Night Terrors is another episode about which I have really mixed feelings. On the one hand it is probably the best attempt at a horror storyline ever told in TNG. But it also suffers from TNG, "slap a scifi premise on it and call it trek," syndrome. Of course the thing causing the crew to go crazy is another ship, invisibly trapped on the other side of (???) an anomaly and of course that other ship is psychically communicating with counselor Troi through her dreams. Also, one of the writers once read that not getting REM sleep makes you crazy so that is the only reason needed for the crew to start killing each other wildly and of course it is an instant fix when they figure it out.
The episode begins with the Enterprise finding the USS Brattain dead in the water with what appears to be only one survivor. Riker leads an away team over and finds the crew have all be violently killed except for one betazoid scientist who is in some sort of coma like state. Further investigation shows that the crew all killed each other both with phasers and in hand to hand combat. The log shows the captain totally out of her mind talking about having her first officer eliminated. While this is going on Troi starts having dreams where she keeps asking, "where are you," and seeing two lights and hearing words about one moon circling. When they try to get out they find none of their engines work at they are trapped in some kind of rift thing. The only way out is to set off a massive explosion, but they don't have the power for it. And for some reason nobody suggests blowing up the other ship.
The crew start going crazy: Worf tries to kill himself, Picard freaks out in the turbolift, Guinan has to pull out her illegal space rifle to calm a riot in Ten Forward, and Riker has visions of snakes when he tries to sleep. Eventually Crusher (finally no Wesley so I can just refer to the good doctor by last name) figures out that none of them except Troi are getting any REM sleep and that this is what is driving them crazy. Also Data somehow figures out that there is another ship trapped and it is sending messages to Troi to get the Enterprise to send Hydrogen into the rift so they can explode it with some sort of future element instead of oxygen like would have made sense. Troi has to go back into the dream to send the message and of course it works just at the last second.
Review: An enjoyable episode to watch overall, but kinda frustrating that they don't start figuring out the real solution until there was less than five minutes left on the episode timer (including the credits). The one thing I remember about TNG from watching it new as a kid was how often they solved everything and had it all back to normal in the last five minutes and that objection still hasn't gone away.
5 out of 10
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