystery is intriguing and scary with nods to the supernatural (the twin moons appearing to be eyes; Worf’s conviction that there’s something watching him), and just when you think everything’s gone off the deep end (such as in the great scene with Crusher and the bodies), there’s an answer that actually makes sense and that is caused by a variety of factors working together instead of by some mysterious space entity or a few minutes of technobabble. It would certainly make sense for another alien ship to be trapped in the rift, and it also makes sense that the method of communication the aliens are using could be confusing and even dangerous to the crew. You’d honestly think complete miscommunications like this would be only too likely in such a situation. “One moon circling” is just great, and it makes it seem like the aliens are trying to do exactly what Deanna recommended the Enterprise do–communicate a single idea in the simplest possible form.
3) Personally, I found the slow, creeping suspense of the episode quite effective. The time lapse not only made the problems due to a lack of REM sleep more believable, but it also increased the tension–being becalmed in space like that, even with sleep, would be frightening. I loved the subtle changes in hair and makeup that made everyone look like they were worn down and kind of losing it (and on a side note, I was supremely happy that Picard had the good sense to make Data acting captain). There were some cheesy effects–this is Star Trek, after all–but the only ones that I found so bad that they took me out of the episode were Deanna’s dream and Picard’s moment in the turbolift. Yes, the episode certainly could’ve been a lot scarier (and yes, the failure to tow or even mention the Brittain at the end is a pretty bad oversight), but I don’t think its failures in the terror department make it a bad episode. (Nor do I think it would’ve made much sense for Picard to hang around near the rift afterward to attempt to communicate with the aliens and blame them for the death of the other crew. The aliens were clearly not trying to make the Brittania crew homicidal, they were just trying to get the heck out of there–who knows how long they had been stranded. It could’ve been years, perhaps.) Generally good acting, good character development (the story about Picard’s grandfather was a nice touch, and they brought the Worf thing in just when I was starting to wonder how the heck Worf was dealing with everything so well–loved that he turned suicidal instead of having a stereotypical Klingon SMASH scene), and a really well-executed mystery plot.
I check!
Please do comment if something else strikes you…I certainly relate to finding a reread/rewatch too late and feeling like you missed out on the fun ;) But my husband and I went through the series more or less with the rewatch (we caught up partway through) and it was my first time too!
I check too, and I’m always grateful to see that people are still reading these rewatches years later. :)
And your points are good ones, but I stand by what I wrote. And you should stand by what you wrote — that’s what makes horse races…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thanks for the response–really happy to know you’re still reading comments! I’ll definitely chime in as we continue watching. Might even go back and comment on Menage a Troi, which, heaven help me, I actually liked.
I’ve been working through the entire series. Never saw it at the time. Good fun!
Personally I think 3 is a bit harsh for this episode. I’d give it 5 or 6. Thought the science solution was quite original.
Reading these posts, I’m surprised how many people seem to dislike Troi. Admittedly Marina Sirtis isn’t the world’s greatest actor – but she’s head and shoulders better than Gates McFadden – whom everyone seems to like. To me, Gates McFadden always acts as if she’s been denied REM sleep for months on end. Everything she says is delivered with the same startled robotic expression that would be unconvincing on an android. Perhaps it’s just me?
And one more thing. Did anyone else spot a continuity error?
When the bodies in the morgue all sit up, the camera zooms in on Dr Crusher who closes her eyes and says “Go Away”. When she re-opens her eyes all the bodies are supposed to be lying down again. Except they are not. Because the cameraman didn’t zoom in close enough. So when she opens her eyes in close-up we can see that the body on the left is still sat upright.
I CAPS-LOCK LOVE THIS EPISODE.
It’s one of my all-time favorites for several reasons, and I’m glad that some commentors came in toward the end of this chain to make some of my points for me. I love the camp of this episode. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve quoted “Eyes. In the dark. One moon circles.” – it’s just totally classic.
As for the ending, the whole not going back for the abandoned ship or making contact with the aliens situation – I think it’s actually pretty awesome that they don’t. The whole ship is out of commission – our heroes are spent and completely destroyed by ten days without sleep. Data is taking them to a starbase post-haste because he knows that they are vulnerable and in no shape to do anything besides go unconscious. Rarely have we ever truly seen them so completely defeated.
