FORCE OF NATURE: TIME TO MAKE IT BETTER Synopsis: In this 1993 season seven episode of *Star Trek: the Next Generation,* the Enterprise D is sent to the Hekaras Corridor to investigate the disappearance of the medical ship of the Fleming. The area around the Hekaras Corridor has abnormally intense tetryon fields which interfere with warp speed, hence why the Hekaras Corridor is the only safe means by which to traverse the area. Hekaras II, the only inhabited planet in the corridor, has not had any contact with the Fleming but was contacted by a Ferengi trader ship, thus why Dr. Crusher suggest the Ferengi might have turned pirate and attacked the Fleming for the valuable bio-mimetic gel it carried. The Ferengi ship is encountered first but appears to be disabled, then is shown to have been playing dead before attacking the Enterprise D, which quickly defeats it. The Ferengi DaiMon Prak claims he was a victim of a previous Federation attack but Captain Picard prompts him to see reason by offering to forward a request for help which will likely result in help arriving in weeks. He then states a Federation signal buoy they approached emitted a verteron pulse which disabled their warp drive and many of their systems, to which Captain Picard points out the Federation set up the corridor for free and safe navigation and thus has little to gain by effectively mining it. Commander Riker also adds that the Federation ship of the Fleming is missing, which persuades Prak to admit his ship passed the Fleming some days before but that it did not appear to be in distress. When Commander Riker asks for the ships heading, Prak claims his ship can no longer access that information due to it being stored in systems now under repair, to which Picard effectively trades the help of some of his engineering staff in repairing the Ferengi ship in order to help get the information back out again (and to which Prak responds with a pleased smile at the good trade, given he is a Ferengi trader). Approaching the location of the Fleming, the Enterprise D then encounters a field of debris that might be from the Fleming and is then disabled by one of the same type of mines that disabled the Ferengi ship, after which a Hekaran brother and sister named Rabal and Serova, respectively, are revealed as having mined the corridor to gain the attention of the Federation Council since their initial findings were dismissed but they are still convinced that the cumulative effects of warp drive are destroying the fabric of space near their homeworld and will eventually even destroy their planet. Rabal is the more reasonable of the two despite their aggressive methods, and Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge openly shows his skepticism since he has made Engineering his own personal life. In exchange for Serova helping repair the Enterprise D faster -- her theories are so far ahead of her time that it took two years for Rabal to understand them and thus their merit -- Data re-reviews their findings but is only able to determine their research indeed merits more study. Serova is not willing to wait for this and thus causes a warp breach the ship of he and her brother which thus kills her but which proves her point by more rapidly-forming a subspace rift within the Hekaran Corridor, within which the Fleming becomes trapped. This causes Geordi La Forge to reverse his skepticism and for the Enterprise to coast into the rift with a burst from the warp core and then to surf their way back out through the energy distortion waves after rescuing the crew of the Fleming -- who worsened the rift by trying to escape using repaired warp engines when the Enterprise D was coasting in, thus why they almost were unable to make it back out. In light of these events, the Federation Council issues a new directive limiting all Federation vessels to a speed of warp five, except in extreme emergency, to slow the formation of subspace rifts such as this. The Klingon Worf confidently declares that the Klingon Empire will agree to the limitations but that the Romulans will not. Troi questions whether the Ferengi or Cardassians will, to which Picard notes the Federation is sharing this information with every warp-capable society so that they have the chance to. Gravity distortions from the rift have altered the orbit of Hekaras II so that its climate is changing, but the Federation has set up a weather control matrix as a temporary solution for the problem. Picard then laments that although he valued exploration of space, he was damaging it through exploring it through the use of warp drive, but La Forge then reassures him by noting that now that they know the truth, there will still be time to make it better. The background for Force of Nature was that the story idea for an environmentally-conscious metaphor of starship warp drive harming the fabric of space had been present for a long time, but connecting other plot elements to it in order to make it long enough and significant enough for an episode was proving to be problematic. As such, finally the idea of connecting Datas cat Spot to the episode was chosen due to the difficulty of training cats being seen as an introductory metaphor for how a force of nature like the fabric of space could not be tamed and thus had to be treated with care -- the same way that the environment needs to be treated with care due to human activities causing biosphere-threatening damages to it, although another subplot is Geordi La Forge increasing the efficiency of the warp engines due to his personal competition with Chief Engineer Commander Donald Kaplan of the Intrepid rather than to avoid environmental damage to the fabric of space. The cat Spot -- the cats name itself very abstract, as there are no Spots upon the cats fur -- is very temperamental to others other than Data, perhaps to offer the irony that a non-biological organism is a better