A colleague, Lt. Cmdr. Leijten, from his previous assignment is on board to hunt down two other fellow crew-members from the ship who suddenly hijacked shuttles from their current assignments and fled to the same planet, a planet LaForge and the other crew-members were all on an away mission on some five years earlier.
A third missing person dies during re-entry of the shuttle as the Enterprise approaches the planet where an away team investigates the landing site of a shuttle, the same place where the away mission was years earlier. There are no signs of the missing Starfleet officers other than shredded and discarded uniforms.
Upon return to the ship Leijten grows increasingly agitated as the investigation goes on ship-side and continues to show desires to return to he planet which go unfulfilled. Soon she begins showing physical changes to her body, sensitivity to light, among other changes causing a medical investigation to unfold by Crusher in sickbay.
Geordi continues to go over the records, including a video recording, of the original away mission leading him to a recreation on the holodeck (That's our LaForge!) where an unidentified shadow is seen in the recording, it cannot be linked to anything in the recording device's field of view.
LaForge too then begins to show signs of changes, similar to what Leijten underwent and presumably the others.
After doing a very intense microbial analysis of Leijten Crusher discovers her DNA is being re-written by a previously unseen parasite. She's able to remove the parasite and use Leijten's remaining original DNA to restore her to normal. Suspecting LaForge will need to be treated as well she requests him to sickbay but it's then discovered he has managed to escape the ship to the planet. They're now on a time crunch to find LaForge before his genetic code is too far gone to be recovered, the search is further harmed that the creature is turning into is invisible to light and the ship's sensors. Data, however, is able to rig-up a light the emits UV rays, making the creatures visible.
The away team, including Leijten, finds LaForge on the planet and Leijten is able to convince alien-Geordi to come back to the ship where Crusher is able to restore him to normal. It's determined that this process is how this alien species reproduces, rather than being a parasite or other malevolent organism. The original missing officers are too far gone, genetically, to be treated.
This is an episode I can go either way on. It's got some good and interesting moments but it's also got some cheesier and harder to really take moments. One in particular is near the end as LaForge's former colleague tries to convince him to go with her back to the ship.
The episode is also a different take on the "planet side dangers" of space-travel and showing us how it can create a story but this episode never makes it clear on how the original away team (and further the occupants of the outpost there in the original investigation) became infected with this reproductive process. Are all of the away team members in this episode going to need to be treated as well?
It's also a question on how such an organism developed in the first place since its entire way of reproduction seems to be dependent on alien visitors to be "infected." It's a question of whether or not interstellar space-travel his existed in the galaxy long enough for such an organism to evolve.
One thing I really like about this episode is that it shows us something that, really, we should have been seeing all of the time. The original investigation had an officer wearing a recording device (we'll call it LCARS Glass) to document the investigation. Geordi is able to use this recording during his investigation of what happened and it's apparent the data from the device is able to record things beyond simple audio and video as Geordi is able to get information from the recording including subspace data. So... Why isn't someone wearing these devices on EVERY away mission? Hell, why does it even need to be a device you wear on your head? Couldn't a tricorder record everything around it (even if it can't visually see it) while being active but still holstered?
Obviously there's plenty of "TV reasons" why this is the case but it seems that in "reality" the LCARS Glass device would be used on every away mission to document things on a new planet.
At the same time the device causes a bit of a mistake in the events of the episode. Geordi begins to suspect there was someone else there in the area of the away mission when he discovers and unidentified shadow on a wall, it doesn't match up to any person or object in the camera's point of view. He's able to conclude that it's the shadow of an invisible creature that was in the area at the time. How does something invisible (is transparent to light) leave a shadow?
Data's able to modify a flashlight to emit UV light to make the creatures visible on the surface. Yet ship's sensors aren't able to detect the creatures (which leaves the question on how the transporter transports something that it doesn't know is there) can't the ship emit UV light on the planet's surface to find Geordi and the others?
Overall, for me, this is a "meh" episode. It has some good moments in it with Geordi and his former colleague and watching Geordi's investigation of the recording is fairly interesting but at the same time it's hard to really get to wrapped up in the mystery of what was going on. Which is sort of a function of putting a main character in peril.
The remastering of the episode looks really good and I'd have to go back and check the DVD but it seems something was "added" to the effects of the eyes on Geordi's colleague as she lays on the biobed in sickbay mid-transformation. I'm sure some video effect or contacts were used in the original version of the episode but here they seem to have a more vivid "glowing" effect, sort of like a cat's eyes at night.
Some nice character moments with Data as his "concerns" over Geordi's wellbeing seem to motivate him more during the investigation. Not much is given to Picard or Riker to do here, which gives Geordi that much more time to shine in the episode.
Good, but not great.
Next week, however.... Oy.
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