“Force of Nature”
Written by Naren Shankar
Directed by Robert Lederman
Season 7, Episode 9
Production episode 40276-261
Original air date: November 15, 1993
Stardate: 47310.2
Captain’s Log: La Forge has borrowed Spot, Data’s cat, to see if he wants a cat of his own. It proves something of a disaster, as Spot breaks a vase, ruins a chair by using it as a scratching post, and coughs hairballs all over the carpet. Data points out, rightly, that this is normal cat behavior. La Forge feels that Data should consider trying to train the cat, which proves he’s never had one….
The Enterprise is searching for the Fleming, a medical transport that was lost in a region of space littered with tetryons. The only way to navigate the region is through the Hekaras Corridor—a narrow band of space free of tetryons. The Hekarans have reported only a Ferengi ship in the region. Since the Fleming was carrying bio-mimetic gel—which is valuable—it’s possible the Ferengi are engaged in some piracy.
Sensor efficiency is off, so La Forge and Data start crawling around Jefferies Tubes to figure out the problem. They also discuss cat-training methods, ranging from a phaser on stun to a piece of tuna in a shirt.
The Enterprise comes across the same Ferengi ship the Hekarans reported, but their engines and communications are down. However, they were playing possum, and fire on the Enterprise when it gets close enough. The DaiMon claims to have been defending himself; they encountered a Federation buoy in the corridor that damaged their ship with a verteron pulse. Picard agrees to send a damage control team over to assist with repairs, in exchange for information the Ferengi might have about the Fleming, which the DaiMon says he encountered days earlier.
La Forge interrupts one of Data’s cat-training sessions—which isn’t going as well as one might hope—to ask for help with the power conversion rates on the ship. La Forge is in competition with his Academy-mate, Commander Kaplan of the Intrepid, to see who can get their conversion rate highest.
The Enterprise finds a debris field that might be all that is left of the Fleming. While investigating, a small object emits a verteron pulse, just like what the Ferengi reported. Picard raises shields, but it doesn’t help—the pulse kills shields, warp engines, and all subspace systems. A small ship approaches and beams its two inhabitants into engineering.
Rabal and Serova are two Hekaran scientists who insist that the constant use of warp fields is destroying their homeworld. The Federation Science Council rejected their findings years ago, but Serova says that was a preliminary report. They’ve been mining the corridor with verteron pulses that only disable ships without harming anybody. They agree to assist La Forge in repairing the ship—since it was their mine, they know exactly how to fix it and can cut a day off the repair time—and remove the mines, and also aid in trying to locate the Fleming (apparently the debris field wasn’t that ship). In exchange for that, Picard agrees to have Data look over their report.
Serova’s studies show that constant creation of warp fields are damaging space in the region. Picard analogizes is to pacing over the same bit of carpet—eventually you wear it down. In this case, the fraying carpet will cause subspace to extrude into normal space, which would be bad.
However, Data says that there’s insufficient evidence to prove the theory. Picard and Data are both willing to get the Science Council to send a ship to do more detailed research. Rabal is grateful, but Serova just sees this as yet another delay. She returns to her ship and leaves without Rabal. She causes a warp core breach, which creates the very subspace rift she predicted—and also kills her. To make matters worse, the Fleming is now trapped inside the rift. It’s safe for now, but the Enterprise needs to figure out a way to rescue it without using warp drive, which would just expand the rift. Unfortunately, the rift is far enough away that it would take weeks to get there at impulse. Rabal works with Data and La Forge to try to figure out a way to get to the Fleming.
Data comes up with a solution involving a warp pulse and then coasting into the rift without actually using the warp engines. While he sets that up, La Forge talks to Rabal. La Forge wonders if he missed something, but Rabal assures him that he didn’t—what they needed was time, and Serova wasn’t willing to wait.
They engage the rescue, but while they’re en route, the Fleming engages their warp drive, not realizing the damage that would do. The Fleming is badly damaged, and the rift is now larger, so that the Enterprise’s momentum is no longer enough to get out. La Forge suggests riding one of the rift’s distortion waves out of the rift. The first time they try it, it fails, because there’s still time left in the act, but it does work the second time.
The Federation Council decrees that all Federation ships must limit themselves to warp five in order to minimize the potential damage.
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: Repeated use of greenhouse gases—sorry, warp drive in the Hekaras Corridor is apparently wearing holes in the ozone layer—sorry, subspace fields.
