Home Soil

** (2 stars out of 5)

"Home Soil" offered me lasers and a charred corpse once, but the appeal grows thin. Could my Trek Blog project itself be flawed? Could I have overlooked something? Like today's 'scientists'?

Velara III terraforming project has fallen behind.

Director Kurt Mandel is the grouchiest space farmer you ever did see, and Troi says he's also panicking about something.

Luisa Kim introduces her co-suspects... I mean, co-workers: Arthur Mullet... I mean, Malencon and Bjorn Baldspot... I mean, Benson.

Hang on, I got them backwards. Bald Arthur is seared to death by a laser drill while trying to siphon off the weirdly precise and uniform subsurface saline. The laser drill then guns for Mr. Data, who is fast and strong enough to destroy the offending device. Data is certain it operated with conscious will. Someone programmed it for... MURDER!

The android and Geordi find an odd, flashing, itty bitty crystal on a planet MANY TIMES confirmed, certified, assured, very definitely, to be lifeless. Maybe.

"How could it be alive? It's inorganic." says Geordi (who like everyone else today has a weird attitude toward the impossibility of living rock from a Federation which has known about Hortas and Excalbians for over nine decades. And a crew that just confronted a planet-eating Crystalline Entity. While talking to a fellow made of non-organics. You know, Data? Yellow shirt? Standing right behind you?)

Will goes to Luisa's room to offer comfort, Riker-style! This guy's trying to beat Kirk's seduction record... fat chance!

The nerds peer at the lightning bugs under glass, until the critters get tired of waiting, reproduce, and get chatty. The shiny silicon crystals have been etch-a-sketching geometric shapes in the sand for a while and the terraformers have been... utterly ignoring it. Dicks.

Well, no more! Now it's locking people in the programmer's rest room! While it's good to hear that these planet-shaping godlike future people still pee, this cannot stand!

The Velaran 'Microbrain' declares war on the "Ugly Giant Bags of Mostly Water" and has seized direct control of the ship's computer. Every moment counts, so they sit down in the lounge to brainstorm some talking points for a quarterly review of best practices.

The Giants Bags win by turning the lights down slightly, accept the Microbrain surrender, and put them back in their sandbox.

'Perhaps the lesson we've learned from this near tragedy will prevent blah blah, we've never heard of a Horta, nor Horton Hears a Who. Durpy durpy durp.'

Deanna's tears for the being are most convincing. I was moved by this myself once, and glad somebody still has some frickin' empathy. It's tough to care about a jelly bean in a bell jar, but she made it work. Yay, Troi!

The Devil in the Dark

***** (5 stars out of 5)

In the previous entry I mentioned the munchies. Well, how about a planet where the pizza cooks and eats YOU?

The earthy miners of Janus VI are a gruff, tough, pastel jump-suited breed. They supply the mineral Pergium for the Federation Purgatoriums... I mean, life support systems. Which is all very well if a horrible monster isn't melting you by the dozens.

There are millions of symmetrical globular nodules lying around these blue caverns with no commercial value. Spock suggests the monster might be the first known silicon-based life-form. Silicon-based life is physiologically impossible, McCoy insists. (They proved that back in the day, mostly by stuffing it into women's boobs.)

The murdering monster can't be stopped by a single phaser, and it secretes a corrosive acid strong enough to dissolve anything. It moves through rock with ease. Kirk and Spock set out to hunt it down.

If it is the last of its kind, Spock says, to kill it would be a crime against science. But between them, they can think of no alternative.

They shoot a chunk out of it with a phasers- yup, it's silicon-based. (One of those rare occasions when Science Officer Spock is proved correct in matters of science.)

In Spock's theory it is imperative not to damage the little bronze-coloured silicon globes.

Kirk is faced with the killer unknown and he makes what is, for me, the highly brave and admirable choice to lower his weapon.

"So what do we do now? Just... talk it over?"

At Kirk's order, Spock uses the mind-meld and establishes that the being is a highly sophisticated animal that calls itself a Horta. It burns the English phrase NO KILL I into the rock. As Spock gets beneath its searing agony he gets some perspective: it regards humans as murderers, the repugnant devil in the dark.

Kirk orders McCoy to heal this chatty rock shark. "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer."

"You're a healer, there's your patient."

"Walk carefully in the Vault of Tomorrow. Sorrow for the murdered children." intones the Spock-Horta.

Kirk figures it out: the globes are eggs, and the monster is their mother. He manages to stop the angry mob from brandishing torches (just slightly too late for the red shirt security crew they already bludgeoned unconscious.)

McCoy trowels silicon thermo-concrete into Mother Horta's wound and saves her life.

"By golly, Jim, I'm beginning to think I can cure a rainy day."

As a grown-up, the Horta is quite clearly a man under an elaborately decorated rug. But Horta designer/portrayer Janos Prohaska created a thing of beauty, weirdly elegant and affordable. Yes, it always reminded me of pizza but I believed in this creature. To the boy I was, this was a real Horta.

With understanding achieved, the little devils hatching by the thousands are going to make Janus VI the mineral treasure-house to a thousand planets.

I'm curious about Federation child labour laws. Yes, they jump right into their work, but they are minors, after all.