| Review : |
This is one of my all-time favourite episodes of Trek. It's a lot more frightening than VOY's "Haunting of Deck Twelve" (itself a terrific episode IMO). The sequence with the bodies sitting up in sickbay has remained with me for twenty years. Nothing felt overdone, it was extremely subtle and with no disrespect to American viewers, the USA doesn't know what subtle is - they seem to need monsters flying out at the camera, raging gun battles and explosions. Look at all their ghost, UFO and Bigfoot documentaries, universally featuring flash cutting between scenes, super-closeups, background noises and loud music with drum beats. Then look at Night Terrors, which is how Britain tells ghost stories: a creeping dread, building tension, with inexplicable events that have an emotional impact on the people involved, quiet music, disturbing scenarios... "I could go on forever, baby!" The "eyes in the dark" sequences might seem cheesy to people but I found them frightening and bewildering, their weird, incomprehensible nature only making them more disturbing. Pity it had to cost the lives of an entire Starfleet crew to save some unknown aliens who bugger off immediately. |
