“Words come later. It is the scent that first speaks of love.”
I’m fairly sure I thought “Transfigurations” was Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third-season finale when it aired in 1990; and I remember thinking “wow, what an underwhelming last episode.” I can’t even recall how or why I found out that I needed to tune in again the following week before starting my summer vacation, which means that there’s a version of the timeline out there where I missed “The Best of Both Worlds” entirely. I’m shivering inside just typing that.
Anyway, yeah, “Transfigurations” isn’t very whelming. I’ve been handing out a lot of four-Enterprises-and-above ratings throughout most of Season Three, to the point where you’d be justified in thinking I’d just given the series a free pass. “Transfigurations,” though not terrible, is just a weird one-off dip in what was otherwise Next Gen’s longest sustained run of great episodes (a run that continues quite a long ways into Season Four, too). It’s ostensibly a Beverly episode, I guess, which should suit me fine, but the issue is that the amnesiac alien guest star in his creepy white Fermi suit isn’t very interesting. The slow progress through his amnesia to his healing powers to the resolution is leaden.
There’s some fun to be had when “John Doe” (rather inexplicably) “cures” Geordi’s inability to talk to women, although how lasting that cure turns out to be will probably be subject to the mercurial whims of the writing room, who seem to like to continually flunk Geordi on his sexual skills. But for the time being, the cure leads to a scene or two with “Smooth Geordi” (or maybe we should be calling him “Lando LaForge”), which is funny, as is Worf’s insistence that his gruff tutelage on talking to women is the cause of Geordi’s improvement.
The episode is notable for two other things: it takes place over an unusually long time period (three months, ish?). It also has an astonishingly gruesome prosthetic in the teaser – John’s mangled face on the planet’s surface features exposed brain, exposed jaw, exposed teeth, and lotsa blood. No idea how that made it on television in 1990.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. We charge into Season Four next week.