4.18 Identity Crisis Tracking one of the team members who stole a shuttle after deserting her post, the Enterprise find the ship but watch helplessly as it burns up in the atmosphere of the planet Geordi’s team originally investigated. Well, you can’t save everyone. Apparently. On the surface they find two more stolen shuttles and a bunch of torn starfleet uniforms. Leijten, who has joined the search party, herself goes missing, only to be found by Geordi staring blankly into the darkness and muttering about being able to feel the rest of the crew calling. Geordi tries to help but she starts shaking violently and collapses. Luckily, in the absence of anything useful he can do, Geordi orders a medical beam-out. As the crew investigates strange footprints on the surface, Leijten’s eyes become incredibly sensitive to light and she has to sit in a darkened room, much like Chief O’Brien does when he’s off duty. Geordi reconstructs the mission footage on the holodeck to try and determine what happened to them, and notices a strange shadow that can’t be accounted for. He realises that something else was down there with them. But then his fingers fuse together, and he realises it may be too late. Not least to wear that pair of designer gloves he just bought. In sickbay, Dr. Crusher and Nurse Ogawa figure out what’s happening, and discover a strange parasite in her body which is trying to transform her DNA. They quickly reverse the process before the transformation is complete and they plan to check Geordi as well, but the computer says he’s not on board. They find his shredded uniform and VISOR in the holodeck. Meanwhile, in the transporter room, transporter chief Hedrick (Miles is off-duty, sitting in a dark room somewhere) is attacked by an invisible alien, which then transports to the surface of the planet. At the end of the episode Picard drops a warning beacon to tell people not to beam down to the surface of the planet, postulating that this is simply how the aliens reproduce and the planet must be quarantined. Though it seems to me that if you’re going to essentially condemn a race to death by starving them of a chance to reproduce, you might as well just nuke them from orbit and have done with it. But hey, that’s probably why I’m not usually in charge of anything. TNG WTF: This is one of those episodes that, as my friend observes, someone gets completely transformed into an alien and then changed back and somehow manages to retain their original hairstyle. You can forgive a lot with pseudoscience, but I have to admit, that does stretch it. Also, you have to wonder why the Victory’s away team filmed this mission years ago, but it’s still not standard procedure to do so. Seems like a smart idea, to me! TNG LOL: You can’t help but laugh at the early scene where La Forge describes himself as “enjoying the bachelor’s life too much”. But not too much to spend an entire episode hitting on a married woman he’d never actually met in person about two weeks ago, right? To Boldly Go: Intercepting a stolen shuttlecraft. Because that sure seems like a job for the Federation flagship rather than one that could be done by just about any random starship, right? Who’s That Face?: This episode features no less than three weird guest stars, though we don’t see all of their faces. Ensign Graham is played by Mona Grudt, a former Miss World from Norway, while two of the mutated aliens are played by Los Angeles DJs, Brian Phelps and Mark Thompson. Time Until Meeting: 0:00. JACKPOT! This episode STARTS in a meeting. Well, technically, it starts with the video that they’re watching in the meeting, but 40 seconds in you get a pull-back and reveal and everyone’s sitting around a conference table. Whether you go with the 00:00 or 00:40 timestamp, this is by far the earliest meeting TNG has ever done. If anything about the episode is bad (aside from the technobabble solution to the problem) it’s the timing of it. We just had a Geordi episode, followed by a Troi episode, followed by this Geordi episode. I like the B-listers as much as anyone, but spread them out a bit! Read James’ look-back at the previous episode, Night Terrors, here.
