Whatever it was that the writers were going for with “Aquiel,” it seems to me that it didn’t quite come together. The episode has assorted flaws, but the main one is just that it isn’t terribly engaging. I mean, to be fair, it’s not hideously dull or godawful or anything, either. It’s just…not quite anything in particular: one part not-very-mysterious-or-intriguing mystery, one part shallow and underbaked love story, with halfhearted gestures toward political intrigue along the way, and topped off with a fairly dull sci-fi gimmick for a plot resolution.
Technically, in terms of plot, the episode is a murder mystery: there’s a missing officer, some human remains fused to a deck plate, another officer who had a contentious relationship with the missing one and who can’t remember what happened, and a belligerent Klingon with a history of threatening behavior. What went down? Who killed Rocha? The trouble is (you know what I’m about to say, right?): I don’t care. We never even meet the victim, and the two suspects are both one-off guest characters. Yes, the writers try to get us emotionally invested in one of them by naming the episode after her pairing her up romantically with Geordi (more on that later), but it’s not very effective. For one thing, it’s such an obvious set-up; sure, it makes you wonder if she’ll turn out to be the murderer and to be manipulating poor Geordi or if that’s just a misdirect, but unfortunately, either outcome feels more or else equally obvious and disappointing. Even worse, it turns out in the end that basically everything in the episode was a red herring. We are supposed to be torn between Aquiel’s characterization of Rocha as an arrogant jerk who attacked her for no reason on one hand, and the evidence pointing to Aquiel perhaps being insubordinate, dishonest, and someone who delights in pushing other people’s buttons on the other, all while also wondering what role the wildcard Klingon played in whatever went down…but in the end, none of that is actually relevant; it turns out that some random alien monster killed the never-seen Rocha before he had ever even met Aquiel or the Klingon. And you know how, in a good mystery, all the clues are there, so that the audience could theoretically put them together and figure it out (or at least, it feels that way in retrospect)? Yeah, that doesn’t happen here. Sure, the dog seems so out of place that one could pretty easily guess that something will prove to be “up” with it, and then near the end it becomes very obvious that it’s the coalescent life form before any of the characters realize it, but otherwise, the detective work consists of technobabble from Crusher and none of the character dynamics that have been playing out at this remote station matter in any way.
That the Geordi-Aquiel love story that the episode attempts mostly fails to grab me should not come as much of a surprise, given TNG’s general track record with love stories for its main characters. Geordi seems to fall for Aquiel mostly just because viewing her personal logs and communications makes him empathize with her, and she seems to like him mostly because he believes that she’s not a murderer. We get no sense that they’re particularly compatible, or anything. Their connection develops in a way that feels more relatable and less artificial than has sometimes been true with other TNG one-off romances, but that’s an awfully low bar. What bugs me more than just the half-bakedness of the romance, though, is the lack of any real character work for Geordi here, given that he is a character whose romantic struggles have actually been dramatized in an engaging way in past episodes. For the writers to throw a one-off romance at Geordi without picking up in any meaningful way on the character threads laid down in episodes like “Booby Trap” and “Galaxy’s Child” just feels lazy. (It’s been pointed out that Geordi once again falls for someone before even meeting her here, but the episode certainly doesn’t make anything of this. Besides, I’m not even sure it’s entirely accurate or fair.) Plus, the episode doesn’t even bother to show us Geordi struggling in any real way with the question of whether or not to trust Aquiel, which would at least have been something. (When Riker suggests to Geordi that he’s too emotionally involved to be seeing things clearly, Geordi merely comes back with a hot-headed retort. Some self-awareness and genuine uncertainty from him would have been much better, in my view.) Instead, their relationship just seems to escalate in intimacy right up to the point when it’s time for the episode to end, only for them to then write it off quite casually (almost as though they don’t care about it much more than I do). (Which is confusing, really. I’ve read that part of the thinking behind this episode was that the writers wanted to give Geordi an ongoing love interest—so, why have them decide to go their separate ways at the end, and then never bring her back? Because the character wasn’t very interesting, I guess? Even more puzzling: I also read that the original draft was going to have Aquiel actually turn out to be the murderer…which seems even less compatible with the supposed goal.) And finally, I have exactly zero patience for the lame pseudo-sci-fi magical intimacy crystal nonsense, which was obviously only included as a fake-out to make us think that Aquiel is the coalescent organism and is about to absorb Geordi, and which in any case is cheesy, dumb, and a total cheat with respect to developing a strong emotional connection between two characters.
Minor quibbles: The information that emerges from Aquiel’s communications to her sister raises a couple of big questions for me. There is a Klingon patrol ship that has been routinely harassing this remote and presumably unarmed Starfleet communications relay station, and has even gone as far as to lock disruptors on them, and…they haven’t reported this to anyone!? Also, it rather sounds as though Aquiel suffered physical abuse at the hands of her father as a child, and she comes across in her messages to her sister like a barely-holding-it-together trauma victim. Why, exactly, has she been assigned to this remote outpost, far away from any kind of support? The Enterprise has a full-time ship’s counselor; Aquiel, apparently, has a single belligerent coworker for company…
The story credit on this episode belongs to Jeri Taylor, with teleplay by Ron Moore and Brannon Braga. This is somewhat odd, since even though it’s not very good at all, it doesn’t really bear the usual hallmarks of a Jeri Taylor episode. Kind of the opposite, in fact; instead of being an obvious, preachy issue episode, “Aquiel” lacks anything resembling “big ideas” or thematic relevance at all. I mean, even a not-very-good mystery might have been somewhat forgivable if the episode, like, added up to something—but alas, it really kind of doesn’t. And since there’s nothing inherently wrong with the general idea of introducing a love interest for Geordi who’s wrapped up in a murder mystery, one senses that it may have mostly been Moore and Braga, not Taylor, who dropped the ball on this one.