“Night Terrors” is another episode derided by pretty much everyone: From the people who worked on it to the people who watched it, almost nobody has anything kind to say about this story and it’s frequently held up as being among Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s absolute worst of the worst.

You should know where this is going by now. I always thought it was pretty good!

What we’ve got this week is another step in the show’s transition into its next form. Like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is a story about the Enterprise crew in the thick of a mind-bending cosmic mystery that warps their conception of reality. It’s also a competently mind-bending psychological thriller for the audience as well, with some unsettlingly well-done hallucinatory scenes and a plot that goes out of its way to showcase the power of dream logic and dream imagery. A great many future Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will be comprised of one or both of these storytelling archetypes in roughly equal measure, and while “Night Terrors” isn’t the best or most ambitious iteration of either one of them, it is a very noticeable first draft.

It’s also not really safe to say that “Night Terrors” is the point where this becomes the show’s default mode, and of course the very best Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will find ways to blend this with its pre-exisiting commitment to utopian conflict resolution, but, perhaps fittingly, this episode is a sort of vision of things to come-A decent first look at what’s going to be more or less a baseline average for the show going forward. Which is really not a terrible thing as far as I’m concerned.

Also like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is another strong ensemble outing where each and every character gets to show off their talents and particular skillsets. Deanna Troi obviously plays the biggest role and we’ll talk about her a little later on, but this is a great showing for everyone in the main cast. I think what I enjoy the most about the act of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from an entertainment standpoint is seeing the crew work together comfortably and effortlessly to figure something out and the trust they have in one another in the process: It’s that “competency porn” idea again, and this episode is a good example of that. The twist this time is that the dream deprivation is testing the limits of their capabilities and sanity both, and the hook is in watching how the crew responds to this.

And in this regard the actors really drive home some stellar performances: I know they always do and I always say they do, but it’s especially noticeable when their acting is bolstered by writing they can really play off of, as is the case here. Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden are particular standouts for me, as they play Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher slowly and subtly growing more and more frazzled and unhinged, yet never once wavering from their heroic dedication to saving their friends and their ship.…

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I don’t get “First Contact”.

To be precise, I don’t get the reputation it has. On paper, the episode seems pretty straightforward and self-evident: Do a story about the standard procedure for how the Federation handles first contact situations, preferably one where something goes wrong because something something conflict drama conflict. Even though it comes out of a pathological compulsion to answer the sort of question only a vanishingly small subset of the audience was actually asking and is as such something I don’t have an especially deep fondness for just by definition, “First Contact” is at least pretty easy to explain. What I’m not understanding, and have never been fully able to, is why this is considered a timeless classic above and beyond that. Well, at least I certainly hope it’s for reasons above and beyond that.

Obviously, the conceit is to explore Federation first contact procedure by taking the perspective of the contactees such that “First Contact” is unique in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation by being the only episode not focused on the main characters. It is an interesting change of pace as a result and I can sort of see how this episode could be received as particularly memorable because of that, but to me both “Data’s Day” and “Clues” had already taken respectively unorthodox looks at the Enterprise crew, so this episode doesn’t strike me as being particularly groundbreaking in that regard (though it seems the production team thought otherwise, given the hoops they apparently had to jump through to convince Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman that this was a good idea). Maybe it just seems underwhelming in retrospect given how often the subsequent Star Trek shows broadened their scope beyond their main casts while this was the first story to try something like this, but I don’t remember feeling I was seeing something really special and groundbreaking at the time either.

Not to mention that, Holy Shit, how stagnant and insular must Star Trek fans be if this is seen as being truly refreshing and experimental?

Maybe this episode plays into an unspoken desire science fiction fans have. Maybe people identify with Mirasta Yale, a space engineer working tirelessly with prototypical Warp Drive in order to realise her dreams of travelling to the stars (by the way, great to see Carolyn Seymour again. I prefer her as a Romulan though). Perhaps they project onto her at the end when she asks the Enterprise crew to take her with them, and they agree. Certainly there’s always been, at least since the early days of the franchise’s syndication, this aspirational drive Star Trek fans have to actually insert themselves into their favourite fictional universe. These were some of the first modern fandom cosplayers, after all, and it’s no coincidence that it was Star Trek that became synonymous with the Mary Sue archetype.…

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This is an episode that has always been noteworthy to me for being one I keep feeling as though I should like a whole lot less than I do. On paper, it sounds like it’s setting up an irritating “Shocking Betrayal!” plot involving Data supposedly lying to the crew, which is the kind of story I hate (and compounding the obnoxiousness, we’ve already been made to watch Data do something similar earlier in the season in “Brothers”). But it’s an episode I’ve always found to be perfectly enjoyable, and all of my hypothetical doubts are always assuaged every time I watch it.

I think what saves “Clues” from the hackish melodrama quagmire that sinks so many other productions in the fourth season is that it goes out of its way to hedge against the stock dramatic conventions this kind of setup would otherwise use as a crutch: The story takes extreme care to ensure we never once think Data actually is attempting to maliciously mislead or betray the crew-In fact, he makes a point of never technically lying (at least not any more than he has to, depending on your reading of the probe scene and the “30 seconds” bit), just withholding specific bits of information, dancing around some topics by answering in hypotheticals and speaking the literal truth that he cannot answer certain questions. And even when the, erm, clues, start to stack up, the crew never once suspects Data is willfully turning against them, but rather that he might be physically compromised in some manner or is being coerced not to participate in the investigation. Which, of course, turns out to be exactly what’s going on. Because of this, “Clues” gets to dodge the flak canon of hackneyed drama tropes to instead become a story about how much the crew really does trust and respect each other.

This was an important point for the show to emphasize, given “Clues” is technically speaking the first “regular” episode of our new Star Trek: The Next Generation, following the two-part premier event of “Data’s Day” and “The Wounded” and the strange, if fun, aberration of “Devil’s Due” (which was if nothing else a polite, but firm, declaration to any new viewer that Star Trek: The Next Generation is not Star Trek, which does in a sense follow on from “The Wounded” in one respect). It’s a reinforcement of the themes those earlier episodes introduced and a reminder of the commitment the show has finally made to being about utopian conflict resolution. It also might be interesting to take note of how structurally “Clues” is an inverse of “Data’s Day”: In that episode, we shared Data’s perspective looking in at the rest of the Enterprise crew from the outside. Here, that situation is reversed, with us being in with the rest of the Enterprise crew looking at Data with uncertainty and concern. But most importantly of all, that tension is resolved at the end with the crew being symbolically reunited at last.…

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