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: Troi doesn’t show up until the end, but she points out quite rightly that it is extremely unlikely that the Ferengi and Cardassians will obey this new speed limit.
There is No Honor in Being Pummeled: Worf disables the Ferengi ship with little difficulty. He also is unrealistically optimistic that the Klingon Empire will obey the new speed limit, and more realistically pessimistic about the likelihood of the Romulan Empire so doing.
If I Only Had a Brain…: Data’s cat Spot suddenly becomes female in this episode. This is never explained, but it is sustained in “Genesis,” when Spot becomes pregnant.
In the Driver’s Seat: Ensign Gates is at conn this episode, though she isn’t named, and all her dialogue happens off-camera so they don’t have to pay the extra playing her for dialogue, instead using prerecorded ADR of a female voice saying, “Aye, sir.”
I Believe I Said That: “How about a phaser? A low stun setting at just the right moment might do the trick.”
“Geordi, I cannot stun my cat.”
La Forge giving perfectly good cat-training advice and Data rejecting it out of hand.
Welcome Aboard: Lee Arenberg plays the second of three Ferengi he’ll play on Trek, having been Gral on Deep Space Nine’s “The Nagus.” He’ll return later this season to be the second person to play DaiMon Bok in “Bloodlines,” and he’ll also appear on Voyager (“Juggernaut”) and Enterprise (“Babel One” and “United”) as, respectively, a Malon and a Tellarite. (Lee’s also a friend of your humble rewatcher, and both of us will be guests at Farpoint 2013 next month.)
Michael Corbett and Margaret Reed create no impression whatsoever as Rabal and Serova, which is too bad, as more emotion and personality from either of these two might have made the episode more compelling.
Trivial Matters: The warp speed limit will be referenced twice more, in “The Pegasus” and “Eye of the Beholder” (just long enough for it to be suspended for the episode). It will be totally ignored after that, and never once referenced on either Deep Space Nine or in any of the TNG movies, and only mentioned once on Voyager. The tie-in fiction has more or less completely avoided it, too.
Earlier drafts of this story had La Forge’s sister coming on board, a followup to the disappearance of their mother in “Interface.” All that was left of that was one reference to said sister’s methods of training her cat.
This episode is the first time bio-mimetic gel will be referenced. Coined by science advisor André Bormanis, it will be used in several DS9 episodes, most notably “In the Pale Moonlight,” and a couple of Voyager episodes.
Make it So: “Hey, hey, don’t you spit at me!” It’s always dangerous when a “message” episode has the message as its starting point rather than the plot. It’s painfully obvious that the goal with this episode was to do an environmental piece and—just as “The Chase” was constructed mainly to explain all the humanoid aliens and failed as a story—it doesn’t work in the least.
The basic pitch for this episode had been banging around for a while, originally coming from former staffer Joe Menosky. Co-executive producer Jeri Taylor sent Naren Shankar and Brannon Braga to a breakfast meeting with an environmental watchdog group, and Shankar came back eager to tackle Menosky’s pitch.
Taylor would’ve been better off letting them have breakfast in the office. “Force of Nature” is a mess with no emotional core. We don’t even meet the two Hekaran scientists until halfway through the episode, and we’re never given any reason to give a crap about their crusade. Part of it is a failure of guest casting, but the script doesn’t give us anything, either—and you need one or the other. To make matters worse, there’s absolutely no sense of tension or danger—not to the Hekarans whose planet is supposed to be in danger (which we never actually see, and it’s a species we don’t know or care about), not to the Fleming (which we never actually see nor do we meet any of her crew). It’s all technobabble and images on viewscreens with nothing to connect to.
In fact, the only compelling parts of the episode are the bits with Data’s cat and La Forge’s semi-friendly competition with the Intrepid’s chief engineer. Unfortunately, those subplots are all front-loaded as filler while waiting for the plot to kick in, and are abandoned by the time our two scientists show up. And then in the end we get the unsubtle message spoon-fed with the warp speed limit in case we didn’t get the ozone-layer analogy that the script has been sledgehammering us with for the previous half hour.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a bunch of short stories currently available in More Tales of Zorro, Tales from the House Band Volumes 1 and 2, Liar Liar, Apocalypse 13, V-Wars, and the new release Defending the Future 5: Best-Laid Plans. He’s also got two short story collections due out this spring: Tales from Dragon Precinct and Ragnarok & Roll: Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet.
