Star Trek: The Next Generation, like almost every Star Trek series, tells the story of the crew of a vessel traveling the stars. Their mission is, of course, to explore space—the final frontier! But that exploration takes a different tone in each series. Scientific, survivalist, embroiled in political intrigue… people have been asking ‘What is Star Trek really about?’ for so long that a fictionalized version of this question of identity is the core crisis of main character Beckett Mariner in the recent Lower Decks series.
TNG is Star Trek at its most enraptured with the mystery genre. For evidence, look no further than Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Lieutenant Commander Data play-acting at noir and Sherlock Holmes on the holodeck. (I’d argue the episode “Elementary, Dear Data” is a cosmic mystery for poor Moriarty. Have you ever heard a man utter the word ‘arch’ with such awe?)
The Enterprise frequently finds itself in strange circumstances with no greater goal than to try to make sense of them. Captain Picard is well aware of the limits of his own experience, and is always open to the possibility that more is happening than he can understand. He meets those circumstances with still-waters-run-deep curiosity. Even when the mission of exploration falls to the background, most episodes are challenges to—and ultimately affirmations of—that curiosity.
The episode “Where Silence Has Lease” is one of those challenges. In “Silence”, Star Trek’s orbit swings closest to cosmic horror, and in doing so interrogates the intentions of curiosity and the limitations of the Enterprise’s mortal crew.
Image credit: Memory Alpha
As “Silence” opens, the Enterprise is charting the evocative but ominously named Morgana Quadrant. Counselor Troi eyes a troubled Picard. When empath Troi’s on the bridge, you know that either some single-episode dude is going to hit on her (TNG showing its age), or a situation is about to unfold that requires her skill for reading psyches (TNG for the most part showing its agelessness).
Picard confesses to Troi that he’s worried about Commander Riker and Security Chief Worf, who, after an emotionally fraught morning workout session on the holodeck, take their posts on the bridge. The ship encounters an utter void. Troi senses nothing, absolutely nothing. Worf describes a Klingon folk legend of a black creature that devours vessels. Curious, Picard launches probes that disappear from the ship’s sensors.
The void swallows them. Inside, they run into trouble. They go in circles. A Romulan warship appears out of nowhere, and is, confusingly, utterly destroyed by a single round of warning fire. They see their fellow starship Yamato, seemingly devoid of life. Inside, Riker and Worf find impossible rooms and corridors constructed from unknown materials. The Enterprise identifies routes of escape that disappear and reappear all around them. Eventually they conclude they’re being experimented upon. Spoilers ahead.
Image credit: Memory Alpha
An entity called Nagilum manifests, approximating a humanoid form the best it can. Nagilum asks, “Is it true you only have a limited existence?”
Of all the ways in which humanoid life could be considered to be limited, Nagilum’s interest settles on the concept of death. Nagilum kills a crewmember and then states that it requires half the crew in order to study death further. Recognizing that Nagilum “sees no value in our kind of life form,” Picard and Riker set the Enterprise to self-destruct.
One way to look at Nagilum is that, given Star Trek’s technological advancements, it’s up to entities like it to stand in for the dangerous, utterly indifferent expanse of space that contemporary humans will need to overcome to explore the stars. (More later on how Nagilum represents the obstacles that contemporary humans place on ourselves.)
Another is to consider that, for Nagilum, the concept of a limited existence is as novel to it as a limitless one would be to the crew. So when Nagilum expresses that what it ultimately wants to do with the Enterprise is torture its crew members to death, it’s not just frightening—it’s so crushingly disappointing.
For a vast entity like Nagilum to reduce the crew to the whats and hows of death is to reduce itself, too. Perhaps it’s impossible for a limitless being to engage with the concept of a limited being without something like this happening. (Perhaps this is a remark on mystery fiction—should the focus be on the gory details, or the characters’ interior lives and motives?)
There’s Nagilum’s face, distorted like something much bigger staring through glass, and humanoid. At first I interpreted Nagilum’s silver patches as Nagilum’s attempt to represent all of the Enterprise’s crew, not just the humans. But that silver, I think, is also meant to remind us of a mirror. One that reflects the dangers of curiosity back on the ship. The crew couldn’t even sense Nagilum at first. What lifeforms does the Enterprise, intentionally or not, confuse and abuse as it explores?
What Nagilum doesn’t yet understand when it makes this demand, is that death, for ‘limited’ beings, is a limitless domain. It’s a subject TNG will attempt to explore for the rest of the series. For Nagilum to assume it can get death all figured out in, half of however many people are on the Enterprise? is almost insulting.
At its most ideal, and possibly idealistic, the Enterprise’s mission is to learn about unfamiliar lifeforms, and if possible, conduct a meaningful and respectful exchange between alien cultures. (See “Darmok”, in which Picard communicates with a Tamarian captain by learning about the vast mythos that is the foundation of the Tamarian metaphor language.) It would be genre-blind to expect Nagilum to sit down at the bar, grab a drink, and ask Picard to get real about death. But when it creates illusory doubles of Troi and Data to try to convince Picard not to destroy the ship, that is essentially what happens.
Nagilum-Data asks Picard what death is. “Oh, is that all?” Picard muses. He explains that there are many perspectives on afterlives and nonexistence before contributing his: “our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.”
Nagilum accepts this as a satisfactory exploration of the concept of death—participating in the exchange of knowledge on Picard’s terms. But not before Picard waits out the self-destruct timer to the very last second. He doubts their freedom, doubts that his surroundings aren’t another illusion. This is the danger of Picard’s open-mindedness. There is fear in the idea that reality is more than it seems, as well as joy. Part of what, I think, is special about Star Trek—and what causes so many conversations about its core identity—is the degree to which each series balances the depiction of that fear and joy.
Once the Enterprise is safe, Nagilum delivers a summary of its findings: limited beings “thrive on conflict”, are “quick to judge, slow to change,” “selfish”, “have no common ground.” Given some inaccuracies in the simulated environment, like the eagerness with which a fake Romulan warship explodes, this serves as an example of how a scientist’s gaps in knowledge and unconscious biases can steer their conclusions. (If Nagilum wanted a measure of humanoid life, then it could have simulated an environment in which the Enterprise was in control over other beings in the same way Nagilum was.)
In passing this judgment, Nagilum reveals that it judged the Enterprise by the same rubric that Captain Picard seems to use when evaluating the life forms he encounters throughout the series. These are understandable moral and emotional concepts that Nagilum cares about—Nagilum is unknown, but not unknowable. Nagilum is the paradox and point of many cosmic mysteries. This vast being echoes the vast societal architectures that humans, with human emotions and motivations, use to alienate and disenfranchise each other. Perhaps this is why Picard chooses not to turn the mirror on Nagilum, and instead points out the trait they share: curiosity.
MINUTE MYSTERIES
This month I wrote a little about gardening and community in the video game Mutazione over at Imaginary Papers, a quarterly newsletter from Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination about, in the words of editor Joey Eschrich, “the tangled relationships between how we envision the future and how we see ourselves today.” I deeply enjoy this newsletter’s approach to science fiction, and was happy to be a part of this issue. Check it out!