TNG Flashback: Transfigurations

It's time to get back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the last couple episodes of the third season. First up is the disappointing and flat "Transfigurations."

The Enterprise rescues the near fatally injured survivor of an escape pod crash, and Dr. Crusher begins the weeks-long process of nursing him back to health. Suffering from amnesia, the alien "John Doe" is unable to recall his past, nor to explain the strange cellular mutation he is undergoing. When the crew is finally able to locate Doe's homeworld, his people demand he be handed over to be executed for unspecified crimes.

After selling his first script to Star Trek: The Next Generation ("The Offspring"), writer Rene Echeverria was reportedly contacted by the writing staff to see if he had any ideas for cracking a troublesome story idea they'd been pursuing. They wanted to tell the story of an alien recovered from a crash, but didn't know who he was or what to make him that would get the story going. Echevarria suggested that Star Trek had depicted several advanced alien races without ever depicting the moment of their evolution to "godhood"; perhaps that would be a good angle for the story.

The problem is, this idea ultimately has nothing to do with our main characters. Indeed, given John Doe's incredible regenerative powers, it could be questioned whether Dr. Crusher even needed to come along to save his life and get him to his moment of apotheosis. And even if Crusher did that much, it's the last moment in the entire episode that any of the main characters have a substantial impact on the story outcome. Doe recovers his memories without any assistance from the main characters -- and notably, at a maddening pace with just enough convenient holes to keep the mystery alive for 45 minutes.

The episode is awash in technobabble. The entire first act seesaws back and forth between mechanical technobabble about the the computer storage device recovered from the crash, and medical technobabble regarding John Doe's recovery. (In a key scene were Worf bellows, "enough talk," we the audience wholeheartedly agree.) At the midpoint of the story, the scene in which Data and Geordi figure out where to find Doe's home planet is another agonizingly long bit of exposition. But worst of all is the climax of the story, a plodding, dry scene in which the camera pans across the passive faces of our heroes as they listen to the guest star download a massive brick of exposition.

If the main characters don't impact the story, we could have at least seen how the story impacted them, in a "ripples in the pond" sort of way. But the story isn't much more successful on that front, either. We're told that a strong -- but non-romantic -- relationship forms between Beverly and John Doe. And though the passage of many weeks during the story does allow for this, the fact remains that it all happens off screen. We're told about their relationship, not shown it. It's hard to invest in. And the only other character John Doe really interacts with on a personal level is Geordi, who somehow gains a "boost of confidence" from his contact with the alien, manifested by his sudden smoothness with the woman he'd been interested in, Christy Henshaw. This thread at least has a more personal touch, but also misfires a bit in that Christy Henshaw is actually a returning character (from the episode "Booby Trap"). In that episode, we saw Geordi's failed attempt at a date with her, yet this episode starts with him seeming to have a crush on her as though none of the previous events had ever happened.

A handful of other scenes are well intentioned, but just don't quite work right. A dinner between Wesley and Beverly, discussing her relationship with Doe, seems a bit awkward. Worf's momentary death doesn't really have much of an impact, since it seems hard to believe that his fall from not-all-that-great-a-height would result in a fatal injury, particularly to a Klingon. O'Brien's holodeck kayak injury (shown here for the first time, before it would occur repeatedly on Deep Space Nine) turns odd when Wesley comes off like quite a jerk by slapping the obviously injured O'Brien on the shoulder.

Other observations:

• Riker keeps referring to Geordi's girlfriend as "Miss" Henshaw. Does she have no rank or job aboard the Enterprise? It comes off as ever-so-slightly chauvinistic.

• Composer Dennis McCarthy tries to cut loose a bit in the scene where John Doe tries to flee the ship, but like so much of this episode, it doesn't quite work. The synthesized percussion he deploys is conspicuously strange, calling attention to itself in an undesirable way.

• John Doe's people, the Zalkonians, deploy an unprecedented weapon in the final act of the story. Apparently, at the push of a button, they can either disable the Enterprise's life support or affect the breathing of every member of her crew. Yet despite the shocking power of this weapon, nobody in the episode comments on it. Smartly, the writers never show us such a weapon again for the life of the series (so far as I remember).

There are one or two elements that save the episode from being a total loss. The banter between Worf and Geordi about the latter's lack of skill with women is truly funny. The crash site set where John Doe is found in the teaser is quite impressive for such a short amount of camera time. It almost looks like an outdoor location, perhaps given away only by the sharp clarity of this new HD remaster. In short, even while failing, the series isn't failing as completely as it did in the first two seasons. Still, make no mistake: this is the worst episode of season three. I give it a D+.