I tend to agree — they had good intentions but they didn’t pay off well. I liked the idea of the Federation having a limit imposed on its technology, discovering a downside to it; consequences and limits often make for good stories. Unfortunately, nothing was really done with it. (Behind the scenes, it was assumed that the way Voyager‘s nacelles tilted up before going into warp was due to some sort of solution that had been devised to the subspace-erosion problem, handily sweeping it under the rug. Although that didn’t explain why they didn’t just build the nacelles at that angle to begin with.)
Training cats… yeah, right. They train us.
As I recall, one of the only mentions of the warp-speed limit in tie-in fiction was from, as you put it, our humble rewatcher (who includes an offhand reference that Starfleet fixed the problem within a year and even civilian ships had it within three).
An environmental message is all very well, in the abstract. This particular message, though, was ill-conceived. “Uh, yeah, so you know the fictional technology that basically has made this entire franchise possible? Well, we want to dial way back on that.” Braga said “When you limit warp drive, the rug is being pulled out from under Star Trek,” and I have to agree. Of potential future-tech environmental issues, this was the wrong one to pick.
And the scientist who blows up her ship and creates an environmental disaster to prove that such a disaster was in the offing–WTF? That seems akin to a present-day environmentalist firebombing the Amazon forests to demonstrate how well the trees used to sequester carbon.
Memory Alpha says this is the first time Spot was referred to as “she.” Another transporter accident, no doubt, after the first one turned him from a Somali into an American shorthair.
Second.*
Worst.
Idea.
Ever.
*The worst is coming up in about 5 weeks.
@3,
As there are numerous instances of people who have faked crimes in order to call attention to the problem of crime, I have no difficulty with that part of the story. It’s just that a mumbo-jumbo speed limit to the mumbo-jumbo technology was just a terrible idea.
(Additionally, since every planet and star is moving through space, sometimes at substantial velocities relative to each other, is it really possible to “wear out” the space between even two highly traveled destinations? Or is the rip gravitationally tied to the planetary bodies in question? And why are there no potential rips near Earth or Vulcan, some of the planets with warp the longest. Second. Worst. Idea. Ever.)
I’m with Strong Dreams, and I’m glad that they pretty much immediately dropped it. I get that they were trying to make an environmental story, but don’t do this. Do just about anything else than this, but not this… they might as well ban the matter-anti-matter engine or the transporter… these are things which are just too essential to the fictional world you’ve created.
Also, what is with the cat stuff? It seems like the later seasons, Data’s cat replaced the poker game as the writers way to fill a few minutes of tv time. Data is becoming human and has a cat… yippee!
@5: The rate at which planets and stars move through space is slow enough that the position of a given “space lane” between two star systems wouldn’t change too much over the course of a few centuries. For instance, Alpha Centauri is moving rather fast relative to us, but in 100 years, the line between Sol and Alpha Centauri would shift orientation by only about one degree and shorten by about a sixth of a percent. Between two more widely separated stars or ones with more typical relative motion, the angle would shift far more slowly.
I get that the writers were trying to do something enviormental but picking warp drive was a mistake. Warp drive is what makes space travel on Trek . Don’t you think other planets or cultures would have noticed the problem before now ? Even the Federation has had warp tech for a substantial amount of time and this is the first we’ve heard of the problem? I also had no emotional attachment to any of the guest except to note blowing yourself up to prove a point is dumb.
I find it hard to follow the jump at the end of this episode. The entire episode, I got the impression that the warp rift thing was unique to this region of space…then at the very end, they say it’s every where, and we have to limit warp speed. I keep feeling like I missed some important line of dialogue somewhere that made the connection.
When an episode makes Captain Planet look balanced and realistic, you know it has problems.
This one gets the “It was the 90s.” The ultimate era for well-intentioned but ultimately tone deaf eco-tainment.
@5: This wasn’t so much “faking” a crime as it was actually committing one. From her point of view, it’s utterly insane: “In order to prove that your technology will completely ruin space around my planet, I’m going to completely ruin space around my planet.” If someone who claims to abhor murder, for instance, actually commits a murder to highlight the problem of homicide in his hometown, you start to wonder if he was really sincere in his moral convictions. It might happen, yes, but it’s not helping this story.
