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"Force of Nature" - why all the hate?

M

MikeS

Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
We "Trekies" like to think of ourselves as an enlightened bunch, and Trek has a history of tackling the big issues of the day. Even unpopular issues. This episode dealt with one such issue - environmentalism... Why did it fall on such deaf ears?

Is it because Western society doesn't want to be told it cannot go on consuming resources the way it has been? I picture the haters of this episode with their fingers in their ears humming to drown out the message, just because they cannot accept it. Fiddling-Emperor-Rome-Burns-Whilst springs to mind.
 
As an environmentalist, I appreciated that they were trying to do an allegory here, but still hate the episode. Regardless of the message, it's poorly directed, poorly acted, poorly thought out, overly simplistic/naive, and perhaps the most unforgiveable, boring.

I don't think the hate has anything to do with the message, as much as it's just a bad hour of television. *shrug*
 
My enjoyment of an episode has absolutely nothing to do with what allegory they're trying to incorporate.

I didn't hate the episode, although it wasn't particularly interesting, and the ramifications of the episode were stupid, even if they were pretty much ignored.
 
Still to this day I remember the episode discription in my local papers tv grid blurb STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION "Force Of Nature": Siblings say warp drive destroys universe.

I'm like...oh, exciting...
 
I don't think it has anything to do with the plot. It's the execution. I just posted this in the worst episode thread.

In the other thread I said:
Force of Nature is a Class 1 example of "taking your eye off the ball" because there are more important things. TNG, at this point in its history was probably 4th in order of priority for the powers that be. DS9 was in its second season, the movie was in preproduction and they were almost certainly planning for Voyager too. TNG did not have the lion share of the creative juices flowing through it at this point and it shows.

The show has all the hallmarks of being written the night before. They must have had nothing to shoot because it really is poorly executed. Season 7 is weak overall and this is pretty much the poorest effort. I mean, the first time I saw it I thought it was an episode about Data's cat. :wtf:

I mean, nothing happens for at least 20 minutes in. The pace is deathly slow and by the time the plot starts nobody cares...
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Just my thoughts.
 
One reason is that some of us were still interested in Star Trek at least in part as science fiction, rather than as some variation of Sunday School for nerds - and simply in terms of plausibility the dilemma they tried to create was so obviously forced, artificial and constructed entirely as grist for what trekkies roughly call "allegory" that it was insulting to any reasonable adult's intelligence.

Among other things, these people either didn't care or had no notion of the scale of the Universe in contrast to the supposedly devastating activities of the creatures in it. Meh.
 
Isn't this the episode with the "Geordi, I cannot stun my cat" speech? I think that's one of the best Geordi - Data scenes in the whole series, so it has something going for it at least. The rest of the episode is pretty forgettable but nowhere near "Code of Honor" bad.
 
I don't think it's bad in the "Code of Honor" sense or even the "Shades of Grey" sense. I think it's bad in that it's just not good drama. It does a really bad job of creating a compelling allegory that is both entertaining and teaches us something about ourselves.

Hell, even the central premise of the episode -- that our lifestyle can sometimes create unintended consequences and that we need to make sacrifices to avoid that -- is a joke from the beginning because we know the "warp speed limit" thing is never going to be followed through on. There were only a handful of episodes of TNG left by that point, and they just had the admiral of the week say "you're authorized to go really fast" for those, and after that the issue was completely ignored by DS9, Voyager and the movies. (Yeah, I know, Voyager's moving nacelles was supposed to be some new high tech thing that avoided the effect, but that was never mentioned on screen, is a cop out solution, and wasn't addressed on DS9.)
 
I thought the episode was OK, but Star Trek without warp drive is like Rocky without boxing. If you don't have warp drive, you don't have Trek! You can't get from planet to planet without it. Star Trek effectively cut itself off at the knees. They really had no choice but to ignore this story line in future episodes and movies.
 
