I'm guessing we all know of how violent this episode gets, in fact it get's extremely aggressively violent and gruesome to the point of not only being disturbing but also out of place for Star Trek.
But let's discuss it and maybe try to understand why it became so violent or if the violent ending was even intentional.
What are your thoughts on the gruesome scene in this somewhat famous episode of TNG?
To me, it played like TNG was just trying to keep up with the times. This was, after all, in the first season of any
Star Trek show that was produced post-
Alien chest-burster. It seemed completely understandable, in that light; the queen critter even comes out of Remmick's chest, so there you go, they were doing an
Alien riff. But at the same time, it also played like a bad idea.
Phaser deaths are pretty disturbing, though I actually find them even more disturbing in many episodes of TOS where they are so...quick and clean....the person just causally "fading" out of existence *shudders*.
I agree with this completely. For some reason, in TWOK, TPTB felt the need to change the TOS dematerialization effect into something during which someone could scream in agony while getting burned out of existence. This change might also have a bearing on why they chose to go with the exploding head idea in "Conspiracy": somehow, the "fading" out of existence effect was no longer in vogue.
It's also worth fast-forwarding in TNG a couple of seasons to "The Vengeance Factor." Whats-her-name (Yuta) gets dramatically burned up by a phaser on maximum, as she is lunging at the Biker Alien (Chorgan). You can see the TWOK influence in the vaporization effect, and while they kept the sci-fi violence angle tilted more towards violence than it was in the TOS "fading out" effect, it's tamer than both TWOK and "Conspiracy." This tells me that TPTB didn't want to revisit exploding heads and chest-bursters anymore.