caregiver for a cat than the biological ones of his crewmembers (although a curious implication is that after Data appears to die in the 2002 *Star Trek: Nemesis* film, Worf is accepted as Spots caregiver despite a brief scene in the 1993 television season seven episode Phantasms implying that he was allergic to cats), and offers a feline story in itself as Spot was portrayed as a long-hair Somali cat in the cats first appearance of in the 1991 season four Datas Day episode, but after this Spot was portrayed as a visibly-different striped (not spotted) American short-hair orange tabby cat, this thus cluing the serious fan into how multiple different cats were used to portray Spot within each appearance despite the common practice of using multiple trained animals for ease of performance, this otherwise usually overlooked by viewers as merely negligible superficial changes. Also, although it is possible that Spots gender was originally overlooked by Data and others or that Spot was simply referred to as a male due to the masculine generic of assuming male before female when gender is unknown, by Force of Nature Spot is consistently referred to as being a *female* for the first time, thus how by the Genesis episode ten episodes later (March 21, 1994) her giving birth to kittens provides a significant clue about how to cure the Barclays Protomorphosis Syndrome which is causing all lifeforms aboard the Enterprise D to devolve and then to sometimes re-evolve. Finally, the inconsistencies with the long-haired Somali/American short-hair orange tabby cat Spot has lead to the retroactive theories that he/she is actually a harmless shapeshifter inconsistently masquerading as a housecat or that some type of transporter accident(s) which are negligible for cats are what caused Spots breed and even gender to change over time. The warp drive harming the fabric of space theme from this episode was only alluded to rarely and most often indirectly after this, the explicit permission to exceed the warp five speed limit in the later 1993 season seven the Pegasus being the most obvious reference to this. A retroactive suggestion is that the variable geometry warp nacelles/pylons seen in the Intrepid Class starship Voyager of *Star Trek: Voyager* (the Enterprise D of *Star Trek: the Next Generation was Galaxy Class) prompted Starfleet Engineers to begin the use of variable geometry warp nacelles since in their streamlined (flat) configuration they reduce anything that can produce drag upon the ship, particularly at speeds slower than warp, whereas in their flexed (upward) configuration they reduced the stress upon the warp bubble which is necessary to form about a ship in order to achieve warp (faster than light) speeds and thus which allowed the warp engines of a ship to operate more efficiently and thus to reduce the potential environmental damage to the fabric of space, particularly at high warp speeds such as warp eight and above. However -- according to the same suggestions -- it was later found that the scientists Serova and her brother Rabal were partially mistaken: the space-time continuum of the fabric of space is only highly-vulnerable enough at particular locations such as the Hekaras Corridor to be damaged by warp drive, and upgrades to warp drive outside of the use of variable geometry warp nacelles/pylons thus more efficiently resolved the problem of damaging the fabric of space through the use of warp drive within these sensitive areas afterwards. The idea of warp drive damaging the fabric of space is revisited again in the *Star Trek: Voyager* 2001 season seven episode Renaissance Man, but suffice to say Albert Einsteins theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light since it would effectively freeze in space due to time slowing down to the point of completely stopping at that fast of a speed explains why this may be the case: aside from achieving a type of internal combustion between matter and antimatter (antimatter has yet to be created) for propulsion, warp engines also warp the rules of reality to allow speeds faster than the speed of light. This is why warping through time is portrayed when a speed of warp ten or is achieved -- time will actually rapidly move backwards at this point without additional corrections such as through the transwarp drive sometimes alluded to within *Star Trek* in order to allow no change in the rate or direction of time, given such warping of reality makes constants such as time and space much more nebulous than usual. But on a more mundane note, likely the variable-sweep wing successfully used in some aircraft (primarily military aircraft) from the 1940s to the 1970s inspired the variable geometry warp nacelles of the Intrepid Class ships such as Voyager since although allowing the planform (configuration) of an aircraft to vary between having its wings swept or unswept (to the sides) to allows better handling at higher speeds and more carrying capacity for the aircraft and thus better performance, respectively, allows the aircraft even a starship to appear more natural -- even organic and birdlike -- and thus more believable to an audience (in the *Star Wars* franchise, X-Wing fighters have a similar technology to open their wings into an X-pattern, but this is stated to be for increasing the area of the targeting field the fighter is able to fire into). Likewise, the fact that aircraft since the 1970s has been able have their aerodynamics and structure tailored to more efficiently achieve the handling and carrying capacity needed from an aircraft without the need for the addition of mechanisms for sweeping the wings, thus also imitating the brief appearance and reasoning for the variable geometry warp nacelles seen within Intrepid Class ships such as Voyager.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:22:56 +0000
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