4x17 Night Terrors

[5.8/10] Horror is so tricky. You wouldn’t know it given how many low-budget horror movies come out on an annual basis. It’s considered one of the easier genres to pull off and still pull in an audience. But balancing scares, tension, mood, and plot is an appropriately perilous business and not every show or movie is up to it.

“Night Terrors” certainly isn’t. For one of the rare times Star Trek: The Next Generation aims to put on a genuine horror show, it’s a surprisingly languid episode. Despite the weird goings on, there’s not much progression until the very end. And there’s a lot of dead space, if you’ll pardon the expression. It lends the episode the air of a scarefest that leaves you checking your watch.

On the other hand, you can see what TNG is going for here. While the lack of narrative progression is pretty inexcusable, the show’s trying to build up a sense of maddening uncertainty and slow-burning panic. No one can figure out why everyone on the ship is hallucinating and becoming snippy with one another. No one’s sure why the symptoms are steadily (very steadily) getting worse. That’s intended to create a certain ominousness to the proceedings, a slow descent into madness, even if it often feels like a long slide into dullness.

The fun begins when our heroes find a Starfleet vessel that’s been missing for a month. They find the crew all dead, taken out in a series of fights, leaving behind a nothing but a series of conspiracy-minded log entries and one shell-shocked Betazoid crewman. Unsurprisingly, similarly mysterious things start happening aboard the Enterprise, with crewmen becoming testy and suspicious, and hallucinations popping up that disturb the senses.

The episode seems to take its cues from “The Tholian Web” of The Original Series. There’s the similar eeriness of finding another Starfleet ship where something’s gone terribly wrong, a spatial phenomenon that traps the Enterprise in place, and strange side effects that leave crewmembers cross or unhinged with one another. The difference is that the 1960s series made the most of the creepy atmosphere the storyline created, whereas TNG’s efforts to frighten or unnerve are much more hit or miss.

Some of the scares are just cheesy. Riker’s “Why did it have to be snakes?” moment feels silly. Picard’s fear of being smushed into the ceiling of the turbolift is pretty weak. And good lord, Troi’s nightmares, where she’s flying through a greenscreen background of swirling clouds amid cryptic words from “ominous voice #7”, is one of the hokiest things the show’s done in a while. I can appreciate TNG taking some big swings here, but there’s some substantial strikeouts to show for it.

In contrast, it’s striking how good the craft of the episode is elsewhere. Stalwart director Les Landau and his team deploy a lot of long, slow zooms to communicate the sort of creeping madness affecting the crew. The production team includes darker lighting throughout the episode to give the ship more of a haunted house feel, and even opts for red lighting when Worf’s on the verge of committing seppuku. Michael Westmore’s make-up team does great work at subtly conveying how beleaguered and out of sorts the crew is given the chemical imbalance in their brains due to the spatial phenomenon, with slight but noticeable changes in hair and shading. You can see the series’ crew having fun with this one, and I wish the story of the episode could live up to their work.

You can particularly see it in the episode’s best scare, when Dr. Crusher finds herself in a cargo room full of cadavers. There’s nothing flashy about the scene. But the way the corpses seem to have sat up when she wasn’t looking, combined with the claustrophobic camera work, creates some real eeriness that’s largely missing elsewhere. The corny synthesizer score to all of this doesn’t help, but in a few choice moments, the scares rise above it.

It’s hard to say why beyond the sense of doldrums between (and occasionally during) those bigger set pieces. Some of it may be the fact that we’ve done the “freaky hallucination” thing on TNG multiple times before, most notably in “Where No One Has Gone Before”. But some of it may just be the acting.

“Night Terrors” puts a lot of the episode on Troi’s shoulders and, god bless Mirina Sirtis, she’s just not up to it. There’s ways to use Troi effectively on TNG, but having her do a heap of high volume emoting, particularly shouting the same things over and over again, is just not the way to do it. Contrast her with the inimitable Patrick Stewart, who delivers a gutting monologue about watching his grandfather fade away, and conveys the nuances of a man afraid to lose his senses. Given the nature of the story, it makes sense to have empathic Troi be the linchpin rather than the ship’s captain, but where “Night Terrors” puts its focus has some unfortunate consequences.

It doesn’t help that the problem itself is a little silly and the solution comes out of nowhere. It turns out that the cause for all this unrest and dissension on the Enterprise is that no one on the ship can dream. The fact that an inability to dream causes hallucinations and paranoid thoughts doesn’t really click. If you dig in, you can extrapolate that the inability to dream means the crewmen aren’t getting restorative REM-sleep and thus we’re basically seeing our heroes in the throes of severe insomnia, but it’s a weird framing.

The especially frustrating thing is that the explanation is pretty cool and science fiction-y! It turns out the Enterprise is actually stuck in some sort of spatial rift. The attempted communications from the beings on the other side is blocking the humans’ (and Klingons’, I guess) ability to sleep. That’s a neat idea, one that imagines unfortunate knock-on effects for the way different species might try to communicate with one another.

Unfortunately, this conclusion emerges from guesswork that’s all too easily accurate, a pathology that afflicts most of the episode. Troi decides those beings are trying to communicate through her recurring nightmare. She and Data mange to interpret the cryptic message she’s been hearing in that nightmare as asking the Enterprise to shoot into some hydrogen to catalyze an explosion that will neutralize the rift. That’s a series of very big, very lucky leaps that leave the escape from this spooky predicament feeling unearned.

I like horror stories. I especially like the combination of horror and science fiction. (Hello Alien fans!) But they can be a hard thing to get right. It can be tough to earn those types of solutions which connect to both the scary and science-y parts of your tale. “Night Terrors” presents more of a snooze than a nightmare, with some good production work and a few nice scenes, spent on an episode that just can’t seem to get its scary story right.