@9: The final scene established that this particular sector was unusually susceptible to warp fields, but there might be others as well. The Federation Council’s directive read, “areas of space found susceptible to warp fields will be restricted to essential travel only, and effective immediately all Federation vessels will be limited to a speed of warp five, except in cases of extreme emergency.” The latter was probably a precaution, given that they might not have identified all the problem regions so it was better to play it safe. Then again, given that it was issued by politicians rather than scientists, it may have just been an overreaction to the perceived threat in order to appease public concerns. Maybe that’s part of why it was revoked so quickly — as further data came in, it became clear that most regions were safe for warp travel and no such blanket restriction was needed. Maybe the instability problem was less widespread than Serova believed.
Yeah, this one was pretty terrible, and I think you hit on the reason why: they started with the message and decided to fill in the story later. The result is an “enviornmental catastrophe” that doesn’t make any sense and that no one cares about. It would have been possible to make a great Star Trek episode about the environment, but this wasn’t anywhere close to it.
Speaking of the tie-in fiction, I do remember one book that referenced the speed limit: there was some sort of auction with a bunch of super-duper invincible weapons for sale, the Enterprise had to get there to buy the superweapons before the Cardassians did, and the Federation Council wouldn’t give them approval to break the speed limit so they could get there before the auction was over. I don’t remember the name of it, but it definitely existed.
I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t make the Warp Drive = Greenhouse Gas connection until a few years later – maybe that’s another indication about how much of a mess this episode was?
@13: The novel you’re thinking of is probably Balance of Power by Dafydd ab Hugh.
Perhaps more of an emotional investment in the story would’ve been possible if LaForge had been to one to make the discovery of the damage caused by warp fields. During La Forge’s semi-friendly competition with the Intrepid‘s chief engineer, he discovers some wierd wibbly-wobbly in the space time continuum (or something) while pushing his warp engines just a bit more. Imagine the weight of that discovery on a man whose whole life is built on pushing the limits of techonology…only to find he’s reach those limits and there is a real and present danger as a result.
As an aside, I would point out that it _is_ possible to train a cat. Mine, besides being toilet-trained, responds to me when I call him and plays fetch. (My ex trained his to use the toilet.) That said, there are limits.
Love it. So that’s how they save money in Hollywood. Though wasn’t there one not too long ago in the rewatch where an extra got paid because the actors pounted out it made no sense for data to respond to a command?
And yeah, I agree with everybody the only thing to talk about with this episode is how it manages to be so bad so many ways.
The main problem here is that this episode would not have been altered in it’s main narrative thread had you removed all of the cat training guff, Geordi’s rivalry bit, and the entire of the rescue of the Fleming at the end. When you write an episode and then have to add that much filler just to fill out the story time, surely that’s the moment at which you should realise that you should be writing a different episode.
You can’t train cats, but you can herd them.
@1 ‘..the idea of the Federation having a limit imposed on its technology, discovering a downside to it..’ You mean -another- downside! What with: anti-matter containment failures; toxic+unstable+explosive trilithium resin; flesh melting warp plasma coolant; unspecified warp coolant (finger-painting, captains for the use of. 100% warp breach success rate); dodgy quality control (the only part of the ship to experience an explosion caused by fatigue); unreliable jettison mechanisms; dangerous to clean baryon particles. Phew! its a wonder anyone would want to work around a warp core. It must have been a relief to the engineering watches, to inflict side-effects on someone else for a change :)
And as of this moment, I’m finally, finally, finally caught up with the rewatch! (I only learned about it a few months ago and ST:TNG only came up onto Netflix Canada shortly after that) This calls for a celebration – bloodwine for everyone!
Shame it had to happen on such a crappy episode, though… I was bored stiff the whole time, even though I remembered being very intrigued by the idea of warp power causing universal spacetime problems. It was like one like dry scene of technobabble. Even the Spot bits were less fun than they should have been.
@22… Yes, I was also bored stiff the entire episode, and it did feel like one long scene of teknobabble.
Wow, the science in this episode is garbage. Space is a vacuum, spaceships “coast” anyways. That’s how they work in real life. Space is a VACUUUUUUUM. I’m not going to suspend my disbelief for this episode if it insists on hitting me over the head with a boring real-life analogy. The warp disruption was ignored or forgotten for the rest of the series. Wow, someone hire new writers/producers/story editors. This is an example of Fan Discontinuity.
@23, Actually I had the opposite reaction to Data’s suggestion. It has always seemed to me that warp drive isn’t so much a ship traveling through space as it is space bending around the ship — that is, the ship is always essentially stationary, so that when the warp field collapses the ship is completely stopped. (Impulse is a completely different matter.) So I don’t understand how the ship could sustain any forward momentum after dropping out of warp.
