Nagilum
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| Nagilum | |
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| Species: | Nagilum |
| Gender: | Unknown |
| Home planet: | Morgana Quadrant |
| Portrayed by: | Earl Boen (voice) |
Nagilum was a very powerful extra-dimensional, chaotic neutral-like creature (or perhaps a lawful good one, based upon the laws and morality of its own society), which created a "hole in space", utterly devoid of all matter and energy in the Morgana Quadrant. This was created, in part, as an experiment during its encounter with USS Enterprise-D, in 2365.
In the course of conversations the creature, it called humans limited, apparently because they were mortal. It became increasingly interested in the concept of "death" and mercilessly killed the ship's conn officer, Ensign Haskell. Further intrigued, it decided to study this aspect of humanity on numerous levels, proposing to kill off a large portion, from one third to one half, of the ship's crew.
Nagilum finally let the ship go after Captain Picard threatened to kill his entire crew, via the auto destruct device, rather than to subject half of his crew to an experiment. In a final conversation with Picard, Nagilum revealed that he had learned everything that he needed and admitted that while quite different, he perhaps shared the trait of curiosity with humanity. (TNG: "Where Silence Has Lease")
Nagilum was portrayed by actor Earl Boen, but is named after Richard Mulligan, who was originally set to play the role.
[edit] Trivia
- The name Nagilum is (almost) a palindrome of the name Mulligan, the actor who was to originally speak Nagilum's voice.
[edit] External link
- Nagilum article at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki.
