“Forgot what a handsome guy I am.”
So it’s come to this: the one with Geordi’s Mom. Furthermore, the one with Geordi’s Mom… and Virtual Reality.
“Interface” is an example of the deep-cut approach to the seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The characters have long since arrived at lived-in status, so there’s a noticeable effort to dig out any remaining nooks and crannies for story points. So, because we know next to nothing about Geordi’s family – except that he was a Starfleet brat, with both parents in the service – we spend some time with them here. But “Interface” is really about confronting and accepting grief… with a Virtual Reality overlay.
Geordi’s mother, a Starfleet captain, goes missing on a mission at the same time that Geordi is experimenting with a VR suit that will let him “pilot” a probe in dangerous environments using his VISOR inputs. Unwilling to accept the fact that his mother is gone, he believes that he has found her, and her ship, while on his away mission. The scenes with LeVar Burton working through his loss are fine enough on paper but there isn’t a lot of “oomph” to the proceedings, probably because Geordi is the least “oomph”-y character we have. He’s (at best) a gentle soul and (the rest of the time) a phenomenal bore, so while his scenes with Troi, Riker, and especially Data all track in terms of what they’re trying to say, none of them are exactly riveting to watch.
Actually, it’s odd that the writers would pull Geordi’s family out of the hat at this late game and make an episode that features them, without actually engaging with any of them in a meaningful way. We see some recorded letters between Geordi and his Mom, and a gentle conversation with Dad, but none of them are ever in a room together, and no meaningful drama is pulled out of the relationships (as it has been in other episodes for pretty much every other character on the ship – Picard, Riker, Worf, Data, Troi). We don’t learn anything about Geordi by meeting his parents, and we don’t learn anything about Virtual Reality by having him walk around in the gizmo suit, other than that the early ‘90s were patently obsessed with this stuff, and for no good reason.
Blogging The Next Generation is winding down to the end, as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The final season is in stores now.