TNG Deathmatch Episode 17: Home Soil vs Masks

Home Soil is the Devil In The Dark rip-off, but it's a little better than that implies. By this point in the season it feels like we've left behind the worst of the narrative raggedness, the sense that stories were unfinished or slapped together that pervaded episodes like Lonely Among Us. Home Soil at least feels cohesive.

The Enterprise stops by a planet in the early stages of terraforming, and is met with such hostility from the facility's director, Mandl, that they feel obliged to investigate. Long story short, there's a silicon-based lifeform living in the sand of this planet, and Mandl has been haring ahead with the project, ignoring the evidence, and killing the creatures as a consequence. The crew learns to communicate with the life forms, the life forms get an apology, everyone goes on with their merry way having learned their lesson that life is valuable even if it isn't like you. It's very old Trek, it's pretty cheesy but not unpleasant, and it's nice that so much of the episode is devoted to actually scientific research.

I have to point out the horrible sexism, though. Of the terraformers we meet, only one, Luisa, is female, and she is the only one who is at all welcoming or enthusiastic to meet the crew when they arrive. "She is as open as she appears," is Troi's assessment, and then she says that Luisa has "lovely visions, little data", which is honestly shocking. The woman is a terraformer, a scientist, and she has "little data"?! Lots of pretty pictures in her head, but the poor dear doesn't have a clue how to go about achieving anything, that's why she's assigned to give the tour while the boys get on with the real sciencing. 

To add insult to injury, when they need to investigate, it's Riker who goes to try to get information out of Luisa, the exact same way that in the 60s it was Kirk who handled the troublesome women on his ship - romantically. (Think of his approach with Miranda Jones in Is There In Truth No Beauty, or Kalinda in By Any Other Name - if in doubt, appeal to their feminine side and also maybe try to bang it, because women are immune to logic, I guess.) Except, in Home Soil, it's Troi who actually suggests to Riker that he "might have better luck" with Luisa. A trained psychologist actually decides against using her professional skills and empathic powers to communicate with a scientist, and instead sends her own ex-boyfriend to try to romance the information out of her. It's nauseating. Whenever people crow about Star Trek being progressive, I want to scream, because it was progressive in some ways and massively ignorant in others. Even as a kid I knew it was BS that Uhura, usually the only woman on the original bridge, didn't get to do anything and was always the first to scream or say, "Captain, I'm frightened". 

Anyway. On to Masks, which is horrible. It feels as if the episode is a victim of season seven's allegedly reduced budget, but it's not like this script would have been rescued if it had had better visuals.

The whole ship is being taken over by an alien library and turned into artefacts from some other culture’s history, except we hardly see any of it and there’s absolutely no sense of peril, even when parts of the ship start turning into a swamp. The culture in question is advanced enough to remake the Enterprise from the molecules up, but it also resembles some vaguely Aztec-Mayan civilisation and wants to reenact a very basic myth about a sun-goddess, and none of this makes sense at all, and all of it is boring.

IIRC this episode was written by Joe Menosky, who also wrote DS9’s Dramatis Personae, a superior episode but one that is also about an alien culture reenacting an historical event, this time by possessing the crew and making them live it out. Both episodes share a major problem in that they are not about the characters on the show we’re actually watching, and whenever that happens I always wonder why it is that the writers cannot find anything interesting to do with the actual characters; I also wonder why, if they're going to have our characters (or indeed the ship) possessed by aliens, why are the aliens so uninteresting? Dramatis Personae worked better because the new personalities were fun (absent-minded Jadzia, vicious Kira, crazy Emperor Sisko). Masks has nothing - it can't show us the ship being changed, nobody gets possessed except Data, there's no sense of peril, and the central mystery, the metaphor that the crew has to unravel, is tediously literal, the equivalent of a jigsaw with only eight pieces.

It does have one really great, creepy moment where Data, beginning to malfunction, whispers to Geordi, “What does it feel like when one is going mad?” If the show had leaned into that, and made the whole story about Data being overwritten by this probe and treated his condition as something like a mental breakdown, that feels like it could have been more focused and more interesting. Instead, we end up with a hokey showdown in which Picard wears a mask to pose as Korgano, the masculine figure that chases the feminine Masaka (Data) and forces her to submit, or something. It really doesn’t help that the villain’s name is basically pronounced “moussaka” and I just feel hungry every time I hear it.

I mean, I guess it makes a change that it’s not Troi being taken over by an alien for once, that’s a positive. And Brent Spiner does his damnedest to embody the multiple characters warring inside him (I quite like his weary-old-man voice). But to go from “I’m going slightly mad” to…actually, I barely even remember how this episode wraps up. It sort of just stops.

 

WINNER: Home Soil