From: ira2p@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Iain Robert Asplin)
Subject: Saturday Night Review  "Realm of Fear"  !SPOILERS!
Organization: University of Virginia
Distribution: rec.arts.startrek.current,  Paramount Pictures
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 00:59:43 GMT



Time foe another Saturday Night Review!
(Don't worry, I won't talk about Doctor Who this week  :)

SPOILERS!  (Realm of Fear)







SPIDERS!, whoops, SPOILERS!  




Sorry.  I was thinking about O'Brien a little.  More about his new insignia
in a later post....


Right.  "Realm of Fear"  Was it good?  Was it bad?
 
Moderately good.  About a 6 or 7 on a 1-10 scale.

I'll start with the good points.
Dwight Schultz is excellent as ever as the refreshingly imperfect Lt.
Barclay, and the character has had some fleshing out and seems to possess
a bit more confidence.  Amazingly for TNG, this looks to be a hold-over
from his experience in "The Nth Degree."
Another point I thought was excellent and would have liked to have seen
more of was the dead body waking up system by system.  Dr. Crusher's
line "What the hell is going on?" echoed my thoughts exactly.
Another one is the treatment of the transporter process.  For the first 
intriguing time we see it from the transportee's point-of-view.
And another one is the worms in the transporter beam.   Again, "What
the hell is going on?" came to mind.
The best bit of all is definitely the surprise ending of the worms
turning out to be the missing crew members.  It was the kind of ending
where one mentally kicks oneself for not thinking of that.  The script
very cleverly mentions the missing crew early on but then so much
emphasis is placed on Barclay and the transporters and the worms that
we completely forget about them.  When the guy slammed onto the 
platform with a thud, I felt like doing the same to my head.
One other thing, I liked the pressure point trick. Let's say it together
now, "Can we say PLACEBO?"


Now the bad points.
First of all, we are once again venturing into the realm of cliche.
Of course the guy who is afraid of something has the something happen
to him!  We've seen this scenario time after time after tired time,
and I was disappointed to see it happen on TNG.
The other bad point is the script needed a bit of tightening.  It does
move a little slowly, and I can see what happened as it was being written.
The writer(s) wanted to throw the big surprise punch at the end, and 
the best way to make a surprise work is to make the viewer forget about
the little seed you planted in the first ten minutes.  And the most
obvious and probably most effective way to do that is to shift the
emphasis and toss in a lot of other things.  This was the problem.
A little too much got thrown in and the pacing suffered as a result.
How to improve this?  If I had a final edit of the episode I think I
would have tossed out one or two of the "middle" Barclay scenes (or
trim them back a bit, like the relaxation scene) and replaced it
with some more mysterious behavior from the charred corpse.  Maybe
that's a little cliche too, but when you use a cliche to mask a good
original surprise I think it can be forgiven.  

But all in all, a fairly solid episode, and a definite improvement on
"Time's Arrow Part II."  

Direction-wise, a little above average.  Troi's having to run beside
Barclay down that corridor looks like a cinematrographic decision so
I'll mention it here.  It was cute.  Dragging down the average is the
not-so-subtle Data-sees-Barclay-check-his-pulse scene.  Shouldn't have
been done with close-ups; more effective to see them both simultaneously
I think and perhaps at more of a distance.  

So all in all, a slightly above average episode, and I'll settle on
a rating of 6.5 out of 10.

Steve/Iain

From: nunis@hpsgm2.sgp.hp.com (Simon NUNIS)
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 02:58:32 GMT
Subject: Re: Q WHO
Organization: HP Singapore Notes-Server