There are some really cool ideas at the heart of this episode, and parts of it have always worked for me, but there is also a lot of missed potential and lackluster execution. I recall liking this one quite a bit when I was younger, but it now strikes me as pretty middle-of-the-road.
On the level of metaphor, I love the idea of building an episode around the idea that “we have to dream in order to survive.” Also, on a more literal level, pondering the physiological and psychological functions of dreaming (and the effects of dream deprivation) is fascinating. There are other things that I appreciate about this episode, but fundamentally, these core conceptual elements have always been what most appealed to me about it. What I don’t find particularly compelling, though, is watching the characters act randomly surly and paranoid, or most of the episode’s (in my view) rather dull attempts at creepiness/horror. When the characters are struggling to retain mental focus while trying to explain concepts or carry out routine activities, that works for me and can be kind of fun (Frakes and McFadden strike me as particularly good at conveying this), but the more extreme behavioral aberrations just kind of bore me. Characters behaving erratically due to the influence of outside forces is rarely very interesting in itself, because it tends to be sort of “hollow”; they wouldn’t normally behave this way, you know they’re just going to go back to normal after the problem gets resolved, and it will have no meaningful impact on anything. Worf runs off half-cocked, intent on killing himself for reasons that have nothing to do with anything but the sci-fi phenomenon of the week (and also, we know Troi is on the way to stop him)? So what? Some random moron in Ten-Forward tries to start a mutiny/barfight? Yawn. (Miles and Keiko have a marital spat that actually doesn’t seem all that far outside of their “normal” ways of interacting? Worse then boring.) In order to really make the concept underlying this episode work, the effects of the dream deprivation would have needed to be more character-specific, more interesting, and more consequential—ideally, revealing things about the characters that we didn’t already know, or at least illuminating somewhat known traits in new and interesting ways. Going even further, what if the writers had found ways to make the characters’ literally dream-deprived states suggest something, symbolically or thematically, about the consequences of losing touch with their metaphorical dreams?
Counselor Troi’s role in “Night Terrors,” and the playing out of the basic mystery of what’s going on, seems to polarize viewers to some extent. Many seem to find the Troi “nightmare” sequences hokey and/or tiresome, or to have little patience for the cryptic nature of the aliens’ “one moon circles” message, or (contrarily) to feel that Troi should have glommed on to its significance much sooner. With a few caveats, I disagree with each of these criticisms. I’ll concede that, as is all too often the case, I find Marina Sirtis less than entirely effective as an actor in many of her scenes (I often wish that she’d let up on her melodramatic intensity a bit; you can convey emotion more effectively and in a more naturalistic way by doing less, sometimes)—and also, in the teaser, her empathic ability proves every bit as frustratingly useless as usual (she can sense that there’s life aboard the Brittain, but…*vague (literal) hand-wave in place of any concrete information*). (For that matter, though, why could the ships’ sensors not conclusively establish the facts about whether anyone was alive on the Brittain? Basically, so that the episode can make us wait for an away team to discover that almost everyone’s dead, and for no other reason.) But with those things said, I, for one, have always actually found the nightmare sequences effectively creepy and mysterious (in contrast to, say, Dr. Crusher’s morgue scene, which some fans seem to dig but which does absolutely nothing for me). I don’t for a minute fault Troi for failing to put the pieces of the puzzle together more quickly, either. To us, the nightmare sequences are scenes in a TV show, so they’re obviously significant; to her, they’re random details from a recurring (and disturbing) dream, and she has no obvious reason to analyze them closely or imagine that they might somehow relate to things happening in her waking life. Besides…call me slow, but I didn’t make the connections any faster than she did, way back when I saw this for the first time. The moment when the catatonic Betazoid mumbles the same phrase that Troi has been hearing in her recurring nightmare throughout the episode has always really worked for me, and Sirtis even sells Troi’s unnerved reaction pretty effectively, I think. As for the mysterious aliens… I’m not the first person to point any of these things out, but their allegedly needless riddle-speak seems easy to rationalize as arising from some combination of their very alienness (we don’t learn much about them, but there seems to be an implication that they’re more “alien” than the usual run of Trek aliens by an order of magnitude or two) and the fact that Troi’s reception of their message comes via a dream. Honestly, just about everything about this side of the episode works for me.
I do have a few other criticisms. First, on a plot plausibility level, the idea that the aliens couldn’t escape from the rift on their own owing to a lack of hydrogen—which is literally the most abundant substance in the universe—is more than a little hard to swallow. Second, it doesn’t make much sense that the chemical explosion via which the two ships escape in the end is more potent than a matter/antimatter explosion, such as from a photon torpedo, would be. Also, the amount of guesswork and sheer luck involved in both coming up with and executing the solution to the ship’s predicament is a bit much. The climactic scene goes a bit overboard in trying to ramp up the tension, too. And finally, while I generally enjoy seeing Data thrust into positions of greater responsibility, his brief stint as “acting captain” here ends up mostly feeling wasted. Even ordering Picard to bed at the end fails to rise above the level of the fairly predictable. So, all in all, this is a fairly mixed bag…but one with just enough elements that I really do rather like to earn it a modest place on my personal list of “keepers.”