On a small two-person space station near the Klingon border, one crew member is missing and the other has been turned into gelatin mixed with steel catwalk. The shuttle is gone, and it is presumed that it's Rocha in the shuttle, and Aquiel in the puddle. For such a small station, Aquiel has a very luxurious bedroom, complete with a skylight, art, and even her pet dog (who LaForge calls "Pooch," because clearly Geordi is a three year old).
LaForge sets about trying to figure out what happened by accessing Aquiel's personal logs and messages to her sister. Why the head engineer is assigned this task is anyone's guess. It's much better suited to Troi, or maybe an actual investigator on the security team. At first, the transmissions are audio only, but eventually video is added and it turns out that the sexy voice is matched to a sexy black alien. Perfect for Geordi! It's almost as if she were cast to match exactly to his tastes! After seeing her, LaForge doubles down his efforts to get to know her by snooping through her underwear drawer and stuff. There is a scene where Riker checks in on him, and upon hearing LaForge call Aquiel by her first name, he takes an interest. LaForge explains to Riker what kind of person Aquiel is, and Riker smiles creepily while drinking in the description, presumably attaining a certain level of sexual arousal himself. Riker then moves on so that LaForge can jerk off in her bed while petting her dog or whatever.
The only useful thing that LaForge comes up with is that a Klingon, Morag, has been harassing them. He stops by once a week to flex his muscles and rubs Aquiel the wrong way. But so does Rocha, and after looking at her personnel files, it seems Aquiel may be a bit of a trouble maker herself. But the Klingon lead is all they have, so they track down Morag. In the only redeemable scene, Picard pulls rank on the local Klingon in charge to get this done. It is a great moment, but not great enough to save this episode.After the crew harasses the harassing Klingon for no good reason, the Klingons come up with a surprise. They have recovered the shuttle, and in it is Aquiel, not Rocha. Now wait just a darn minute here. How is it that Worf was able to tell that a Klingon had been on the station just by scanning for DNA with a simple tricorder, but Crusher came up with the wrong person altogether to assign to the puddle of goo?
Well actually, there's a perfectly good explanation. Follow me here, cause this gets crazy. There's some sort of shape-shifting parasitic alien that takes over bodies that's involved here. It took over Rocha, and Aquiel shot him at high intensity. But then it moved to her, which is why she doesn't remember things. Then she got in the shuttle to flee, and alien parasites can't ride shuttles, so it jumped to another host. Morag? No! Pooch! Just then Pooch turns into an alien thing and LaForge shoots it. But now it doesn't jump to another host, because....reasons.
But anyway, at least LaForge got to hook up with a hot alien (after an uncomfortable conversation where he confesses to sniffing her panties when he thought she was dead). There's really nothing more here. Horrible.
Published September 23, 2018
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