Identity Crisis

DVD, TNG S4 (Identity Crisis)

Much better than I remembered, this story, linked to one of Geordi's previous postings, is slow-burning, but with enough intrigue to keep you going. I love it when we hear about (or even better, in this case, see) previous missions people have been on prior to the series. They got the period detail of five years before, correct, with the tighter uniform designs and their 'go-faster' stripes on the shoulders! I'm not sure if we'd heard much about Geordi's previous career, or the USS Victory, but either way we get more information to add to our knowledge.

There's always something special about recreating a real scene on the holodeck, perhaps a more important function than the recreational use it's mostly employed for. There was something rather creepy about the shadow that can't be accounted for in the scene, and that computer extrapolation, unfinished, untextured, was strangely menacing. Effects are always important for helping to create believability, and 'TNG' sometimes suffers in this department - the shuttle crash into the atmosphere of the planet was a bit weedy. It's surprising that some visuals can be so drab, yet others are incredible, up there with the best in the series - I'm thinking of the chameleon effect La Forge uses to get to the transporter room, which was tremendous. The holodeck recreation was pretty good, although whenever they do something like this, it always works better when the subjects are locked off (as in 'Journey's End' or 'the 'DS9' episode 'Duet') as you can't rely on the actors not to sway slightly or move almost imperceptibly, which nonetheless diminishes the effect somewhat. Saying that, the 'rewind' sequence looked brilliant, as did all the business with the shadows, and La Forge removing individual elements from the scene.

While the visual effects were worthy of praise, the prosthetics took the series to another level of quality and experimentation - the alien's translucent, blue-veined exterior, added to the webbed hands and glowing yellow eyes, crafted an image of fear and instinctual behaviour. When Geordi is torn between following the other two, who are too far gone to ever revert to their humanity, or to trust his friend Susanna Leitjen, the eyes are so expressive of his desire to flee like an animal, and it's a very touching moment when he takes her hand and takes the first step back to his humanity. There is great poignancy in his returning to normal as the others couldn't make it back, and though we never knew them, it's still very sad.

There are a couple of hiccups in the story - why didn't Riker simply deactivate the holoprogram rather than leaving it running when they search for Geordi, and in the first place, why didn't Picard order a twenty-four hour watch on his Chief Engineer since they knew he was going to turn into a creature that couldn't be tracked, at some point? It was quite surprising to have a Nordic or Scandinavian helmswoman, as it wasn't a people I'd thought of, but as soon as she spoke I wished we had a regular character of that extraction! On the cast front Nurse Ogawa gets to be in it, and we get some really nice scenes between Geordi and Dr. Crusher, and Geordi and Data, both of whom show their concern for their friend. It's one of those well mixed episodes (not talking about sound, although that was fine), which you can sink into, there are some good moments and everything, well almost everything, turns out alright by the end, which is the style of the series I really like - the warm bath effect, shall we say.

Ideas in 'Star Trek' often get recycled, and the genetic reproduction was also seen in 'Voyager' story 'Ashes To Ashes', though that race brought the dead of other races back to life to serve as hosts to new genetic material. The same series' (and also written by Brannon Braga) 'Threshold' is also about genetic mutation, and of course 'TNG's own 'Genesis' had a similar theme. No doubt there were others too!

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