I think I pretty much agree with many other posters. The concept was good (really good, actually), but the execution was just...shoddy. Which is a shame since it ended up involving something that affected the entire Federation and beyond, so it's too bad that such a potentially momentous change got such an inauspicious beginning. But golly, was it badly plotted.
 
Not a bad episode just plainly executed. Despite the actions of the two aliens, it just didn't seem the consequences were enough to add a sense of urgency to the story.

RAMA
 
Here's a problem I have with the plot....

Two scientists want nothing more than to save their planet from a devastating climate change due to warp engines being used in their solar system. When nobody believes them, one scientist decides to detonate a warp core in the system, thereby knowingly endangering her planet on a massive and catastrophic scale (the very thing she wanted to avoid). But hey, at least her point was proven.

That's like saying.... you know, you really shouldn't build a nuclear power plant in the middle of New York City because if there's a meltdown, it will endanger millions of lives and we can't have that. And so, to prove my point, I'll nuke all those people.

That's excellent writing right there. :shifty:
 
It was okay.

One thing that's helped me get over it is the fact that (somewhat belatedly) the novels kinda reconciled the whole "No travel over warp 5" issue...though it's basically a very minor plot point in Articles of the Federation.

But :shrug:
 
Admiral Shran said:
Here's a problem I have with the plot....

Two scientists want nothing more than to save their planet from a devastating climate change due to warp engines being used in their solar system. When nobody believes them, one scientist decides to detonate a warp core in the system, thereby knowingly endangering her planet on a massive and catastrophic scale (the very thing she wanted to avoid). But hey, at least her point was proven.

That's like saying.... you know, you really shouldn't build a nuclear power plant in the middle of New York City because if there's a meltdown, it will endanger millions of lives and we can't have that. And so, to prove my point, I'll nuke all those people.

That's excellent writing right there. :shifty:
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Yeah, it was nuts which is exactly how that female scientist came off. I think she was totally off her rocker.
 
SevenOfNein said:
My enjoyment of an episode has absolutely nothing to do with what allegory they're trying to incorporate.

I didn't hate the episode, although it wasn't particularly interesting, and the ramifications of the episode were stupid, even if they were pretty much ignored.
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This. Plus, people don't like being preached to. I would hope most intelligent people realize that being gentler to the environment is a good thing and not something to be shrugged off or dealt with later. But this episode really didn't show us any of the "problems" with using up resources or causing environmental disaster or build an interesting story around it. It preached! And worse yet it preached boringly!

You could argue that "Who Watches the Watchers" preached about religion being bullshit because it liked to hit you over the head repeatedly with it's "idea" but at least it was an interesting damn story and not about some dumb bitch being a Space Greenpeace terrorist nut.

The TOS episode with the guys in it with a half black/half white face gets "credited" a lot for being one of these good "message shows" but I disagree. As it was just as clunky as FoN because it took a good idea and beat you on the head with how "stupid" the "wrong position is" by being ridiculous.

Were people watching that episode thinking, "Man. Kirk is right! Why are these aliens fighting based on which side of their face is white? Racism is stupid! I'm going to turn my life around on racism!"

Same thing here, I doubt this episode made anyone think about environmentalism is or how damaging our various emissions were because the story was boring, the story was preaching and worse yet our usually very liberal and thinking characters were acting like dickheads with their "We've thought it all through. We KNOW we're right!, "Oh, you're right. Our engines do fuck things up. Well, it's still going to take us a long time to fix them properly, thanks for breaking them!" and "We don't wanna go Warp 5!"

The episode was boring, it's message was out of the blue and made no damn sense, the effects of it were pretty much negated quickly anyway (I think the Treknobabble in it is that they simply made better engines that didn't damage subspace), it was preachy and, really, it was probably also preaching to the choir.
 
courtnwy said:
"I know the pain is fresh... but the lie is really old.":confused:
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Quote from the character of Phil Dunphy from the ABC sitcom Modern Family. His reaction when his wife found out he was still dating another woman while they were dating.
 
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