31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 15 (Spooky Star Trek TNG Episodes)

Captain's blog, Stardate 72832.4. After first watching it roughly one year ago, and viewing it on and off with lots of breaks between seasons, we have finally made it to me writing about Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm shuffling my hats about here, but the role remains much the same. Instead of waffling about Doctor Who like a third-rate Phil Sandifer, now I'm waffling about Star Trek like a third-rate Josh Marsfelder. Which is weird 'cause he's here right now. Ooh, breakin' the fourth wall. That's spooky. So is the assortment of television I've selected here! Even though there's so much I could say about how this show has positively changed me, I'm on a bit of a time limit here. So, I have to fire this off quick. I wanted to pick a handful of episodes that have more spooky elements to them. I don't know what it is, but late-era TNG had a whole bunch of episodes with gothic or surreal dream-like elements to them. Really, I'm almost spoiled for choice and wouldn't even need to stick to good episodes to do it! (Though, given what Fandom thinks, arguably my last choice didn't...). So, here are some words on some spooky-ish Star Trek episodes, and we begin with...


6x21- FRAME OF MIND


The short version: Commander Riker gets a healthy dose of unreality.

What IS reality?

Oh, this is a fun one. In the Higurashi post, I made a big deal out of how that show deals with mystery and unreality and how we never really find out what the truth of the matter is. For 30 minutes of this show, we and Commander Riker are put through the same ringer. Things are made far more interesting by this being a Star Trek story, though; namely the idea of narrative collapse. The implication of the Enterprise being the delusion of one guy locked up in a mental health facility is a direct attack on Star Trek's ability to tell a story. No, not only that, but a direct attack on the bonds the audience has formed with the crew of the Enterprise over 6 seasons. Here and now, it threatens to Tommy Westphall this shit as the imaginations of imaginary people. The conflict here is twofold, then; Riker's need to discover which world is real and which is fake, and our need to know that the world of Star Trek is fake only in our own world. All of this is tied to this almost metafictional concept of Riker's performance in the play, Frame Of Mind... and doesn't that obfuscate things more? Riker as a performer in a play with the same name as the episode? Fiction is all a lie, but a lie whose truths can inspire us in reality. Frame of Mind, with Riker's fractured sense of reality, threatens to make the fiction which inspired us unreal. That's the true terror inherent in Frame of Mind, and the episode always keeps you on the back foot. You're never quite sure what's going on until Riker's triumphant phaser gambit shatters all of the fake images. This was indeed all engineered by aliens, thank god. Star Trek is a real imaginary story. The show can continue. It's not a traditional horror story, but it's psychological drama with a good dose of narrative collapse and a real good episode. On to...


7x06- PHANTASMS

The short version: Data has bad dreams and briefly becomes a slasher.

Mm, Diet Riker Cherry.

All that talk about unreality comes right back a season later. We've talked about nightmares here before. Freddy Krueger is the king of those haunts, but he's not out here. He cannot boldly go where no one has gone before; only Jason Voorhees can claim to have done that. No, this time we have Data and his recurring nightmares, each with more surreal and horrific imagery than the last. Whether it's Data being torn apart by miners, Dr. Crusher drinking from Riker's face with a straw, or Deanna Troi as a sentient cake being cut into slices... there is some absolutely fucked-up shit going on here. There's more technical malarkey about the ship's new warp core not working, and it all ties into the plot of the nightmares. Eventually they invade Data's waking world, and he sees hungry mouths appearing on people's skin. Hell, in a scene I found pretty goddamn divisive on first viewing, Troi in the waking world gets attacked by Data and stabbed in the shoulder. The camera before this happens moves with Troi, very much in the cinematography of a slasher film. It doesn't seem to be from Data's POV, as we never see him in the shots where Troi is looking back. Eventually Captain Picard and Geordi LaForge go into Data's dreams via the holodeck, indeed travelling where no one has gone before... well, save Freddy Krueger. As I said, though, he ain't out here. Sigmund Freud is here though, for... some reason. He gave Data holo-counseling earlier and most of his advice is full of shit, so that's funny I guess. It was interphase organisms literally eating everyone's cells. That's the solution to this plot, and Data's dreams were a warning and he saves the day. This is another really great episode, and late-era TNG's strange dream-like nature is given full showing here. The bit with Deanna as the cake seriously fucked with me the first time I saw this. There's just one episode left, and we got ourselves something here...


7x14- SUB ROSA

The short version: AH HUH HUH HUH BEVERLY CRUSHER'S HAUNTED SEX CANDLE HUH HUH

Still a better love story than Twilight.

I'm not really a part of Star Trek Fandom, with a Capital F. As such, I don't really know much about the standard baseline opinions of said Fandom. Imagine my surprise after watching what I thought was a quite interesting episode, then. Sub Rosa is a supposed dud, a Shit Episode much maligned for being about... well, Beverly Crusher inheriting a candle haunted by a ghost who wants to do all sorts of erotic things to her. You can theorize all you want about why Fandom doesn't think this works, but I ain't here to do that. Here's why I think this one's not bad. It has an atmosphere. We're on basically Space Scotland, there are dark and stormy nights, and there's even fog rolling along the floor of the Enterprise. Yes, it's all due to weather control fuckups, but that's only in-universe. This is a tale of gothic romance... in Star Trek. So, the erotic spirit lurking within the haunted sex candle is... I forget the technobabble used at the end. Space plasma or some shit. It's a clash of genres. Star Trek is doing Gothic Romance, and this story is charged with eroticism. Not just Beverly Crusher laying down while green fog rolls on top of her making her move around in as much sexual pleasure as primetime TV can get away with, but there's very frank discussion between Beverly and Troi about Beverly's grandmother, her journals, and her own erotic accounts of adventure with Ronin the sex candle ghost. It may seem like some shlocky gothic romance a la Twilight, but what elevates it is the climax. Beverly Crusher has actual agency in her own goddamned romance story, and when her sex ghost starts zapping people with green lightning and possessing her grandmother's body, she starts to realize that maybe this asshole doesn't have her best interests in mind. People are getting zapped and hurt, and she's a doctor so her instinct is to help hurt people before selfishly giving into her own pleasures. So, it's her who ends up zapping the sex candle and dissipating Ronin before he can possess her to keep on living. I like that a lot, and I really dig this episode! It's not as much a story "for" me as it is for all the female fans of Star Trek who might be into this Gothic Romance stuff, but I can appreciate it all the same.


Captain's blog, supplemental. We've done all the spooky Star Trek episodes with time to spare for posting them. Tomorrow we journey... somewhere else. The planet Karn? The real world? The last record of a group of teens? A literal dream. Only the infinite cosmos knows. We're halfway through this voyage of fear now. Let's travel on ahead at Warp 6 and figure out what other experiences to enjoy.

Engage.