“Night Terrors” is written by: Pamela Douglas and Jeri
Taylor, from a story by: Shari Goodhartz, and is directed by: Les Landau. It was produced under production code 191,
was the 17h episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4,
the 91st episode overall, and was broadcast on March 18, 1991.
The quirks of the 26 episode season means sometimes there’s
an episode of a show where because the episode count needs to be filled the
premise is something just a little off. “Night
Terrors” is one such episode from the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next
Generation that decides what the show really needs is a haunted starship
story in the middle of March. There’s a
lost art to episodes like this because looking at it it’s a fairly standard
episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and network television. Because the current streaming model of television
does not allow for more than 10 episodes in a season if the show is lucky, typically
now being limited to six to eight episodes, there is no reason to write a
random episode where a starship is found with a dead crew and haunted by ghosts. Okay, so it isn’t a case of real ghosts, the episode
builds to the twist that the phenomenon is entirely natural and due to the
binary star system, the Brattain (or possibly Brittain as is written
on the model), the Enterprise, and a third unseen ship that has a
psychic crew reaching out for help. The
reaching out for help is not working for this crew because humanity is not
psychic, instead the psychic emissions are disrupting the sleep of both crews. This has led the crew of the Brittain
to massacre each other; the aftermath of the massacre is the opening of the
episode which Les Landau shoots quite atmospherically. It’s a dark opening for the episode and the
lighting is intentionally kept low so the viewer can fill in the gaps of how
awful the situation is. The script after
the pre-credits lingers on how empty the Brittain is and the morgue is a
set used for multiple scenes in the episode as a constant reminder of the death
even before the haunting begins.
The haunting itself is through sleep deprivation, the
episode taking place over the course of at least a few days as the crew of the Enterprise
fall asleep without entering REM. This
creates paranoia and anger even before hallucinations begin. The best hallucination is Dr. Crusher’s: she sees
the corpses under their shrouds sit up straight. It’s small but Gates McFadden plays it perfectly,
using her own logic and assumptions about the situation to bring Crusher back
to reality. There’s also a hallucination
of Riker’s bed being full of snakes, which is quite funny for me because that
is a recurring nightmare of mine which I am certain has no deeper meaning at
all. The paranoia among the crew fares
slightly less well for “Night Terrors”, mainly because it is almost entirely
rooted outside of the main cast. The best
scenes of paranoia are between Miles and Keiko O’Brien early in the episode, Miles
becoming jealous and accusing his wife of infidelity which is a bit over the
top considering both O’Briens are relatively minor characters, but they are
characters we know and have spent time with this season. The rest of the paranoid characters are day players,
and they don’t really get the time necessary to get the audience to care about
them, only serving a function in the plot.
The buildup to the reveal of what is causing the paranoia and subsequent
resolution of the episode also leaves some to be desired. Pamela Douglas and Jeri Taylor’s script
simply lacks the dramatic tension and energy in the climax, it’s just the main
cast figuring out that there is a third ship stopped, the psychic wavelength
that Troi is tuned into coming from the ship, and using an influx of hydrogen
to save both ships. The final lines ordering
Picard to go to sleep are good and witty, but the climax of the episode does
just run out of steam.
Atypically for an episode of Star Trek: The Next
Generation is that “Night Terrors” is actually quite a good showcase for
Deanna Troi. Because of the focus on
horror, Douglas and Taylor use Troi as one of two characters largely unaffected
by the paranoia and hallucinations while awake, however, when she sleeps, she
finds herself in dreams that are not her own.
Marina Sirtis is actually given material dealing with Troi’s empathic
abilities. She spends much of the
episode while awake attempting to communicate with the one survivor of the Brittain,
a Betazoid science officer. In terms of material,
it is not particularly deep, but this is a series that has often sidelined Troi
and its other female characters as well as reducing them to their gender. This episode is particularly good for Troi by
making her be a counselor and active in the actual resolution (it’s Troi and Crusher
who work out what is going on) and it’s clear Sirtis is enjoying the material. Her best scene is saving Worf from a suicide
attempt due to his lost Klingon honor, emotions being pushed to their limits
from the lack of deep sleep. It’s a
scene that just kind of flies by and both Sirtis and Michael Dorn play it so
well it ends up the best scene of the episode.
Even her dreamscape has Troi as an active participant, fitted into a
flying harness and acting on a greenscreen in a genuinely good attempt at
making an atmospheric dreamscape on a 1991 television budget. The dream sequences could be paced better,
but the attempt to do something surreal like a dreamscape is laudable and
giving the material to Sirtis does take advantage of what she’s been doing with
Troi even when the show hasn’t been serving her well.
Overall, “Night Terrors” has the potential for
greatness that it never quite reaches due to a couple of the production
decisions that keep the main cast as entirely rational and not really knowing
how to structure the climax. The episode
excels at being a ghost story in the trappings of a science fiction television show
and actually showcasing Star Trek: The Next Generation’s female characters
without reducing them to their status as female characters. 7/10.
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