As someone mentioned earlier, I found it confusing as to whether this phenomenon affected only this sector or all of space. I mean, wasn’t it mainly a problem because the corridor focused all space travel across a narrow section of space?
Although, speasking of that, the whole thing about the Flemming doesn’t make any sense either. Just how wide is that corridor? We aren’t specifically told, but it would seem likely that the Enterprise is entering the corridor from the same direction as the Flemming. They then come across a Ferengi vessel that already passed the Flemming — then shouldn’t the Enterprise have passed it, too? Again, how wide is the corridor that they didn’t even notice it?
And the Ferengi ship: Not even any communication ability because it has no power…except that it does. But for some reason it never dawns on Picard (read: the writers) that they were only faking their communications being out just like their weapons.
And–
No, I’m forcing myself stop now. Just a mess of an episode.
@24: It was more of a hazard to certain parts of subspace than others, but it wasn’t only that single region that was vulnerable.
As for the width of the corridor, space is huge. Something that’s a narrow bottleneck in terms of interstellar distances could still be millions of kilometers wide.
That’s not to mention the probe that was capable of instantly disabling the flagship of the Federation when its sheilds were up. Why isn’t THAT mentioned elsewhere? Federation scientists should have been all over that. Heck, even the Ferengi mentioned what an incredible weapon that is. You’d not only win the fights instantly, but be capable of then taking otherwise fully functional ships that just need a few days of repairs.
Even if there’s no way to shield your own ship, it could still be plenty effective as a mine, or maybe a probe equipped with warp drive that is programmed to chase the enemy ship while you are somewhere else.
Once in range, set off the weapon, beam some knock-out gas bombs aboard on every deck, then after a little bit beem over with properly protected clean up crews. The ship is yours.
I agree with the blah-factor here. The casting of the two Hekarans really didn’t work.. I mean, Rabal watches his sister commit suicide, and there’s no reaction except for a blank stare, until Picard, with warmth and compassion, tells him how sorry he is for his loss (yeah right) after which he’s all business. When my sister offs herself to prove a scientific theory and simultaneously puts two starships at risk in doing so, I’m either going to mourn her or curse her, or both, in the moment, crisis be damned.
Heavyhanded treehugger message episodes are a bummer.
Krad, you say after the formation of the rift, it will take the Enterprise weeks to reach it at impulse, but I think Riker meant it will take the ship weeks to reach the Fleming at impulse.
Again with the Ferengi antagonist? Why bother beating that dead horse when they finally had the Cardassians to call on as effective recurring antagonists? That part of the episode was almost all filler but maybe they could have set up a red herring thinking the Cardassians got caught in their own trap.
The social commentary is one of the things that I love most about Star Trek. In or out of the franchise, I don’t typically care if it’s unsubtle as long as it is done well. Unfortunately, I am forced to agree wholeheartedly that this episode utterly fails as a message episode. It reminds me of a great quote from Sidney Lumet: “I’m not directing the moral message. I’m directing that piece and those people. And if I do it well, the moral message will come through.” Admittedly, this episode’s problems have much more to do with the poor writing than the direction but it was still the first thing that popped into my head.
Again, I have to agree that Margaret Reed makes no impression as Serova. However, Michael Corbett made a huge impression on me as Rabal. I thought that he was utterly dreadful and completely failed to convince as either an impassioned scientist or as a grieving brother in the scene with Geordi in Ten Forward.
I don’t usually mind if an episode relies on quite a bit of technobabble but this one took it to extremes. The last part in particular was a real chore to get through.
The scenes with Spot were fun, in so small part because they served to remind me of one of the many reasons why I’m a dog person.
@30: Hear hear on the dog v. cat observation!
Hey, so Geordi is competing with a brand-new, top-of-the-line Starfleet vessel, the Intrepid. Within the next year, the Voyager launches, and it’s an Intrepid-class.
Is it possible that the Intrepid referenced in this episode is the prototype of the new class? It would be undergoing sea trails (space trials?) and pushing its new warp engines as far as it can go.
Behind the scenes, the timelines match up, because at this point they were already having closed-door meetings about the new series.
@krad, There is No Honor in Being Pummeled:
I’m sure it was meant exactly how it was written and I agree that Worf’s notion about the Klingons obaying the warp speed limit is overly optimistic.