This is even cooler because it was an accident. The telepaths on the other side of the rift never meant to hurt- or kill- anybody. I second the opinion of everyone who mentioned this as a refreshing nod to how hard it would actually be to communicate – or even exist in the same room as – an alien species (really, now, I’m sure a lot of their exhalations would be poisonous, or something).
The one beef I have with the episode, and no it’s not the special effects which I didn’t think were that bad, was already mentioned- hydrogen. Really? You don’t have hydrogen? I just googled it – and apparently about 73% of the mass of the observable universe is hydrogen.
P.S. – @Kellia, we are of the same mind. Regarding your feelings toward “Menage a Troi,” see my notes on “Manhunt,” in which I proclaim that I would watch “Lwaxana in Space.”
The pace of this episode was so slow it overran by I think nine minutes and had to be cut. Says it all. The 4th season had some of the best episodes of “Star Trek,” period. This isn’t one of them. Mostly I remember the eerie score as tension theortically ratched up. Premise: Excellent. Execution: Meh.
I too find this episode to be a yawner. However, Kellia and drawder, you can count me in on the Lwaxanna fan club.
Would Guinan be allowed to keep a phaser rifle behind the bar, because I think that’s an illegal weapon, as fun as it is to watch her firing it off at the ceiling to break up a bar brawl. Also, did the deflector dish burn out again. It probably didn’t this time but it should have done.
@49/David Sim: If she could fire it at the ceiling without damaging the ship, then it probably wasn’t very powerful. It may have been more for show than anything else. (Although shipboard phasers, at least Starfleet-issue ones, are interfaced with the ship’s computer, preventing them from being fired at a high enough setting to damage the ship.)
Hey, Keith. Since it appears you are checking the comments: Any chance you can fix or get them to fix the TNG Rewatch list? This episode is missing entirely. If someone hadn’t mentioned the episode in the comments of “Identity Crisis,” I would not have known I had missed an episode.
I went ahead and checked, and this is the only episode that was missed.
@51: Thanks–we’ll have the episode added to list as soon as possible!
I appreciated this episode more than a number of people in this thread did. I think it’s fairly creepy, there’s some good acting with the characters in an unusual mode, the turns in the plot are unusually solid, and though the floating Troi effect is awful I otherwise like the visuals of the dream sequences.
It is a bit wonky how the violence which killed the crew of Brittain doesn’t appear (with the exception of the Ten-Forward scene which is pretty lousy) but I think the threat is supposed to be insanity rather than violence and that shows up a lot. A fine example has already been mentioned; instead of Worf attacking anyone he becomes paranoid and suicidal. I think the problem in the script is that they had to come up with a way leave the Brittain empty because that’s creepier and if the crew were all insane but alive that would reveal the nature of the problem too early.
Starts off great but becomes more and more boring as it continues. We had living dead, a dropping ceiling, snakes in bed and then? A tiref crew. Wow, what a let down!
I was almost expecting the crew being put to sleep during one of Datas long winded explanations, heh.
However, I liked the line ‘It is a distress call, so they are asking for what they need, not telling what they already have’. That was good thinking from Troi there.
@41 I’m with you 100%! I’m also doing a late re-watch (I missed out on the fun :( and as you said not a lot of people around to discuss STNG with in depth in the present). I’m having a great time reading everyone’s thoughts and comments though.
I love this episode! It’s totally suspenseful, yes slow, good sci-fi to me. I have a science background, although certainly not at the physics level that some commenters have, but I found the hydrogen metaphor fun, a great reveal, and believable. It satisfied my need for more complicated and possibly inadvertently dangerous alien communications gone awry. The floating scenes took me out of the show but I really liked everything else. The morgue scene stuck with me my whole life and on re-watch still gave me the creeps. I loved how Dr C courageously dealt with it though and thought the acting was quite good there (@45 I totally noticed the continuity oops). That took some serious strength! Yes @41 again! Troi did finally have a role that made sense and I would have liked to see more of that.
I loved the scenes between Picard and Data as Picard slowly realizes, terrifyingly, that he can’t run the ship. Data gives his always wonderful performance of being detached as the android, yet showing duty and just those first inklings of emotion as he clearly cares. I know the emotion issue has been a debate on here (he’s not supposed to have them but clearly does or at least some development of them). I’ve equated that in my retcon mind that he is just a different version of ourselves. Our emotions are chemical changes and interactions at the root. We can learn to identify and develop them as we grow and some people learn and manage better than others. Everyone is different but even though biological it is still a process of one chemical or combo being released and then it affects us. I always thought that even though Data didn’t have emotions right off the bat, his processors and circuits were learning patterns as he went so that he responded appropriately, and ultimately he began to expect those patterns so that they were indeed missed if they did not occur (as he mentions in one episode – the ability to miss the continued presence of a friend as they had become a familiar subroutine). I see the patterns his circuits were learning not that different from our own chemical processes that we learn to identify and manage.
