“I never lie when I’ve got sand in my shoes, Commodore.”
Here’s the second great Geordi episode in a row, “The Enemy,” in which the good chief engineer is stranded on a storm-ridden planet with a single stranded Romulan. It’s David Carson’s first episode in the director’s chair – he would go on to direct “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Redemption,” and Star Trek: Generations – and it’s damned solid work all the way through, a split narrative of cooperation and survival on the surface for Geordi and Centurian Bochra, and brinksmanship and strategy on the Enterprise for Picard and Romulan Commander Tomalak, who appears for the first time here before becoming a (somewhat) recurring favourite.
Woven through it all, one of the darkest , and most surprising, B-plots of the whole series: Worf’s refusal to provide a life-saving transfusion to a second Romulan soldier. Instead of doing the usual Star Trek thing where Worf eventually learns the value of compassion, the Klingon stands firm – and the Romulan dies. “I would rather die than pollute my body with Klingon filth,” he spits just before kicking it; and on the soundtrack, Dennis McCarthy quotes Jerry Goldsmith’s legendary Klingon theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture as Worf stands over the Romulan’s dead body.
I like the fact that the episode takes the series’ “Planet Hell” standing set and runs with it, turning everything up to 11 to create Galorndon Core, a hazy electrical soup that renders Geordi’s VISOR useless and turns Bochra’s legs to jelly. Amusingly, on the blu-ray, you can see the soundstage wall during several of the lightning strikes, but it doesn’t reduce the production team’s success at creating a really, really nasty hell-hole for Geordi to fight his way through. I like his MacGyvering a pair of climbing spikes out of local minerals quite a bit; and I like his smartassy relationship with Bochra, quite a bit more, even if I can’t help but presume that poor Bochra wouldn’t have lasted long when beamed back to his mothership, regardless of (nay, because of) how genial Tomalak behaves during the denouement. Nonetheless, when Geordi and Bochra beam to safety on the Enterprise bridge, and Bochra confesses to Tomalak that Geordi saved his life, I get the feels.
This is the kind of episode where Geordi works best: drawing out character through action, rather than the other way around. (Any issues I have with the previous episode, “Booby Trap,” are because it draws out action through manufactured elements of Geordi’s character, sometimes awkwardly.) At the end of the day we want to see the chief engineer be awesome at what he does, all while maintaining his particularly Geordi-ish breed of saucy optimism. I’m left with only one question, which has plagued me all these years: what circumstances transpired in the writers’ room which resulted in two Geordi-centric episodes back to back?
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 Three is available now.