However, it could be interpreted that Worf intended to contact his brother who sits on the council (which ironically is first mentioned, correct me if I’m wrong, in the latter episode, Firstborn) to ensure it’s enforced. Gowron also did say in Rightful Heir that Worf’s voice carried weight in the empire.
Of course, considering how quickly the warp speed limit was abandoned in future Treks, I might as well be arguing the merit of Data attempting to train Spot…
Just re-watched this, and two points:
1. Post 26’s comment about how amazing a weapon these mines are is well taken. Seems like something the Ferengi would come back and investigate since it fits their business model/philosophy so well. I’d only assume it’s explained that they are very difficult to build and the one person who really knows how to do it just blew herself up. They take pains to say that Serova is really really smart – smarter than Geordi – so maybe that’s why these aren’t everywhere.
2. Filler: I agree that the cat and competition stuff feels so much like filler…. but isn’t it too much to really be filler? The cat stuff is so involved – is it the writer saying we the viewers and people of earth are as hard to train about ecological issues as cats, but we can’t stop working on it? And the competition stuff could easily stand in for males showing off their big exhaust belching trucks, and not seeing the forest for the trees. Am I giving too much credit to the writer? Stating the obvious that everyone already knows? Hm.
Luckily, now that we are in 2020, everyone knows we solved all our environmental problems. Hooray!
Aside from the other silliness of this episode, it (and many viewers) seem to commit a common environmental error which, admittedly, is a sore spot for me: mixing up ozone depletion with global warming. The former is mostly caused by CFCs and some pesticides, NOT from fossil fuel burning. Greenhouse gases (from auto emissions) cause global warming, not ozone holes. They are almost entirely separate environmental issues.
This episode would’ve worked fine (I guess) if it was a direct allegory for global warming, as it is all about the problems caused by traveling with modern technology. But once it starts talking about ripping holes in subspace (“the ozone layer”), it loses credibility.
@35/Felis Catus: That’s not an error, because fictional analogies don’t have to be point-for-point exact correspondences to real issues. It would be unrealistic for future crises to correspond that precisely and literally to current ones, so it’s better writing if the analogy is only approximate and general. Details aside, both global warming and ozone depletion are the results of human technology and blindness to its consequences, so a fictional environmental crisis that’s analogous to elements of both at once is an efficient way of doing an allegory about the broader issue, the underlying pattern that connects them both.
I mean, look at TOS: “A Taste of Armageddon.” It’s obviously an allegory for nuclear brinksmanship and mutually assured destruction, but the details are quite different; the real Cold War didn’t entail people marching into disintegration booths to keep the peace. But the analogy didn’t have to be exact for the point to be conveyed. That’s not how allegory works.
I watched this a few weeks ago, and have another issue that doesn’t look to have been covered…the ‘warp pulse’.
My understanding of how warp works is that the warp bubble the ship is in is what moves at FTL speeds, and carries the ship with it. So, when they drop the warp field, the ship reenters normal space and would be going no faster than impulse speed. Like being on a moving sidewalk and stepping off.
Is that righ
@37/FSS: Basically, yes. But as I read it, the idea behind the warp pulse is that they were only exerting warp power for a few seconds, enough to saturate the nacelles with energy, and used that residual energy to sustain the warp bubble long enough to get through before it collapsed, rather than generating more power along the way. Sort of like a car engine running on fumes.
There’s precedent in the tech manuals, the idea that photon torpedoes can travel at warp because they have sustainers that can “carry” a piece of the ship’s warp field with them, sort of pinch off a mini-bubble from the main one, and delay that mini-bubble’s collapse long enough to let them use it for a while without actively generating it. The same principle is used as an excuse for how the Enterprise saucer was able to separate at warp in “Encounter at Farpoint” even without engines of its own. So there are ways a vessel or other object can “coast” on a residual warp field by delaying its collapse. Which I suppose is possible if you could generate the right kind of exotic matter to shore up the warp bubble metric, which is what particles like tetryons and verterons appear to be.
@36 I hear what you’re saying man, and I’m not claiming that it needs to be an exact point-for-point correspondence. But if we’re painting with a brush so broad that the episode is thus about any environmental harm caused by human technology and our ignorance of its consequences, then you may as well claim this episode is about algal blooms, acid rain, or any other environmental problem. They were clearly going for an episode about ozone depletion, so they should’ve picked some other action they were doing that corresponded to how real world ozone depletion happens. It’s sloppy writing to fuse two completely different environmental issues into one.
