Another classic of late-fifth-season TNG, “The Next Phase” has always struck me as iffy in the sci-fi logic department but really solid in terms of character and tone, and just brimming with heart. There’s a modest character arc for Ensign Ro, some great Geordi/Data material despite (or because of?) their inability to interact directly, just enough plot tension to keep things moving along, and a really nice, feel-good moment at the end. It’s quintessential Ron Moore, really.
It’s interesting to speculate about the thinking behind the choices of Geordi and Ro as the featured characters for this episode. Ro, I suppose, is one of the only characters who could believably be presented as concluding that she was dead and in the afterlife, and the story allows the show to explore aspects of her personality that we haven’t really seen before. It also serves to integrate her a bit more into the rest of the cast, by showing us both how others (mainly Riker) react to her apparent death and how she herself deals with saying goodbye—not to mention throwing her together with Geordi in circumstances that could hardly fail to develop something of a bond between them. (Pity, really, that Ro will only appear in two more episodes after this one.) The early scene in which they discover that even though the rest of the world is intangible to them, they are at least solid to each other, sets the tone for this, and is affecting. As for Geordi, he was doubtless chosen in part because the plot kind of requires someone with tech expertise, but having him as one of the “phased” characters also gives us the pure-gold story thread of Data reacting to the apparent loss of his best friend (and Geordi listening in as he discusses it with Worf). It’s a delightful inversion of season three’s “The Most Toys,” when we got to see Geordi trying to cope with Data’s apparent demise. Moore knows exactly how to show us Data struggling (just a little) to come to terms with Geordi’s death, and voicing his thoughts about what Geordi meant to him, all while remaining entirely who he is. Plus, our favorite android’s unorthodox approach to a memorial service (and Geordi’s delighted reaction to it) strikes just the right tone for the episode, given that the audience knows no one has really died.
Of course, the episode’s handling of the “phased cloak” premise doesn’t hold up to even the most casual scrutiny. Probably no one has ever written or otherwise opined about this episode without calling out the fact that Geordi and Ro are somehow able to walk around on the floor as though it were solid to them, even though they pass through all other objects as though they weren’t even there. For that matter, why are they able to breathe, and how are they protected from the cold and the vacuum of space? It’s hard to imagine a workable way for these flaws to have been avoided, but still, they’re glaring, and to the extent that we overlook them, we do so basically because the episode is clearly more interested in using the phased cloak as the launching point for a character story than in exploring it as a sci-fi concept. Likewise, not much is really made of the implications of the Romulans having this technology. Sure, they have some kinks to work out (it’s not much use to them if deploying it tends to cause their ships to explode). But the episode ends without so much as a confrontation between Picard and the Romulans (whom the Enterprise folks have just rescued and aided) over the latter’s attempt to “thank” them by destroying them (!), much less any larger concerns being expressed over how a phased cloak might impact future Romulan encounters. Depending on how you want to look at it, these omissions are either kind of lazy or just reflect choices about what to focus on. Admittedly, scenes of sabre-rattling at the Romulans might have clashed tonally with the character-focused, feel-good mood of the existing scenes at the end of the episode, but I still can’t help but feel that there are some missing pieces.
Earlier in the episode, too, the dealings with the Romulans present something of a mixed bag. The Enterprise answering a Romulan distress call and providing aid to “the enemy” is something that we haven’t seen before, and for a bit, it inspires a degree of hope. Things turn somewhat less friendly when we discover that there’s a phased Romulan and he starts threatening Geordi and Ro, but since he is aware that the two of them are “onto” what he and his shipmates are up to with their secret experimental technology, it makes sense that he would take action to contain what he naturally sees as a security leak. (This somewhat parallels the concern that Worf expresses over giving the Romulans access to Federation computer technology.) However, I find it a little disappointing that even the scientist who is in charge on the Romulan ship (its senior officers having been killed), and who at first seems a little in over his head and simply grateful for the Enterprise‘s help, ends up plotting to destroy it. Geordi and Ro being aware of the plot but unable to tell anyone or do anything about it adds a dramatic tension and urgency that serves the story well, but the decision to try to blow up the Enterprise makes the Romulan scientist less interesting as a character, reducing him basically to a run of the mill, stock adversary. Oh well. As with the phase cloaking device itself, the episode turns out not to be especially interested in the Romulans; both are mainly just devices employed to engineer the situation of Geordi and Ro being phased, which is what the episode is interested in. That’s not a bad thing, either, per se; it just leads to other potentially interesting elements of the episode’s premise getting somewhat shortchanged.
Once Geordi starts connecting the dots between his and Ro’s actions on one hand, and Data’s findings on the other, it’s pretty fun to watch him struggling to guide Data toward the answers and actions necessary to de-phase them, across both the technological divide of Data’s inability to directly perceive him and the urgency divide stemming from Geordi and Ro’s knowledge of the danger to the ship (and of their own not-dead status) versus Data’s non-crisis, memorial-service-planning mindset. (Although, as others have pointed out, he really ought to have been more systematic in his efforts to get a “message” across to Data.) And of course, the moment when Geordi and Ro materialize, clinging to each other, in the midst of their own “funeral,” their desperate hope morphing into exultant relief as their friends and crewmates stare at them in amazement, makes for a moving and memorable climactic scene.