Force of Nature

[DanGussin]

Ok so maybe a bit of the odd one here but I liked this Episode.

I have had those days where you are just coasting along playing with the cat and working on hobbies and then all hell breaks loose and you look back in utter disbelief at how fast things went very wrong.

One of the points this episode makes is that nobody might realize at first that we might have already gone off the cliff when it comes to the environment and climate change. So, it makes sense to take action sooner rather than latter.

 

[Thomas Elliot]

I just saw this. I kept waiting for the sister to be wrong, there’s something bigger at play, maybe an evil plot. But no, that was it. Just a very unsubtle PSA about curbing our emissions to protect the environment at the expense of the story. Social messages and allegory is Star Trek. But to make an episode feel like an hour-long PSA at the expense of something so fundamental to Star Trek??

It also made the universe feel small. So it was only now that fuel emissions, I mean warp drive is messing up space? There weren’t warp capable cultures hundreds, thousands or millions of years before Vulcans, humans, etc?

This was a very poor idea, and the execution even worse. It’s almost like a parody of TNG’s cringed, unsubtle moralizing stereotype.

Only good thing is Data and Georgia exchange about Spot and phasers.

 

[JesterFace]

Weren't the "folding" nacelles on USS Voyager meant to solve this problem?
If so, did USS Defiant on DS9 have another solution to this problem? Defiant didn't seem to fold nacelles. They were warping around for a long time after TNG. Internal folding nacelles maybe?
On the other hand, why bother with the folding before going into warp, couldn't the nacelles just be in that position all the time?

Perhaps after this problem was discovered there was an easy way to fix the problem without changing much of the ship's structure?

 

[Orphalesion]

It just wasn't a good idea. Throttling the speed of movement in a show that heavily relies on moving to different locales in space is not very helpful int telling stories.
It didn't serve any dramatic purpose either because "will we make it to this location in time" didn't pop up very often (and there was already a way to include that, simply by making the location very remote) and if needed the writers just drew the "we got permission to exceed the speed limit" card.

And it was never gonna last, especially not in a franchise like Star Trek. It's like a new run on Superman changing the rules so that he can only fly once a day, stuff like that is gonna get retconned as soon as they can.

 

[Thomas Elliot]

Their goal was apparently to spread awareness, and secondly, hopefully tell a good story.
The whole episode felt like I was being lectured to. Even Picard and Geordi’s last exchange might as well had them turn to the camera and ask “what are YOU going to do?”

 

[NigellaDeanna20]

Did they ever come to a resolution for the subspace tares or what ever they we're calling them? Or did they just slowly forget about it?

not as far as I'm aware of. Like most loose threads on TNG they pretty much left them dangling.

 

[at Quark's]

A problem with this episode is that the damage seems to be "common" to the warp technologies used by the Federation and other species such as Klingon, Romulans, etc (there is that quote after all they are sure the Klingons will abide by them but the Romulans won't). So all these species all using the same (or similar) type(s) of warp would suggest that this particular form of warp is one a lot of races would discover/settle on as the "best" way of warp.

However we also know that Trek has a "deep past". Civilizations that were everywhere thousands, millions, or even billions of years earlier. So how come subspace is not damaged a whole lot more because of that history? Is the type of warp used by most major races in TNG actually quite rare? Does subspace slowly heal itself over time? Do most civilizations find the "easy fix" the Federation found and quickly implemented in ships such as Voyager?

 

[Sidewinder]

Their goal was apparently to spread awareness, and secondly, hopefully tell a good story.
The whole episode felt like I was being lectured to. Even Picard and Geordi’s last exchange might as well had them turn to the camera and ask “what are YOU going to do?”

Exactly. The show overall didn't get overly preachy too often, but this one was one of the worst instances of it.

 

[Thomas Elliot]

However we also know that Trek has a "deep past". Civilizations that were everywhere thousands, millions, or even billions of years earlier. So how come subspace is not damaged a whole lot more because of that history?

Yes! Exactly!
That's another reason why this episode was so bad. I can get humans polluting the Earth would start causing problems on our planet because there was no intelligent life on the planet prior to us, and we all started using cars and fossil fuels at the same time.
But in the whole universe? And in the world of Star Trek? Different intelligent life started at different times, like you said, in the ancient past even. So if the universe can get "polluted," how is it only now that this phenomenon started? Why don't they notice other forms of pollution to the universe from various forms of technology? And from past civlizations? It just makes the universe feel way too small, and the history of it, so much shorter.

 

[Timo]

I don't think this makes the episode bad per se. Rather, an idiotic overreaction to the perceived but not truly comprehended problem is what one would expect of mankind. It simply goes to show how small we are, how we think in such selfish terms that even our altruism is aimed at our own belly buttons.

That the "problem" goes away later on with zero mention of a "solution" is also highly realistic. Again, it would be way too embarrassing for humans to admit to their error here, when simply ignoring it serves all the purposes already.

In retrospect, I rather like "Force of Nature" and the perhaps 1½ later references to it in TNG. It does add a parameter or two to the all-important Trek depiction of the human equation, and does it very nicely through our engineer fellah who is appropriately blind to this thing that is so close to him...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[suarezguy]

The whole episode felt like I was being lectured to. Even Picard and Geordi’s last exchange might as well had them turn to the camera and ask “what are YOU going to do?”

I liked that even though it was preaching it portrayed it was sympathetic to the "wrongdoers", admitted that giving up high warp speed/fossil fuels is a huge sacrifice for the characters and society, not something that can easily be done or even accepted. And it is pretty interesting that for the next 7 years they don't solve or, 2 or 3 times just in TNG, focus on the problem, that also an interesting, though probably unintended, reflection or commentary that environmental protection is important but so are a lot of other priorities.