Schisms

Do you have trouble concentrating at work? Do you have problems sleeping at night? Are you feeling anxious and snapping at the people who care about you? Maybe you need a good night’s sleep. Or maybe that’s when the aliens from another dimension abduct you and carry out gruesome experiments on your body. Sleep tight! Schisms goes into this week’s Mission Log. Forget running to an emergency, I’ve always wondered why they don’t transport security directly to the scene. There’s always been a lot of inconsistency with using the transporter; sometimes they beam an injured party directly up to sickbay, sometimes they beam within the ship… creative license, I guess. I think what could have worked was some sort of transponder, like how humans tag penguins and sharks etc….mind :BLOWN…lol, its all perspective. Sometimes we think we are the big fish in the pond,…till we go into the open ocean… kinda like the Borg giving the Federation et al a big slap of a wake up call…. I worried when I watched ‘Realm of Fear.” This is the episode that I pretty much accepted that TNG was running outta gas. The scenes are atmospheric and creepy. The acting is fine. And if this were ‘The Outer Limits,’ I’d be happy. But, Trek asks us about the human condition. This episode is all about bad aliens being bad and a great big ‘So what??’ Moving on… It seemed like a token Halloween episode….but more than a few episodes in S6/7 gave hints, that they were running out of good ideas…darn their 44 minute time constraints/lack of true story arcs…ugh This is another episode like Conspiracy, where they had a sinister open end, but it never went anywhere. In this case because the aliens just didn’t translate well to the screen. The Conspiracy aliens were the victims of the writers’ strike, too much time passing before they returned to it and the success of the Borg in a similar role. The Schisms fish monks, however, were given up on immediately. It is unusual for Star Trek to not try and communicate with aliens. They tried to talk to a killer Crystal, a bunch of micro machines and the micro brain from Home Soil. But weird subspace fish monks aren’t worth chatting with, I guess. This could have been a whole series of episodes like the Borg or Q, but nope. One and done Yup…poor follow up again, on what could have been an intriguing villain. I think ENT had some villains who were way above the level of the UFP and kept appearing, but I didn’t watch that show much. I think it would have been cool if some evidence of prior abductions or missing starships/lost colonies surfaced giving the Fish Monks a more impressive resume a la an inter-dimensional Borg like/mad scientist like threat… Glad I wasn’t the only one having Conspiracy flashbacks (though overall, I liked Conspiracy a lot better – we can talk about Riker’s arm being cut off or liquid polymer blood all we like; Conspiracy throws Geordi right through a door and feeds us Tasty Space Maggots…now THAT’S horror, as least as much as TV could do in TNG’s time frame). When Schisms first aired, I just immediately had the sense that we’d never hear from these guys again. TNG was not in the business of running plot threads. By the time TNG did start flirting with running plot threads with the Maquis and the Native American colonists in season 7…it was only doing that to set up Voyager. Sigh. I’m glad I’m not the only person who’s ever noticed the remarkable specificity of the holodeck tables. I get it, it’s not worth renting a bunch of prop tables, but c’mon, how about borrowing them from neighboring productions on the Paramount lot? It’s not like we’re asking the table to turn into Minuet for two seconds. (“No, computer, you’re getting colder. Well, Riker’s getting warmer, but you’re getting colder.”) We saw more alternate bodies for Lal in The Offspring, and that was something that required real live flesh and blood extras and makeup artists. I like Ken’s “Riker’s nightmare” hypothesis…but at the same time…if you