Transfigurations
LaForge finally becomes King of the Nerds. Oh, and there's an alien who evolves into an angel because of course there is!
Worf is helping LaForge with his woman problems but he’s still terribly uncomfortable around Christy Henshaw, and deserves the Klingon's admonishment: “I have much to teach you about women.” Indeed you do, Mr Worf. Let’s beam down to Sound Stage 16 where there’s a crashed shuttle that looks awfully like the one that Kivas Fajo was using, along with a seriously injured alien guest star. Time for Dr Crusher to nurse him back to health. Yes, it’s one of those episodes that’s heavy on the medical nonsense words and light on everything else except saving money on the production budget.
Fortunately, our alien ‘John Doe’ can be healed simply by mentioning a dozen random slices of technobabble like “Sixty cc’s of inoprovaline...” and “use the protodynoplaser to stabilize his immune system.” They’re so good at throwing around jargon, that John Doe even starts to randomly glow for no good reason. Not to be out done, LaForge takes a break from bragging to Riker in the turbolift about his sudden change of fortune with Christy Henshaw to construct some fine quality technobabble with Data like “Analyze molecular sequences on nucleic acid chains” and “Overlay navigational chart using referenced pulsars and project a flight path back to origin.” Classic!
Anyway, Worf gets too close to John Doe while he’s having one of his glowy fits and is thrown off the catwalk of the shuttlebay - killing him (Worf 5, Aliens 8)!
Okay, he’s only dead for a fraction of a scene, but it still breaks his streak of winning-and-losing in the same episode. Soon after, a generic alien bad guy turns up to accuse ‘John Doe’ of being a “disruptive influence”, which to be fair he is - he just killed Worf for a start, not to mention tempting Dr Crusher to breach her medical ethics. Mind you, the alien bad guy does try to kill the entire Enterprise crew using the least expensive weapon SFX imaginable (let’s call it ‘the suffocation ray’) before John Doe finally manages to evolve into an angel and leave us all in peace.
Words
This is René Echevarria’s second screenplay, and it seems - just like the plot of the episode - it was something of a rescue operation. Echevarria recalled:
After selling “The Offspring” to the show, I went back to New York and Michael called me a couple of weeks later and said he had a story that was dead in the water. It was a premise they had bought involving us finding some crashed ship on a little moon and there’s a man who’s basically dead and we use miraculous 24th century medicine and bring him back to life. We practically grow him back, but who is he and what’s the story? I thought about it for awhile and came up with the basic idea of “Transfigurations”, that someone was evolving out of their Human form into an energy being. We’ve seen both of those stories before, but we’ve never seen the intermediate step.
To be frank, now we know why we haven’t seen the intermediate step: it’s not very interesting. Honestly, I have so many problems with the ‘aliens evolving into angels because it’s the next stage of their evolution’ plot line, but my main complaint is that we’ve seen it before - for instance, in the 1972 Doctor Who serial “The Mutants”...
...or, in Babylon 5...
...and don’t even get me started on the idea of any species evolving into an energy being from a biological origin, which is obviously a Star Trek staple. I’m willing to accept it as a conceit, because it’s sometimes a fun toybox to play with, but this is not a great example of this kind of story. We started the season with a so-so ‘evolution’ story (namely “Evolution”) and now we’re tying it up with one too. There’s a certain symmetry to that, at least.
Acting Roles
So this is supposed to be a vehicle for Gates McFadden’s Dr Crusher, but it functions more as a kind of proto-”Lower Decks”. To be fair, McFadden works reasonably well with Mark LaMura’ John Doe, who had just finished a thirteen year run as Mark Dalton on All My Children where he fictionally survived a failed romance with his half-sister, and a near brush with AIDS.
He was nominated for a Daytime Emmy for his performance on that soap, and this seems to have encouraged him to jump ship. As I say, he works fine with McFadden, but his appearance in TNG is hardly a career-making role.
There’s an unremarkable performance by Charles Dennis as Sunad, who gets to play the generic ‘change is bad’ villain.
Dennis isn’t actually that used to appearing on screen (despite debuting in the 1970 movie Patton), and has mostly worked as a voice actor - including nearly thirty videogames, perhaps most close-to-notably as Rear Admiral Boris Mikhailovich in Mass Effect. Actually, Dennis has cut a quietly-lauded career as a writer of theatrical plays and arthouse movies adapted from his plays. I like to think that his six hours in make-up for this show helped him to eat while he was working on one of his plays.
But back to sickbay. There's a real attempt to try and give Dr Crusher a team to back her up, but the introduction of Patti Tippo’s Nurse Temple does not pan out. In nine episodes, we get Patti Yasutake’s Nurse Ogawa - she’s a keeper! - but Tippo only gets this one episode.
You might recognise Tippo from her only recurring role, Officer Daley in the silly 80s cop comedy Sledge Hammer! She gets a whole three lines in this episode, sharing the load on the medical technobabble with corkers like: “Limb re-fusion appears to have been successful, Doctor. Tissue oxygenation is within norms.” before her barnstorming final line “Doctor Crusher, medical emergency, room four.”
Crusher and Temple are backed up by the return of uncredited lower decks superstar Michael Braveheart.
Fans will tell you his character is named ‘Martinez’, as this is what he’s called in “Who Watches the Watchers”, twelve appearances ago. Yes, believe it or not this is his twenty third uncredited role in TNG, and he also appears in both First Contact and Insurrection. Always in the background, never with a speaking line, he doesn’t even warrant a name in the screenplay, which just says:
Beverly, NURSE TEMPLE, and SEVERAL MEDICAL CREWPERSONS are working on John.
Elsewhere, let’s welcome back Julie Warner’s Christy Henshaw, who we last saw in “Booby Trap”.
I like that they gave LaForge a chance to overcome his fear of women, and that he works it out with Henshaw, but it would have been even better if she could have been spared some time to be developed as a character as well. Warner did briefly have a crack at a film career, though, and would play the female romantic lead against Michael J. Fox in the moderately charming 1991 comedy Doc Hollywood.
Hat tip to Joycelyn Robinson’s second (uncredited) appearance as Ensign Gates, but of course it’s all overshadowed with the highlight of the episode: Colm Meaney’s Miles O’Brien sustaining a shoulder injury from kayaking on the holodeck.
It is fair to say that the good Transporter Chief will never live this down, and both kayaking and shoulder injuries make frequent appearances in DS9.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Not so much to see in the special effects here except of a lot of glowing body parts. For the final scenes where he’s evolved into an angel, Mark LaMura actually wore a fluorescent orange jumpsuit that glowed on the special film used to shoot the footage - sadly, I wasn’t able to get a behind-the-scenes picture of this.
Near the beginning, there’s a matte painting of mountains that nobody seems to know anything about, but I believe this might be the same rental that we saw back in “Angel One”.
Last, but by no means least, let’s welcome back the Tarellian plague ship from “Haven”, which appears after heavy modification as the Zalkonian ship.
It gets one more appearance in season five, and then pops up once each in DS9 and Voyager before being retired. It didn’t ever get to evolve into an energy form and zwoosh off into space to do energy-formy things though. I suppose it might consider itself fortunate.