“I decided that I’d pre-judged him unfairly. And then I decided that I’d been right in the first place.”
Anyone remember the one where Geordi turns into a glow-in-the-dark man-lizard? Of course you don’t, why would you. While not quite as bad as the Star Trek: Voyager episode where Janeway and Paris turned into a pair of iguanas, then fucked, had babies, and turned back into humans, “Identity Crisis” doesn’t go down as one of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s high points. It’s the worst episode of Season Four, though it’s a mark of how good Season Four is in general that “Identity Crisis” is nowhere near as bad as the low points of the other six seasons of the show. (I’m looking at you, “The Royale.”) I’d have loved an opportunity to really cut loose on this episode, having been handing out largely positive reviews for the past two dozen shows or so, but “Identity Crisis” isn’t so much bad, as just really “blah.”
I like Maryann Plunkett as Geordi’s old colleague, Commander Susanna Leijten, quite a bit. She has a very different energy from most of the usual Starfleet guest characters – jittery, but warm and intelligent. Leijten is part of the problem, though: the episode centers around Geordi and a character we’ve never met before, being instinctually called back to a planet where they were infected with lizard DNA five years ago, i.e. before the start of the series. It’s hard to feel terribly invested in set of variables so wholly outside our core characters and events, even as Geordi begins to deteriorate.
Michael Westmore’s makeup, which uses UV light to create vivid blue veins all over the lizard-men’s bodies, is quite good, although the UV splash necessary to light the creatures occasionally turns any nearby humans into yellow-toothed ghouls. The episode’s core set piece, where Geordi reconstructs the Tarchannen away mission on the holodeck and determines that a shadow is being cast with no apparent source, is neat enough. But the episode as a whole never really accumulates any kind of narrative force. It all just sorta happens.
While watching Geordi sort out his crisis in Engineering, I found myself musing about the Enterprise-D’s warp core, which is somehow just so goddamned comforting. These are the kinds of thoughts that bubble up at the halfway mark in a 176-episode rewatch. For what it’s worth, every other warp core ever designed on Star Trek didn’t quite have the same calm, sturdy “thereness” of that grey, thrumming bulb in Geordi’s basement home. I’m fairly sure I could fall asleep to the sound of that engine… actually, once or twice, I probably have.
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.