@39/Felis Catus: “They were clearly going for an episode about ozone depletion”
Why do you assume that? Maybe the part about the erosion of subspace is analogous to the erosion of the ozone layer, but the part about it being caused by a transportation system is clearly more analogous to global warming and general air pollution.
And yes, it annoys me too when people confuse ozone depletion and global warming or assume they’re the same problem. But it’s an overstatement to call them “completely different,” since they’re both atmospheric problems caused by the gaseous waste emissions of civilization. They’re distinct problems, yes, but they’re not fundamentally different categories of problem.
The only thing I remember this episode for is that the DirectTV summary for it the first time I watched read, in total “Warp drive destroys the universe.” The actual episode was, in that respect, a bit of an anticlimax.
Warp drive destroying the universe would’ve been awesome…………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@42/krad: The universe? That’s where I keep all my stuff!
@1 hard agree after just having watched it today and being the mom to four cats. I also think it’s funny that both you and @krad replied on this 7 year old thread the day I watch it! And let’s be honest, the Federation forgot its towel on Towel Day and the warp drive absolutely destroyed the universe.
I also keep my stuff in the universe! No wonder this toothbrush tastes funny.
Not mentioned above, in all the (totally true) criticisms of this regrettable episode: Geordi yet again patronizingly ignores a woman, and agrees when her brother says she’s irritating. Again, Geordi seems to believe that every woman who comes on board should be extra polite, more so than he seems to believe men need to. It’s subtle, but so damn consistent. Even the way he asks the computer to make the Brahms hologram warmer. What were they thinking? This has got to be the one sourest note in the lovely and layered melody that is Geordi’s character.
Yes he comes around and feels bad, but that’s what he does. When is he going to just listen and accept in the first place? I know KRAD could do this much better, but OTTOMH, Dr Brahms (both the ‘warmer’ request of the hologram, and of course the actual Dr Brahms), Dr. Farallon and the exocomps, even his recent brush with an “irritating” crushing coworker who seems sweet to me (though maybe too young).
He seems often skeptical, but not as vocally indignant, when male visitors/researchers are brash (Liaisons I think, and Where No One Has Gone Before). Though I guess he was irritated at Scotty, he didn’t seem to stand up and decry the guy in the same way. Similar though. Maybe it’s less gender biased than it seems. (This is why judging something by the availability heuristic is not science, and statistics is. A point I find myself making a lot these days.)
Anyway, I was frustrated watching Geordi and Rabal talk about her like “little sisters are gross and shrill and the worst”. Especially because she really didn’t seem that bad. It would have been a more entertaining episode if she had been a bit more Ensign Ro about it. Passionate, angry, sick of her concerns being swept under the rug.
I lost track of and somehow cannot seem to find the comment about Geordi having to realize on his own that warp drive was causing problems, and how that could have been actually rather a moving character moment for him, had it happened in the first third of the episode. Loved that idea – and additionally, Serova should have taken the ship way far away from her planet to demonstrate the problem. We could have had an exciting harrowing impulse drive space chase. She could have done a series of eco-terrorism-like booby traps along the way, pontificating about her cause. She could have pointed out how many years she’s been trying to talk about this and nobody’s listened.
Let’s say she has hypothesized that enough warp could cause a new kind of extremely harmful rift that no one has ever seen before. Then in the end, she slow-speed races out to a safe distance and sacrifices her life to create one, because no one believes in them. Now there is a mostly harmless one, out where it can stand forever as evidence that we have to be careful. Like a museum, an environmentalism art piece, and a thing to study. The Lorax in Space, if you will.
I am sad that there was so much behind the scenes complication on TNG; it seems like politics kept a lot of episodes from ever being better. That and cranking out so many episodes so rapidly.
to return here without warp drive: “rewtch force”
– yes even Star Wars can’t compete.
I thought the episode was OK… I’d give it a 5 out of 10. My main complaint is the first half of the episode dragged on way too long before we got to the meat of the episode. There are too many scenes of filler of talking about Data’s cat, and Data and Geordi doing maintenance before we are introduced to the problem with the rift. By that point, everything afterward feels rushed in the final half. If the 2 scientists were introduced at the beginning of the episode the viewers might have developed more of a connection with them. But the female scientist has less than 10 minutes of screen time before she kills herself, so the emotional impact is low.
