TNG Flashback: Booby Trap

Star Trek: The Next Generation's increased emphasis on character in season three continued with its next episode, "Booby Trap."

The crew finds an ancient alien battle cruiser adrift in an asteroid field. But in going to investigate, the Enterprise becomes trapped in the very same snare that doomed the aliens -- a network of machines that drain a ship's own energy to produce a radiation lethal to the crew. Geordi LaForge is tasked with figuring out a way to beat a trap that uses your own efforts to escape against you. To help get inside the engine, he turns to a holographic simulation of the Enterprise while it was still being constructed, and of Dr. Leah Brahms, one of its brilliant designers.

While this episode does have a science fiction jeopardy in play (the only story element featured in the original 1989 episode preview, in fact), the real story here is about Geordi's ailing love life. The opening scene shows him on a bad, overwrought date, which later leads to a wonderful conversation with Guinan that exposes his problem -- he tries too hard, and just isn't himself around women. The episode then goes on to show Geordi in his element, dealing with an engineering crisis, and having a very natural relationship with a woman along the way. (Natural, but probably not quite "healthy," since the woman is a holographic simulation.)

This story flows so smoothly, it's hard to imagine that the first draft was actually written to feature Picard instead of Geordi. Show runner Michael Piller realized that the core of this story was about a "man who loves his car," and thought that it was an awkward sell for Picard to be getting romantic with a holographic woman during a crisis anyway. He switched the story over to Geordi, and the results were a clear improvement.

Although it's a Geordi episode, other characters get solid moments too. Picard's enthusiasm for exploring the alien ship speaks to his love of archaeology, and even the other characters comment on how great it is to see this boyish side of him. There's marvelous comedy in Worf, Data, Riker, and O'Brien all weighing in on playing with "ships in bottles" as young boys. Data and Wesley have a wonderful exchange upon seeing Geordi return early from his disastrous date. And Guinan tells an intriguing story of her attraction to bald men, because "a bald man was kind to me once." (It's left vague whether she might mean Picard -- although Guinan says in another episode that she never met the captain before coming aboard the Enterprise. The time-traveling events of the later episode "Time's Arrow, Part II" might be seen paying off this conversation here.)

After a long string of first- and second-season episodes where the holodeck accidentally puts people into jeopardy, it's nice to see here a logical use for the technology: to test out ideas in a simulation before putting them into practice in reality. That said, Geordi really hasn't learned his lesson about holodeck use. A slip of his tongue in "Elementary, Dear Data" created the menacing Moriarty; here, it's another unthinking turn of phrase that results in the creation of the Leah Brahms hologram.

Other observations:

• Ron Jones delivers another fantastic score for this episode. He blends live and synthesized trumpets together to personify the alien trap, and crafts an almost pop-music love theme for Geordi and Leah. Still, producer Rick Berman wasn't a fan of all his music for this episode; Jones' music for the final sequence was thrown out. Instead, pieces of his earlier score for "Where Silence Has Lease" were used to cover the Enterprise's escape from the asteroid field.

• Look very closely in the scene where the Away Team searches the alien ship with handheld flashlights, and you can spot the cords running to those lights from the actors' sleeves. In 1989, it took more juice than a small battery could provide to get a light that bright.

• This episode spawned a clever idea for a sequel. You don't really think about the horrible violation of privacy when Geordi conjures up a holographic romance with an actual person, but it makes total sense. And as for the "margin of error" the computer gives here for the faithfulness to Leah Brahms' actual personality? Let's just say that somewhere, mistakes were made.

"Booby Trap" is another solid episode that delves into character as a crisis is resolved. I give it a B+. The show was definitely coming into its own.