Home Soil
Doesn’t this all seem a little familiar?
The Devil In The Details
While the patented IDFC approach means we’ve not actually yet run into “The Devil In The Dark” yet, it feels like it’d be ridiculous to try and discuss “Home Soil” without referencing that episode. I’m certainly far from the first person to make the entirely obvious link – non-carbon-based alien creature from outside human experience gets annoyed at its home being invaded, and so responds with lethal force.
There are no new stories under this or any other sun, of course. Noting similarity hardly counts as a useful analysis. What matters rather more are the differences.
Initial delving does not offer encouragement. The claustrophobic atmosphere and almost mythic sense of humanity having unearthed something which then comes for them in the night is swept away. With them goes much of what made “The Devil In The Dark” work, which is to say a) the devil, and b) the dark. Flipping the alien over from living in darkness to fearing it makes for a classic example of the fact, that just a trope can be flipped, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it should be.
(I’m also not sure why no-one pointed out a subterranean life-form which can’t survive in mood lighting doesn’t make much sense, but right now we have bigger terraforming technicians to laser-fry.)
Perhaps the total lack of atmosphere is a sly nod to the very concept of terraforming? Certainly that seems to be the episode’s focus, to a frankly ridiculous extent. The first act in particular seems to consist almost entirely of a series of bitesize science lectures regarding a discipline that doesn’t even exist. It’s like being forced to read a Stephen Hawking book on hoverboards, except that would at least come with equations.
Even this is only part of the larger problem, which is that the terraforming angle just doesn’t work. At the most trivial level, all these conversations over whether Velara III really is suitable for terraforming reminds me of Wrath Of Khan, which certainly does the episode no favours – imagine if Coppola announced he was doing a fourth Godfather feature focused on economic fluctuations in the price of oranges. Then there’s the motivation issue. In “The Devil In The Dark”, you can understand why Vanderberg feels under pressure. The Federation needs the material his mine is bringing in, to the point where they’ve imposed a quota. It’s not clear what the penalty will be for failing to make that quota, but the fact Kirk approves of Vanderberg refusing to evacuate the mine after fifty people have died makes it clear there are serious stakes involved. [1]
In contrast, there’s no sense of why Mandl’s project is worth saving. We’re repeatedly told (entirely unconvincingly) that terraforming is awesome and fascinating and challenging and so on, but there’s no suggestion the Federation actually requires the resulting real-estate. There’s no outside pressure on Mandl in the way there is on Vanderberg. The episode tries to deal with this by just stating that terraforming experts are “often obsessive”. That’s not a motivation, it’s an admission thinking of a motivation was just too hard. Mandl doesn’t want to stop because he doesn’t want to stop. He’s a Captain Planet villain in an episode that needed to make him at least slightly sympathetic, if it was to have any chance of succeeding in what it’s attempting.
Vaka Rangi
Let’s talk about what the episode thinks it’s doing, then. As best as I can tell, it’s reminding us of the extraordinary acts of self-deception the human mind is capable of, when seeing the truth would be inconvenient. Which is a fair enough theme for a story. It’s laid on a bit thick, I suppose. “Home Soil” basically paraphrases Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his supervisor’s blind obsession depends on his not understanding it”.
But fine. It’s a solid foundation, and it’s not like we haven’t seen a fair few Trek episodes fail to even clear the low bar of crudely making a banal but valid point. The larger problem is that “Home Soil” tries to explore its theme in two different ways, that don’t really align.
The first approach is fairly obvious, and effectively summarised by the scene in the briefing room where two white guys squirm as they try to justify both why they refused to see shifting geometric shapes as evidence of communication, and why they didn’t bother to brief their Polynesian colleague on what was happening.
Not just any Polynesian colleague, either. Luisa Kim was played by Dr Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, a Hawaiian born explorer and anthropologist, and the first Polynesian woman to join the National Geographic Society. Her anthropological specialty is indigenous cultures in remote locations. While it certainly isn’t my place to speculate on her opinions regarding this episode, then, her presence here adds a certain depth to her character’s astonishment that no-one thought to tell her they’d found Velara III’s equivalent of the Rongorongo tablets [2]. For sure settlers arriving from across an ocean (of stars) to reshape the landscape to their own liking, no matter who or what dies in the process, is a story Lindsey will have come across more than once. At least Mandl and Bensen just ignored the local language, rather than trying to destroy it.
All of this is basically fine on its own terms, as I say, and the decision to explicitly exempt the Polynesian scientist from complicity in colonialism is probably the smartest call this script makes.
The problem comes with combining a story where colonists ignore the effect their encroachment has on the lives of the locals, with a story where people debate whether the locals actually are alive in any real sense. The result of this combination is a story that cedes far too much ground to the terraformers. In a world where governments justified the stealing of other people’s land because they didn’t count as people in quite the same sense, you really don’t want your heroes earnestly discussing whether people restructuring a place for their own purposes are really harming anybody.
“This Is Organism Talk”
Having noted the problem with putting this story in the intersection of criticisms of colonialism and questions about what constitutes life, let’s set the former aside. Velara IIIs’ pulsing crystals are probably one of the best ideas this episode has; it’s worth asking the question of how using them to explore our conception of life could have worked, absent the baggage Mandl and co’s presence heaps on.
Certainly, there’s a lot to love about the Velarans as a concept. A gigantic subterranean crystal supercomputer that can rebuild itself from its smallest constituent elements? Yes please. We should note as well that the idea could easily have been presented as threatening – even horrific – but that the show takes the much more interesting and valuable route of making them a source of wonder first and foremost, and only a threat as a reaction to human interference.
