In the eighteenth episode of the first season of The Next Generation, the crew visit a planet that’s being terraformed, and then SCIENCE. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Well, this was an interesting episode! It’s really heavy on the science for the first third, but I’m happy that the show decided to address something as ambitious as the concept of inorganic life. It’s cool! AND SO WEIRD!
Let’s talk.
Kurt Mandl
Lord, what an asshole. I’m actually intrigued that he seems like such a huge jerk at the start of this episode, but by the end of “Home Soil,†I just felt bad for these people. Truthfully, no one here deliberately tried to extinguish the life hiding under the surface of Velara III, so I wouldn’t be comfortable calling Mandl the antagonist. Like a number of episodes in this show so far, there’s not a real villain. Of course, as I picked up on during this, we were clearly meant to suspect that Mandl was behind all of this. RED HERRING! He behaved suspiciously when the Enterprise hailed him; he treated the other employees rudely; he was obviously hiding something.
Except, no? By the end of this episode, it feels like this can easily be explained away by the stress of the job. No one actually thought there was life on Velara, and the team was about to begin a critical phase in the terraforming of the planet. It’s only after the Enterprise produces proof of the lifeform that they surviving scientists are able to connect the dots. Could you imagine what this experience was like for them, y’all??? They just spent years working on Velara, and in the span of a couple days, their friend is murdered by a sentient, inorganic life form, and they’re all taken home because they have no jobs anymore.
WOW. Can I be best friends with Luisa Kim? She seemed like a lot of fun.
Discovery
The main plot of “Home Soil†isn’t about any specific character, and thus, there’s not a whole lot of character growth. This is about the team reacting to the mystery of the inorganic life that Data found at the bottom of one of the bore holes. It seems impossible, and yet, there it is. As they try to figure out what this thing is, the lifeform begins to grow. It is an understandably frustrating and frightening situation because these characters don’t quite get what’s happening. They suspect that it basically lashed out in self-defense, and Malencon was the unfortunate victim of that. As Picard describes it, they more or less declared war on invaders, you know? It’s not like this lifeform is a bunch of serial killers by nature; they’re just trying to survive!
So I admit that this was a fun experience. It was thrilling and confusing in the best way possible, particularly since it was so hard to wrap my mind around the concept. Inorganic life! And yet, in hindsight, I don’t find that this will be one of the more memorable episodes in the series. We don’t delve into the lives of Kim, Mandl, or Bensen, and their stories are given no closure by the end of “Home Soil.†While I appreciate that the writers don’t try to give us too much information about the inorganic lifeform, that still means that this story is reactionary in nature. An unexplained being messes up the Enterprise, they return it to the planet’s surface, and everything continues as usual. Of course, it’s exciting to know that the crew made a scientific discovery that will change the universe’s understanding of life! That’s fantastic. But I don’t see how this might affect any future storylines, at least not if this is the first and last time we’ll see these things.
That being said? I don’t think I’ll be forgetting “Ugly giant bags of mostly water†any time soon. I mean, that’s exactly what we are, y’all. TRULY.
The video for “Home Soil†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
Mark Links Stuff
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