In many respects, Schisms succeeds where Night Terrors failed — it was spooky and creepy without being cheesy or silly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was an overall success, either. And in fact, it does have some issues in terms of pacing and an exceptional overdose of tech-talk.

To begin the episode, we discover that Riker is having problems with sleeping at night. He is tired, irritable and actually late for an early morning meeting in Engineering. After a mysterious sensor reading is introduced, the episode progresses by showing some of the crew having adverse reactions to otherwise innocuous objects: Riker feels claustrophobic near the Navigation Panel on the bridge and Worf nearly rips off the barber’s hand after seeing a pair of scissors (not that the incessantly prattling barber didn’t deserve it, but still). Other strange occurrences include LaForge suddenly becoming dizzy and Data realizing that, inexplicably, for an hour and a half, he had not been on board the Enterprise.

Riker shares his incident with the Nav Panel with Troi and she explains that other crew members have had similar experiences. At Riker’s suggestion, the various crew members gather to share those experiences. They realize their recollections share some commonalities so Riker suggests a trip to the holodeck to help them visualize these memories. Incidentally, why can’t Troi come up with these suggestions? Does Riker know that much more about group therapy sessions than the ship’s counselor? Oh, well.

The holodeck scene is easily the best in the episode. If the final realization that LaForge, Riker, Worf, and some random female crew member have of an examination table isn’t creepy enough, the bizarrely sinister clicking noises drive the message home: they have all been abducted and experimented upon.

As if that isn’t bad enough, the sensor reading turns out to be some sort of subspace thingy that is threatening the ship (and no, I’m not bothering to look up the tech definition of “thingy”). And, finally, the connection is made: the abductors exist in some subspace dimension and are abducting crew members for experimentation. So they decide to use Riker as bait, let him be abducted again, and carry a homing beacon to the other side so they can disrupt the connection between the two places.

Of course the plan works. And the alien laboratory is certainly surreal enough to continue the bizarrely unsettling mood of the episode. But on the whole, the pacing, the buildup, just takes too long. In fact, it plays out a bit like on of Data’s poems: technically correct, but ultimately lacking a true emotional impact.

By the way, Data’s attempts at creating poetry are a nice nod back to his quest to be more human (which has been virtually ignored in the most recent episodes). Unfortunately, his poems not only bore the crew, they bored me as well. And was the woman sitting next to Picard his date? If so, she didn’t seem his type.

Schisms is much better episode than Night Terrors, however, it has too many issues with pacing and tech talk to really be as compelling as it might otherwise have been. The other thing I can’t get straight is that the episode implies that the abductions began after LaForge modified the sensors, but Riker had been having sleep issues for at least a couple of days before that. It’s a minor point, but I was mildly distracted by it.

Filed under: TNG Reviews