Choosing self-replicating crystals as your edge case for a definition of life is pretty smart, too. “Home Soil” aired a little over a year after the publication of Richard Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker [3], Chapter 6 of which comprises a discussion of what might have been the first and most basic form of life on Earth. The hypothesis Dawkins uses there is one first suggested by Graham Cairns-Smith, who argued the easiest way for the building blocks of life to gain the ability to reproduce was just to use a self-replication method that already existed in chemistry – crystal lattices. Drop a crystal into the right kind of super-saturated solution, and the crystal will grow, and fracture, and those fractures will grow again, each one perfectly copying the structure of the original.
Whether Sabaroff, Geurs, and Sanchez read Dawkin’s book, or had come across Cairn-Smith’s theory before, or simply came up with the idea themselves doesn't really matter. It makes perfect sense to use crystals as a starting point for talking about what constitutes life. In theory.
In practice, though, we rapidly collide with two problems. The fact this episode comes after “Datalore” is one – we’ve already seen how the Trek galaxy includes crystalline life forms, which makes dismissing the Velarans seem like nothing but a bizarre outbreak of sizeism. But it’s Data himself that causes the biggest issues here. Or rather, his presence makes an issue out of Doctor Crusher’s definition of life. Data is standing right there when she lists the requirements for something to be considered organic life:
Must have the ability to assimilate, respirate, reproduce, grow and develop, move, secrete and excrete.
Firstly, that seems like a terrible definition, apparently excluding pretty much all plants and fungi. More to the point, though, the relevant question here is whether the crystals are life at all, not whether that life would qualify as organic. By conflating the two Crusher basically suggests that Lieutenant Commander Data – who cannot respirate or grow, at the very least – doesn’t constitute a lifeform. Somehow, the script misses the issue here totally, with Data calmly standing in silence while his colleague casually declares that life only has meaning when applied to organics.
Put simply, this isn’t a story that TNG can do. The Original Series, fine, and probably Enterprise too, on a technicality (Discovery might struggle thanks to Airium). Not here, though. And it’s not as if this is simply a bum note. It’s part of a larger attitude problem. Yes, our heroes ultimately conclude that the crystals are a life-form – the fact that it starts trying to converse with them making it difficult to take any other position. Instead of actually working this angle, though, and trying to figure out how to start a dialogue, Picard has the lab evacuated, and immediately heads back to the same people who caused this whole mess to ask for their input. He’s appropriately short with them, sure, but his response to accidentally kidnapping a sentient being is to keep it locked up while he asks for feedback from the people who’d been busy trying to kill it.
As a result, the crystals take the only form of action available to them. Denied the ability to negotiate with those who have invaded their land, and who have begun to exterminate them, they declare war. It’s only then that Picard wants to talk, and by this point it’s too late. The crystals have determined, entirely reasonably, that they can’t trust the Federation.
So what does Picard do? He starts to torture his prisoner. He tortures his prisoner, and then demands that it recognises a minor relief in that torture as proof he can be trusted.
This is nothing short of appalling. There are plenty of other episodes of The Next Generation, and still more across the whole franchise, in which an alien race responds to the Federation’s presence by initiating hostilities. Can anyone think of another instance of that set-up in which the response was to deliberately hurt members of the attacking race during an attempt to negotiate? Or do the rules change when the life-forms you’re dealing with don’t look remotely like you?
And yes, I recognise the counterargument here – Picard didn’t have much choice given the threat to the ship. That’s narrowly true, I admit, though as I say Picard is far from blameless for the fact the threat exists in the first place. The bigger problem though is that nobody thinks to point out that this necessary evil is still, you know, evil.
This is what finally kills any enthusiasm I can muster for this episode. It’s a story about colonisation in which not only do the colonised have to prove themselves alive and intelligent, the message is still that they don’t deserve to be thought of in the same way as actual people. That inflicting pain upon them until they agree to be reasonable is a viable approach. Had the Velarans responded to the lights being turned back on by immediately destroying the Enterprise entirely, I’d have been hard-pushed to blame them.
To state the obvious, when you can see an argument that everyone dying would have been a reasonable end to an episode, that’s something of a problem. This isn’t the show’s worst story so far – it’s been both less engaging and more reactionary. What’s more concerning is the degree to which this latest failure seems to stem from just not having much interest in delivering quality. There’s one good idea here, which apparently was then simply left to accrete whatever nearby detritus it can, until it reached sufficient size – an inverse pearl, forty-two minutes across, built up with layer upon layer of crap.
Something has to change. And it will. “Home Soil” marks the departure of Gene Roddenberry from the role of head writer. For all the franchise owes him, not least the fact this show exists at all, it’s hard to see how to frame his taking a backseat as anything other than a very good idea.
The fact Roddenberry was better off out of that seat didn’t guarantee we’d do better with whomever sat themselves down next, of course. Either way, though, the Hurley era begins now.
Ordering
(Ordering this cycle will be done by comparing the median episode of The Animated Series and Voyager in their respective first seasons, "The Infinite Vulcan" and “Ex Post Facto”, and deciding where those episodes would fit in-between the four episodes in the cycle.)
2. (The Infinite Vulcan)
3. Home Soil
[1] I’ll have more to say on all of this when we get to the episode itself in May, naturally.
[2] The unfortunate corollary to all this is that it’s even more skeezy and unpleasant when Troi – professional counsellor, expert in psychology, and a more-or-less literal mind-reader – tells Riker he might get a better sense of Kim than she can, if he tries charming his way into her brain pan.
There are times I think the main reason no-one could imagine TNG as being based in a static location is that it’d mean the sexual harassment accusations would pile up past the point Picard could ignore them.
[3] The constant reader will be fully aware of the low regard I have for Dawkins in almost all respects, but The Blind Watchmaker, being that rare example of something Dawkins talks about while actually being qualified to do so, is a book I enjoyed immensely.