“I’ve never seen a rainbow”: Galaxy’s Child, Identity Crisis, The Mind’s Eye
Poor Geordi La Forge.
I have no idea what it is about the Starship Enterprise‘s chief engineer, but absolutely nobody seems comfortable with writing for him or even has any real idea who he is. Michael Piller’s big contribution to fleshing out Geordi’s character was turning him into an insecure mechanophile who didn’t know how to act around women, Ira Steven Behr thinks he should be eaten by Klingons and even René Echevarria mentioned he had no idea what Geordi and Beverly Crusher would have to talk about to each other as an example of how hard he found it to write for the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters. Only Deanna Troi elicits a comparable level of writer’s block and despair amongst Star Trek creator types, and even she’s had “Night Terrors” and bits of “Half a Life” by this point.
So it really is fitting one member of this trio is entitled “Identity Crisis”, because that’s what it feels like Geordi is going through. And not just him, but Star Trek: The Next Generation too-Recall that while we’ve seen some strong stuff in the past few weeks, we’re still very early on in the show’s Mark II phase and it’s still finding its footing to some extent. That process won’t be complete until we enter the summer hiatus. But as for poor Geordi, it really does feel like the creative team has absolutely no idea what to do with him here: Instead of looking at the role he plays on the Enterprise and his relationships with the other members of the crew, the episode invents backstory for him, is primarily interested in creating the person he used to be instead of who he is now and tries to tell a story in the past tense (unlike what the show did with Captain Picard in “The Battle” where the Stargazer backstory was firmly in the past, here the Victory stuff has real material bearing on the plot). Also, it turns Geordi into a 1980s version of the aliens from Raumpatrouille Orion.
The other episodes in this set aren’t especially better. “The Mind’s Eye” is the most obviously offensive, being a rote, boring “Shocking Betrayal!” Manchurian Candidate ripoff. It’s an unimaginative and stock “Let’s Do” plot well beyond the point at which we should have learned that these don’t work, and the treatment of Geordi is absolutely horrific: Let’s take his visor, which was designed to facilitate an empowering portrayal of blind people, and turn it into a security risk by treating it like a computer in a thriller movie you can hack and make it do whatever you want. On top of that, it renders Geordi subservient to the by this point entirely and unnecessarily overblown Worf/Mogh/Duras discommendation story arc. The one bit of partial credit I suppose I could give this episode is that Commander Sela is in it, but she really doesn’t need to be in this episode.…