While still not very good at all, this is a rather different sort of bad episode from most of the other terrible episodes of this season. I mean, it’s not without commonalities: the storytelling is quite poor, it leans on a way-too-common trope of the Enterprise showing up somewhere and encountering unwelcoming locals who don’t want them there, and at least one of the guest characters (the leader of the terraforming station) is all-too-typically brusque, transparently defensive, dickish, and unconvincing. On the other hand, the episode—though it goes off the rails at the end—is actually about something worthwhile. Also, in a variety of small ways, its plotting and general execution are better than in many of the previous episodes. It’s uneven, but still far less painfully bad, on the whole, than has been typical so far. Instead of being nigh-unwatchable in a routine, we-have-no-fucking-clue-how-to-write, screenplay/execution kind of way, then, this one mainly runs into trouble in more substantive ways—as well as suffering from too exclusive a focus on plot, to the neglect of doing anything interesting with the regular characters. Since the plot really isn’t all that riveting, this also means that the episode winds up being a bit dull. I had a hard time deciding on a rating for this one, but although it’s better than many other first-season episodes, I can’t ultimately call it good enough to warrant even two stars.
To consider some of the pros and cons of the general execution before addressing the meat, though: For one thing, the director of the station aside, the remaining terraformer characters come across as reasonably sympathetic and human, and the female scientist, in particular, is actually a halfway decently realized character—even if, in her scene showing the main characters around the station, the writers can’t quite decide whether her style should be personal and passionate or detached and tour-guidey. On the other hand, Troi’s assessment of her later on as being “all vision, no data” (i.e. essentially a dreamer rather than a serious scientist?) seems unnecessarily harsh—and arguably sexist. Why did the writers feel the need to make this statement about the character (who, at least to me, doesn’t even seem to show any signs of meriting the critique)? Back to pros: Although the other two terraformers are only the most minimally sketched of characters, having the engineer react with interest to Data was a nice touch. Additionally, I’d just like to note that if episodes of this show had to be bad, I’d much prefer them to be bad in the sorts of ways that this one is bad, rather than in the much cheesier and dumber kinds of ways characteristic of “When the Bough Breaks,” or other disasters from earlier in the season. At least a story like this one is focused on the world of the Federation, rather than on a super-hokey and criminally under-imagined planet of the week.
But anyway, this episode seems like it’s trying to be about unintended harm resulting from human activity, leading to a conflict with newly discovered life forms very different from humans—and about the crew of the Enterprise reaching out across the gulf between the two forms of life to resolve the conflict and achieve a mutual understanding. This is very much a worthwhile topic for an episode. It’s not addressed very explicitly, but the terraforming premise (humans remaking other worlds to their liking) lends itself to social commentary on a variety of real-world issues, from resource exploitation and environmental damage to imperialism and colonization. Surely, at least, the female scientist’s line about how “terraforming makes you feel a little godlike” is intended to raise a red flag or two for the audience? Happily, however, the episode is not so transparent and in-your-face with these ideas as to make it super-obvious right from the start what is actually going to happen. To be sure, Data and Geordi discover the inorganic life form much too quickly and easily—but at least it isn’t already obvious to the audience beforehand that they are going to make such a discovery!
The ensuing development of the main story needed some work, though. For starters, it’s not as though inorganic life forms are entirely without Trek precedent (even putting TOS to one side, what about Data?)—yet this is never mentioned, and everyone acts as though the idea of an inorganic life form is a radical new concept. I also thought it odd that rather than theorizing on her own about her observations in the lab, Dr. Crusher has to ask the computer to “disregard incongruity and theorize” about what she is seeing in order to reach the conclusion that its likely cause is “life”! The subsequent sequence of events surrounding the exploration and investigation of, and eventual interaction with, the life form could have been tightened up a bit from a writing standpoint, too, even if they are notably less meandering and structureless than the events of many of the previous episodes. And finally, in light (pun!) of the eventual discovery that the life forms are photoelectric and that depriving them of illumination weakens and threatens them almost immediately, one does have to wonder how these things survive overnight in their natural habitat…!
In any case, though, I mentioned that the episode really goes astray in the end, and that this (along with not being very character-focused) is its major downfall. My problems with the ending are sort of twofold. First, while I will certainly grant that, since the terraformers are represented as having been witness to evidence pointing to the presence of life on the planet and having willfully overlooked that evidence (and as continuing to resist its implications once the Enterprise officers look into it), the humans are, to be sure, not blameless from the inorganic life form’s point of view. However, for the life form to proclaim in a holier-than-thou tone that humans are “still too arrogant,” and that if they want to establish relations, they should come back in 300 years when they will presumably have matured sufficiently—is way, way too much to bear, especially from entities who opened the dialogue between themselves and the humans by calling the latter “ugly bags of mostly water.” Granted, they perceive themselves to be (or at least to have been) under attack by the humans—but if that’s their idea of diplomacy, which life form is the arrogant one? Starfleet personnel in similar circumstances would have behaved better (even if only with self-interested motives!). But more fundamentally, my problem with the ending is that it doesn’t really fit, thematically, with the rest of the episode—and that it amounts to an obvious attempt at an “homage” to the original-series episode “Arena,” in which an ultra-advanced race of beings judges humans to hold promise after Kirk shows mercy to his Gorn adversary, and consequently suggests that his people and humans may have a basis for relations in the distant future. Since the life form in “Home Soil” shows no sign of being fantastically more advanced than humans/the Federation, though, the situations aren’t actually analogous, and the life form’s accusation of human “arrogance” thus comes off as laughable and silly. But worse, this tacked-on TOS-ripoff ending fundamentally doesn’t fit with an episode that, until the end, was about two very different “peoples” learning to see each other and working to achieve an understanding—not about humans being evaluated by a more advanced race. This last-minute veering off course, in my view, effectively ruins what otherwise might have been at least a halfway decent (if a bit dry) episode.