Original air date: October 19, 1992
The Enterprise is on a routine mission to chart an unusually dense globular cluster. Riker starts the morning feeling unusually tired and arrives late for the morning briefing in engineering. After some technobabble discussion on how best to speed up the charting of the cluster, Data reminds Riker of his poetry recital in Ten Forward. At the recital, while most of the attendees are merely bored, Riker can barely stay awake, and falls asleep in the middle of Data's "Ode to Spot."
Riker goes to Sick Bay about his fatigue, where he reports feeling constantly exhausted and on edge despite getting a full night's sleep as far as he can tell. Crusher doesn't find anything physically wrong with him and so sends him home with a recipe for a warm milk toddy and an invitation to return tomorrow if it doesn't help.
In engineering, Data is discussing his poetry with La Forge before they are interrupted by the report of an EPS overload in cargo bay 4. An emergency team is dispatched, but they find nothing out of the ordinary, leading La Forge to hypothesize that it was a sensor glitch caused by their recent modifications. Riker asks La Forge to wake him at 0700 the next morning because of his recent sleep troubles.
La Forge obliges, but Riker has no memory of falling asleep and refuses to believe it's morning until he checks the clock. Suspicion mounts as further strange occurrences are noticed: Worf and Riker both have panicked reactions to ordinary stimuli, La Forge's visor starts randomly cutting out, and Data, of all people, finds that he has lost over an hour of time. La Forge observes that many of these events took place in the same cargo bay, and sure enough, they find a Negative Space Wedgie forming there from a deep layer of subspace that shouldn't be able to exist in normal space.
When Riker goes to Troi about his unexplained panic attack, she remarks that other crewmembers have reported similar problems and decides to bring them all together to talk about it. They eventually go to the holodeck to try and recreate a repressed memory they all seem to share. The end result is a nightmarish operating table with a surgical arm in a dark room filled with a cacophony of alien clicking sounds.
More evidence appears, indicating that random crewmembers are being abducted into another subspace dimension, where they are sedated and experimented upon. To make matters worse, the anomaly in the cargo bay starts expanding into a subspace rift. The senior staff come up with a strategy to stop the rift but need a way to identify the exact dimension where it is originating. Since Riker has been abducted several nights in a row, he volunteers to take a homing device with him the next time it happens, which will allow the Enterprise to track him as he leaves.
Dr. Crusher gives Riker a stimulant in the hope that it will counteract the sedative used by the abductors. Riker goes to bed and soon finds himself pulled into the other dimension. There, he finds himself on a surgical table being examined by robed aliens, alongside Ensign Rager, who was previously discovered missing. He feigns sleep until the Enterprise begins to close the rift, at which point he is able to grab Rager and escape through the rift while the aliens are distracted.
Despite resistance by the aliens, the Enterprise is able to close the rift once Riker makes it through, and the abductions cease. They believe the aliens had established a pocket of "normal" space in their laboratory in order to experiment on the crew, and the rift in the cargo bay was their attempt to create a pocket of their own space in the Enterprise's universe. Data hypothesizes that the aliens may simply have been explorers like themselves. Riker counters that he and Rager are lucky to be alive, while Lieutenant Hagler is dead, suggesting that the aliens are more than simply curious.
Tropes featured:
- Alien Abduction: The first time this subject has really been explored in the series.
- Aborted Arc: Originally this episode was meant to begin a story arc dealing with the unidentified aliens. However, due to production issues, the crew were ultimately unsatisfied with the final product, leading to plans for further episodes being scrapped, resulting in an Ambiguous Ending. (This is picked up years later in Star Trek Online, where the unidentified aliens are a scientist caste, the Solonae, performing horrible experiments on behalf of the Iconians.)
- Another Dimension: Subspace has always been among the most loosely-defined fictional concepts in Star Trek, but this episode takes it to a new level with La Forge's revelation that it contains an infinite number of domains which, based on Riker's experience, have (or at least can have) their own spacetime dimensions and intelligent life. In a way, it's Trek's version of The Multiverse.
- Artistic License – Medicine: The technique used by Troi to help crew members remember their experiences is exactly the way one is not supposed to interview trauma survivors. Talking as a group encourages people to subconsciously one-up each other. Humans also tend to want to agree with other people who've been through similar experiences, thus reinforcing their stories whether true or not. She also asks a ton of leading questions. This is a recipe for confabulation, in other words, just making crap up to agree with the therapist and other patients. (It's also very much Truth in Television for many abuse or abductee support groups, with therapists encouraging their patients to expand their stories, usually validating whatever theory the therapist favors.)
