6x05 Schisms

[7.4/10] “Schisms” has the old Original Series problem that often bled into the early seasons of The Next Generation. There’s about half an episode’s worth of plot stretched out to a full hour. Several scenes drag, or feel like filler, as the show vamps for time until the major developments unfurl.

But damnit, it’s a good plot! It’s a little odd for a show set in the future to do an alien abduction story, but somehow fan hate magnet Brannon Braga and company managed to craft a story with all the unsettling creepiness that present day abduction yarns manage to evoke.

Honestly, some of the slowness is what makes that work. Coming into this one cold, you could be mistaken for thinking it was a “day in the life” episode of the show. Riker has insomnia. Geordi’s come up with a fancy new sensor technique. Data gives a stilted but well-intentioned poetry reading. With such low-stakes interludes, you might think this was one of the show’s more slice of life outings, a la “Data’s Day.”

Still, the regularness of it all adds to the creep factor when unexplained things start happening at the margins. Riker isn’t just losing sleep; he’s losing time. Geordi’s visor implants have a strange bacterial infection. Worf has a strange reaction to the barber brandishing a pair of scissors. Taken in isolation, these could all be the mildly strange but mundane events aboard a ship with a thousand crewmembers aboard. But taken together, they point to something sinister beneath this raft of otherwise normal events, something the character and the audience can’t quite put their fingers on.

I’ll confess that I’m a sucker for the “Things seem mostly fine, but with something weird at the edges” setup. It’s one of the elements that made Dr. Crusher’s adventures in “Remember Me” so engaging and low-key disturbing. It can be thrilling when Romulans are attacking off the port bow or the latest spatial anomaly is throwing off all the Enterprise’s systems. The overtness of the threat can be a jolt. But there’s something just as compelling when the danger is something more subtle, more unknowable, and yet just as viscerally felt as any more direct attack.

That’s a big part of why the slow burn works here. We get to watch as more and more of the crew is affected by these peculiar happenings, and they start putting it together. Not for nothing, Data being affected helps a lot. He’s something of an empirical backstop, to suggest that whatever’s occurring is real, and not some hallucination or mass delusion, since his physiology doesn’t allow for, for example, the rest of the crew being affected by the weird nebula they’re viewing next week.

Likewise, watching Riker, Geordi, Worf, Troi, and a random crewmember use the holodeck to piece together the room where they were all abducted, examined, and abused is nerve-wracking. It surpasses the excruciatingly overextended sequence where Geordi’s does holographic forensics in “Identity Crisis”, because each new detail the group uncovers makes the scene and their reality feel a little more disturbing. The cold metallic table, the dark room with a bright light, the pincer arm all give shape and form to the mysterious thing that’s been terrorizing our heroes in ways they all feel but couldn’t quite articulate.
This is a good place to mention that I think there’s a 99.9% chance that all real life alien abduction stories are complete bunk. There’s a danger to validating the dubious ideas of “recovered memories” and groups recounting and recreating supernatural events together. I don’t know whether Braga is a true believer, but my one hesitation here is that, taken seriously, “Schisms” could promote pseudoscience and delusional nonsense about supposed genuine alien abductions. (See also: the Jonathan Frakes-hosted FOX special entitled Alien Autopsy.)

But if you accept these things as conceits and conventions for something purely fictional, they’re great devices. There’s a reason those alien abduction stories have such purchase in our culture. On an elemental level, the prospect of beings more advanced than ourselves, kidnapping us and rendering us powerless while they treat us like lab mice, is downright terrifying. “Schisms” plays on that terror, dreaming up a scenario in which extra-dimensional beings pose the same sort of threat to even our futuristic spacemen protagonists.

So when our heroes finally piece things together, and plot a way for Riker to remain awake despite his abduction, the scenes we see are utterly frightening. Much of the credit goes to the makeup, sound, and production design teams, who put together a horrifying operating theater full of chittering aliens who scoot around in an inhuman fashion.

The biggest credit, though, goes to director Robert Wiemer and his team. Most of “Schisms” is shot out of the standard TNG playbook, with even cuts and typical framings. But the scenes with Riker in the alien probing room are done in longer, continuous sweeps across the space, with unusual angles and changing perspectives along the way. It works to subtly signal to the viewer that this place is something else and other, in a way that no amount of exposition about these beings hailing from another dimension can match.

And yet, the treknobabble works here. There’s a satisfying explanation of Geordi’s sensor experiment accidentally signaling life forms from another dimension via subspace. Their efforts to study us, create a pocket realm where we can survive in their world and an environment where they can cross over into ours satisfyingly accounts for the episode’s mysteries. The motives and means make sense, which helps undergird the central chilling events of the episode.

The only catch is that “Schisms” spends a great deal of time spinning its wheels amid that terror. Some of that is underplaying with a purpose. The normalcy of the early scenes creates a canvas for the mysterious, troubling events to wash over later in the episode. But as the plot wears on, more and more time is spent on technical explanations or overextended discussions of what’s already clear, which play like stalling for time.

Still, the meat of this episode is both quality and downright terrifying, even if there’s not quite enough of it. The prospect of being stolen away from our home whether terrestrial or space-bound, tampered with by unknown forces, with only the faintest inklings of what went wrong, is the lifeblood of a good horror story. “Schisms” manages to craft just that here, even as it has to rise above some bumpy pacing to get there.