“Captain! The creatures are accelerating their approach! They are changing colour!”
Geordi’s hologram fantasy dream girl returns, and this time, she’s real! Except, whoops, she’s married. And not a hologram fantasy dream girl. I guess Geordi forgot to check her relationship status on Spacebook. I remember, while I was cyber-dating about a decade ago, chatting with a woman for a couple of weeks online who turned out to be so fundamentally different in person that it was like meeting a new person. If nothing else, “Galaxy’s Child” is a solid, unintentional primer on the (then-imminent) hazards of getting to know someone through a computer.
On blu-ray, the visceral sourness of Geordi and Leah’s reactions to one another IRL are even more bracing than I remember. Susan Gibney has an appreciable Ingrid Bergman thing going on, both physically and in performance, which works with the character in an interesting way. Gibney never shies away from heartily sneering at Geordi’s attempts to be her friend, or going ghost-white when his unannounced cyberstalking reveals a personal detail about her that she doesn’t think he’d know.
So there’s that – Geordi is hella creepy in this episode, so much so that it takes whatever was on the boundary about his behaviour in “Booby Trap” and pushes it way over that boundary. One wonders what the writers thought they were writing here, except that in 1990, it probably didn’t seem like as big of a deal as it does now. They can’t solve the arc of the show, of course – the episode can take everything right up to and including the point where Leah walks onto the holodeck and is confronted by her touchy-feely holographic self; but from here, to get out of it, they’d either need to paint Geordi as a supreme asshole or a Barclay-esque nutcase, or both. Since they can’t do either, the character lines go off the rails.
So instead, we have Geordi’s “I’m guilty of a terrible crime, trying to be your friend!” speech, which might work marginally better if Geordi hadn’t been actively trying to get into Leah’s pants for the whole episode; we also have Leah completely forgiving him by the end of the episode and even evincing a bit of nostalgic regret that they can’t go make out behind the portables, which doesn’t track at all. (And the fact that by the “All Good Things” future timeline, they’re married? Yikes. Follow this throughline and it seems to be suggesting that if you stalk a girl long enough, she’s gonna come around.)
Still, I like the episode, and I like the whole cosmic baby (ahem, “Galaxy’s Child”) plot quite a bit, as the Enterprise performs a C-section on a star creature they’ve inadvertently killed, and then becomes unwilling mother to the creature’s offspring. C-sections are cool. It’s a fun little show, with unpleasant undertones. And, as usual, it completely sucks to be Geordi – both as a person, and as a character that the Trek writers need to write for.
Three and a half Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Four is in stores now.