- Awkward Poetry Reading: Data's poem is technically flawless, but his emotionless delivery and convoluted language render it flat and boring.
- Body Horror: The aliens' experimentation starts out fairly unobtrusive, but things start to get nasty when one crewman is returned with his blood turning into a liquid polymer. He doesn't survive. Dr. Crusher also discovers that Riker's arm has been severed and then surgically reattached.
- Call-Back: Crusher introduces Riker to an insomnia treatment (warm milk) favored by Picard's Aunt Adele.
- Chekhov's Gunman: During Data's poetry recital, the camera uncharacteristically lingers on a seemingly random civilian. That civilian, Kaminer, is one of the people brought in to recall their repressed memories.
- The End... Or Is It?: Much is left unanswered by the end. Who were the aliens? What did they want with the crew? Will they ever try to enter our universe again? The tone of the episode implies a sinister answer to all of these questions.
- Giftedly Bad: Braga deserves credit for drafting the "Ode to Spot," a poem which has been written by a being without emotions, and which simultaneously meets flawless technical criteria and is hilariously dull and terrible, forcing the entire crew to listen, straight-faced and bored, to try to protect his nonexistent feelings.
- Hesitation Equals Dishonesty: When Data asks Geordi what he thought about his poetry, Geordi hesitates for a long moment. Data immediately notes that his hesitation indicates that he's not going to be completely honest.
- Homage: The character Kaminer is named after author and lawyer Wendy Kaminer. One of her books is titled Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials, which sounds like it has some tenuous connection to the plot of this episode but is actually criticizing modern society for favoring belief over reason, a very Star Trek point of view.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Or "Subspace is a Scary Place" in this case. An infinite honeycomb of infinite spaces, some of which are apparently capable of supporting life with an at best loose code of ethics, who will take you away in your sleep and do all sorts of ghastly things to you to serve their unknowable purposes, and potentially destroy your ship in the process. Enterprise learns this the hard way, and warns the rest of the fleet not to repeat their mistakes.
- The Insomniac: Riker can't seem to get any rest no matter how much he sleeps. It turns out this is a result of the subspace aliens' experiments.
- Kidnapped While Sleeping: Several Enterprise crew members are abducted from their rooms while sleeping and taken through a subspace rift into an alien laboratory. Once there, they are experimented on by the aliens.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Abductees don't remember their abductions, though some do remember glimpses as repressed memories.
- Missing Time: Data loses an hour and a half while in the troublesome cargo bay. It transpires he was abducted by the subspace aliens.
- Negative Space Wedgie: The aliens try to intrude their way into the Enterprise's universe via a subspace portal, nearly destroying the ship in the process.
- Orphaned Punchline: When we first arrive in Mr. Mot's barbershop, he's delivering the last line of some amusing anecdote. The stony reaction of his customer seems to indicate that it's not as hysterical as he thinks it is.
- Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale: They determine that Riker's arm was cut off because it is 0.02 microns off from where it should be. Given that a human hair is a whopping 70 microns wide, 0.02 microns is well within what most would call a reasonable margin of error.
- Sequel Hook: A subspace entity of some kind is able to evade containment and flees into the unknown. Once they have the situation under control, Enterprise recognizes that whatever they encountered was at the very least not friendly and warn Starfleet to take precautions as they expect this won't be the last time they try to break into the universe.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Data's poetry is riddled with overly complex language to describe simple things, particularly in "Ode to Spot." For example, he describes Spot's purring as "subvocal oscillations."
- Trauma Button: Innocuous objects begin evoking unsettling emotional responses in the Enterprise crew, one of the first clues that something is going on. Riker reflexively flinches away when Dr. Crusher moves a medical scanner towards his face, and Worf is so disturbed by Mr. Mot's scissors that he walks out on his haircut.
- Trailers Always Spoil: Much to the consternation of writer Brannon Braga, the "next week on" gives away the Alien Abduction plot, which is a mystery until the 5th act in the show proper.
- Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: In "Ode to Spot," Data makes the first two lines of the poem sound like a question rather than a statement. It is written as "Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature; an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature", but is inflected by Data as "Felis catus. Is your taxonomic nomenclature, an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature?"
- Warm Milk Helps You Sleep: Crusher gives Riker Picard's recipe for a warm milk toddy to help with his sleep troubles, since she can't find anything wrong with him to treat medically.