One reason I loved this episode and was completely in line with the slow pacing of it was because I had something like this happen once. I was on a fairly high stress job that turned into the proverbial 120 hours a week for a few weeks. I would lay down at night but it turns out I was not actually going into proper REM sleep because I was so exhausted. And…this is exactly what happens to you. It took me about two weeks to recover once the job finished and the doctor told me they had seen it happen to people like on military missions who became massively sleep deprived. It was spooky standing there and not being able to remember everyday words and actions like when Data had to finish everyone’s sentences and the other events were not that far fetched. It’s way beyond just pulling an all nighter and being tired. Data knew he had to hi-tail it out of there to the nearest starbase as the crew definitely wouldn’t have been able to deal with anything for several days. The fact that it was caused by alien communication that didn’t mean any harm was a really cool concept to me (no tin foil hats for me though, just no more accepting jobs that require that kind of workload!).
@55/Cutenewt: I don’t have anything profound to add, just this – I love this episode too. It was my favourite fourth season episode when TNG was new, and I still find it memorable. I like the mixture of surreal mystery and perfectly rational, and nice, explanation, the difficult first contact situation where a request for help becomes a deadly danger, the poetic paraphrase of a simple science concept, and the fact that it’s one of the rare good Troi-centric stories. I even like the floating scenes; but then, cheap special effects have never bothered me.
@56 Yay there is someone still out here!
All those bodies suddenly sitting up scared the poopies out of me.
59: Yeah, I know what you mean bet. It’s like something out of Coma, isn’t it?
I liked the music and I liked John Vickery’s presence, even though it was a horrendously wasted role for his amazing talents. Also, the morgue scene scared the crap out of me when I was a kid when the bodies sat up. However, I thought Guinan’s gun was as phony looking as the dream special effects.
Ultimately this episode felt like a series of vignettes that were all played to give the viewer a sense of fright. Some were far more successful than others. The final solution was come upon so transparently as to be laughable. If the Brittain Betazoid was having the same dream as Troi, why did it take him the whole episode to say what the aliens were saying: eyes in the dark. Obviously the answer is simply: to have an episode…
And after all that, the aliens needing hydrogen was a ludicrous leap in logic from our characters.
All that being said, I really don’t mind this episode that much. It’s definately highly flawed, but I think it has some good moments.
@60/thierafhal: As I mentioned above, I don’t think the aliens were actually saying “Eyes in the dark, one moon circles.” If they had the ability to communicate actual verbal phrases, they could’ve just said “Hey, can we borrow a cup of hydrogen?” Rather, they could only communicate an abstract concept which Troi’s mind interpreted as “Eyes in the dark, one moon circles.” Hagan was trying to find the words to communicate the same abstract concept, and it took a while for him to stumble upon the same words as Deanna.
@61 I had actually thought about that. However, when the Brittain Betazoid looks over at Troi when he finally says “eyes in the dark”, we can clearly see their mutual understanding. To a more literally minded viewer, this sudden realization between the characters might still seem contrived.
I won’t call this an all-time classic, but I will give this episode credit for crafting a Troi-centric story that actually takes her abilities, training, and role seriously (i.e., she’s not pregnant by a weird space entity caught helplessly in a romantic snare, or otherwise a “damsel in distress”). She (rightfully) demands to be included in Riker’s away team at the beginning; later, she’s able to communicate telepahtically with her fellow Betazoid, and she’s savvy enough to figure out the link between his throughts, her nightmares, and the situation at hand; and,of course, it’s her Betazoid mental abilities in the first place that allow her to have those dreams where the aliens are trying to communicate with her. She even talks Worf out of suicide (albeit much too easily). Again, I realize and acknowledge the faults of this one, but it does treat Troi as a serious character in terms of what she’s actually on the Enterprise to do.
