In the episode, the crew of the Enterprise investigates the murder of a crewman on a terraforming colony and discover a crystalline life form possessing intelligence.
Critical reception was mixed, with one reviewer noting that unlike the original Star Trek series, "Home Soil" explored the realm of hard science fiction.
Critics compared the appearance of inorganic life forms in the story to the plot of the original Star Trek series episode "The Devil in the Dark".
Commander Data's (Brent Spiner) inspection of the tool, it begins to fire at him, but his quick android reflexes allow him to dodge the shot and render the drill harmless.
The crystal begins to grow and gains access to the computer's translation program and attempts to communicate with the crew, treating the humans as an enemy, derisively calling them "ugly bags of mostly water".
[3] The guest stars in "Home Soil" included Walter Gotell, who was better known for appearing in the James Bond film franchise as General Gogol.
[1] The crystalline life form's description for humanoids in the episode spawned the phrase, "ugly bags of mostly water",[3] which has been used as the title of a documentary about Star Trek fans, and as the name of a song by the band Streetnix, as well as being referenced by Dream Warriors in the lyrics of My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Theme.
It's called "hard" because it takes existing knowledge and projects only slightly outwards from it, instead of just throwing in a few words like "space" and "lasers" to make it all seem technological.
Kirk's Enterprise ran into all sorts of aliens and oddities, but while it did make overtures to more grounded writing, you never got the impression any of the writers on the show did serious research before putting plots together.
"[7] He didn't like the film direction by Allen, saying that the director had a "bizarre insistence on unnatural, stage-y blocking and positioning and obsession with extreme closeups".
[7] Michelle Erica Green, in her review for TrekNation, thought that the episode was "less interesting" than the "Horta attacks and mind-melds" of "The Devil in the Dark".
[5] James Hunt, writing for the website Den of Geek, noted that the Enterprise fought a space-bound crystalline entity several episodes earlier in "Datalore", which he considered "a lot more impressive than these crystal microbrains...