Where Silence Has Lease

* (1 star out of 5)

Worf and Riker use Worf's exercise program on the holodeck. They battle a Ninja Turtle and Skeletor to the death, as you do in the eighties. Worf gets a little TOO into it and almost stabs Riker, too. This is the last laudable moment of the episode AND IT'S BEFORE THE OPENING CREDITS!

I'm not a drinker anymore, but the blissful numbness of alcohol would probably help you get through this episode.

Oh, look, what fun, it's a hole in space. (Yer a hole in space! You space-hole.) The absence of everything seems like something to devote a whole damn hour to...

When asked, Data claims nothing remotely like this has ever before been observed, when of course, it's a lot like the hole in space from 'The Immunity Syndrome". Or any old hole in space you'd care to name from everything ever.

Zooming in on it with scanners fails to make it more interesting.

'It does know how to do these things, doesn't it?' Pulaski asks of Data. What a delightful old racist!

Engulfed in blackness, at 17 minutes into a discussion about nothing they drop a beacon, drive away from it, and meet it coming towards them from up ahead. O.K., I have to give it this one. That is a little eerie. But mostly, it has me longing for the good old days of 'Catspaw'. No, not really.

They easily annihilate a Romulan warbird, then see their sister ship Yamato 1305-E. Riker and Worf beam aboard the empty ship and jump at spooky sounds in labyrinthine hallways.

It seems they are rats in a lab run by something called Nagilum. Pulaski refuses to have sex in front of it to demonstrate reproduction, so it plans to kill up to 500 of them to study death. Can't it get the Internet in here?

Nagilum starts with a horrible spastic demise for redshirt Haskell. I don't know what Haskell saw and felt as he died but I hope it was less painful than re-watching "Where Silence Has Lease".

In order to have some control over their fate, Picard and Riker set a 20 minute auto-destruct countdown which for some reason means Nagilum lets them go. I thought it wanted to study death? Isn't a thousand people exploding twice as interesting?

Hava Nagilum taunts Picard- saying he's too aggressive. This from the outer space equivalent of a troll under a bridge.

There's probably a message here along the lines of science not being a good excuse to kill things, but it's a pretty dull way to tell that story, even for 'a bottle show'.

Picard observes that humans share at least one trait with Nagilum- curiosity. He's apparently too polite to mention the callous douchebaggery.