@63/jazzmanchgo
You know, as much as this is obviously a Troi-centric episode, I never really focused on that aspect of it; that’s not to say I’m blind to it. She was definitely key in getting the Enterprise out of this predicament, but it was not what enthralled me about the episode. I’ve always been a fan of Trek episodes that were different and/or strange. Some examples are TNG S1: Conspiracy, VOY S2: The Thaw, ENT S3: Impulse to name a few off the top of my head. I know a lot of people have this one on their “worst of” lists, but I’ve always found it atmospheric. Thinking about it from your perspective, I have to agree that it is a decent Troi episode as well.
Wow, tough crowd!
This is my all-time favorite episode of TNG. I guess I am a heathen with no taste haha!
I find it interesting that the first half of this comment thread is people agreeing with the review, or rating it even lower, and then the second half is mostly people dissenting. I wonder why that is. Did the episode get better over the years?
Anyway, I’m going to continue the trend. I guess it’s too slow for some people expecting more adventure in their space opera, and indeed the effects in Troi’s dreams are laughable. But overall “Night Terrors” succeeds at building dread. I always liked this one even as a kid who hated horror and being scared, because there’s very little in the way of actual scares, but very much in the way of atmosphere. That scene in the morgue when the corpses sit up… I’m getting chills just thinking about it, that moment has stuck with me all my life.
This is the same reason I’ve always loved another episode that I will get to eventually…
@66/erictheread: I suppose that if people rediscover an old thread and find that they agree with what’s already been said by multiple people, they don’t see much point in adding another voice to the chorus. So it’s the people who disagree who are more likely to comment.
Not just the quality of the ‘floating’ effect, but the fact that Marina Sirtis was clearly not comfortable, and her undignified position did detract. Others have noted all my nits such as re the hydrogen atom model so I’ll just say, it half works as a horror, not as well as ‘Remember Me’ for example. The mistake with the sitting up body is annoying. Someone should have noticed that. I thought this was a minor episode but not a bad one.
I love that Worf’s Klingon dagger comes in a case with its own Styrofoam mold for safekeeping, like the finest steak-knives.
If I were an actor, I would audition for all the roles like Hagen. “Wanted: actor to play mute humanoid alien who lays around all day. Ability to furrow brows a plus.”
I had a dream the other night inspired by my TNG rewatch, as it happens: The Enterprise is hijacked while docked for maintenance by a cosmic entity that has just discovered, and is fascinated by, the human(oid) concept of stories. Worf, the sole bridge officer aboard with only a skeleton crew on the ship, has to spin yarns from Klingon history and mythology and Russian folklore to keep everyone alive while an endgame gets worked out — kind-of like Speed but Star Trek and “over 50 miles an hour” = “compelling narratives”. Unfortunately, I woke up before a satisfying conclusion.
@70/Arben: So basically you dreamed that Worf was Scheherezade.
@71. ChristopherLBennett: Ha! Yeah, I guess, although my lingering memory of it was more that the entity was just wholly unaware of the entire concept of storytelling and, like we often see with Trek, on such a different plane that it wasn’t merely planning to kill the crew out of some base instinct or personal animus.
It’s 2022, post-covid (sort of) and I am still reading the comments, so those of you from 2014 concerned it was wasted, it wasn’t
I’m loving the exchange of idea and interpretations in the comments – its adding a lot to a show I already love, so thanks all.
Like some others I didn’t like this episode but somehow on this watch (maybe the rewatch reviews are helping me think more critically about the show) I found it more interesting – the idea of different communication methods, how different people deal with stress and how some people think though problems was reasonably done (with some needed plot devices), not a 10 by any means though.
BTW I was struck by the Enterprise leaving the Brittain behind as well but my thoughts are that the rift is only distrusted temporarily by the explosion, and the length of time that is for is determined by the power of the explosion, so it made sense for them to just bolt in case the rift reformed and they got caught again. Also Data at that point was really the only functioning crew member so organising the tractor in etc would take longer with only himself to do the work.
I have to say one thing about the episode, the Crusher scene where the corpses sit up is iconic for me, I vividly remembered it, knew it was coming but still got a tingle down the spine when it happened.
Fletch: I still make sure to keep up with the comments on all my posts, so thank you for the cool words. And yes, this is one of those rare places on what we used to call the information superhighway where the maxim “Don’t read the comments” does not apply, for which I’m eternally grateful.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One of my favourites from the 4th Season. Regarding the Crusher morgue scene where all the bodies sit up – this is almost exactly the same as a scene in the Buck Rogers episode “Space Vampire” with Wilma Deering (Erin Gray).