Plot
While on a charting mission, the Enterprise discovers a patch of pure blackness in space; probes launched into the area simply disappear. As they study it further, the patch expands and soon envelopes the Enterprise, leaving them in a black void with sensors reporting nothing outside. Picard orders the ship to return on the course it entered the patch, but they find that they cannot escape; even using a stationary beacon to track their position, they find themselves brought back to the beacon.
A Romulan Warbird suddenly decloaks in front of the Enterprise, and Picard orders the crew to attack it; their photon torpedoes destroy the Warbird, but Picard suspects that it was destroyed too easily. The crew then finds a ship that appears to be the USS Yamato approaching, but does not respond to hails. Picard orders Commander Riker and Lt. Worf to beam over and search the ship. They find the ship empty, and, like the blackness, seemingly impossible with physical loops. As they are exploring the ship, the Enterprise crew spot an opening out of the darkness, but cannot lock onto Riker or Worf to transport them off the ship in time before the opening disappears. Riker and Worf are beamed back aboard as the Yamato fades away. Several similar openings appear in the blackness, each closing as soon as the Enterprise approaches them. Picard realizes that these events are tests of their responses, and orders a full-stop.
Suddenly, an entity appears in the blackness, calling itself Nagilum. It is curious about the humans and their "limited existence", and would like to test the limits of the human body, demonstrated by killing Ensign Haskell, who has violent convulsions and falls to the floor dead. Nagilum then reports that he wants to know everything about deaths and all kinds of different ways of people dying. He asserts it would only take less than half of the Enterprise's crew. Picard decides to activate the Enterprise's self-destruction sequence rather than to allow Nagilum to harm anyone else. As the crew prepares for their end, Picard is tested again by Nagilum through doppelgangers of Counselor Troi and Lt. Commander Data, both of whom question the self-destruct order. As the countdown nears zero, the void suddenly vanishes, leaving the Enterprise in normal space. Picard orders the ship to move away at high-speed and cancels the self-destruct sequence. As the Enterprise continues on its mission, Picard is met by an image of Nagilum on his ready-room computer. Nagilum offers his evaluation of humanity, criticizing the race for its faults and having no common-ground with Nagilum's kind. Picard begs to disagree, pointing out that both races are curious as shown by their recent encounter, which Nagilum agrees to before disappearing.
Read more about this topic: Where Silence Has Lease
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
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