I didn’t feel the parallel to global warming was overdone but the characters don’t seem particularly concerned about the consequences of the damage warp travel does, which further muddles the seriousness of the dilemma.
The second half of the episode was much better than the first.
Very much agree with KRAD’s assessment of this episode. Even the first time I saw it, I sensed what I now recognize as a script that began as a message. Even if you totally agree with that message, you’ll probably recognize how heavy-handed it is – that the plot feels cobbled together around it. Then you have to wonder if anybody stopped to think how the whole “warp drive tears up the universe” concept would play out if they stuck with it. Which of course, they didn’t. Finally – as mentioned – it all plays out so clumsily that it’s hard to buy in, and it’s a relief that there wasn’t much effort put into canonizing it all.
They talk about how warp drive has been around for “three centuries”; surely, it must have been around for a great deal longer than that, given how many much, much older starfaring races we see than the humans. Also, it seems silly to extrapolate findings for one particular region of space to the universe as a whole.
@48/jaimebabb: “Also, it seems silly to extrapolate findings for one particular region of space to the universe as a whole.”
Not at all, since that’s literally the goal of science — to deduce universal laws from local observations. For instance, Newton extrapolating from the fall of an apple to the motion of the planets, or Stephen Hawking extrapolating from pair production observed in cloud tanks to black holes evaporating from Hawking radiation. After all, the same laws apply everywhere in the universe, so if you figure out the equations that govern things in one part of it, you can extrapolate how they’d behave in another part by plugging in the appropriate variables.
@49 In real-world physics, certainly. In Star Trek, there seem to be weird anomalous regions of spacetime all over the place.
I think part of the issue of this story is the fact that space is so RIDICULOUSLY BIG that it beggars the imagination that Warp Drive could ever be building up damage. I mean, why are they traveling in the same path anyway?
@50/jaimebabb: “there seem to be weird anomalous regions of spacetime all over the place.”
That doesn’t mean they obey totally different laws of physics; it just means the existing equations have some unusual values plugged into them, so they manifest differently. A black hole is an anomalous region of spacetime, but it’s governed by the same equations of gravity that keep you sitting in your chair.
In this case, what made the region distinctive was its “unusually intense tetryon fields.” Tetryons are a commonplace subspace particle in Trek physics, showing up all over the place. So it’s not something unique, despite Picard’s use of that word; it’s just an unusually large quantity of something normal and ubiquitous. The reason the subspace damage showed up there first was because the concentration was so high, amplifying the effect, but it follows that the same damage could develop more gradually in regions with more normal tetryon fields. At least, it was a reasonable precaution to limit warp speeds until it could be proven that more normal regions weren’t susceptible to damage.
@51/C.T. Phipps: “I think part of the issue of this story is the fact that space is so RIDICULOUSLY BIG that it beggars the imagination that Warp Drive could ever be building up damage. I mean, why are they traveling in the same path anyway?”
As discussed above, travel between established world would tend to be heavy along certain routes through space. And realistically, a warp field would have an intense distorting effect on spacetime, because it would have to be really powerful. So it’s reasonable that if a warp field could damage subspace, it could do so for a considerable distance around the ship, not merely in its immediate path.
Physicists like to use the simplified analogy of spacetime as a rubber sheet with masses pressing down on it to create depressions, i.e. gravity wells. A warp field would be like pushing down really hard on a rubber sheet with a really small, heavy object and dragging it around. Now, the analogy usually presumes the rubber sheet is infinitely flexible and indestructible, but if something could damage it, you can see how something like that could mess it up.
I don’t think I’ve seen any of Season 7 since it first aired ere now. When I rewatched “Phantasms” I was confused because I’d have sworn the interphasic creatures sucking on cellular peptides in that episode were the species from which the Enterprise learned that warp drive wreaked havoc on subspace. I’m constantly perplexed by what I remember or don’t. Now, rewatching this episode, I can hardly believe the final scene didn’t end with Picard and La Forge turning directly to the camera to drive home the moral of the story.
Meanwhile, I have to admit that our cats almost unfailingly come when we call, although I wouldn’t exactly describe them as trainable.
I’m concerned by Data’s ignorance of Spot’s changes in breed and gender. Perhaps there’s an unspeakably awful subroutine running without his conscious knowledge and Feline Supplement #221 isn’t named for the number of recipes he’s programmed but the iteration of Spot he’s up to.