This episode has multiple flaws, but I’ve always felt that its #1 problem is simply that it is unbelievably boring. It’s got a sci-fi premise about weird, basically invisible aliens that reproduce by turning other beings into members of their species, which doesn’t really do anything for me; it tries to play the creepiness angle both of the aliens themselves and of “what the hell is happening to me” with the afflicted characters, but not very effectively; and it wants us to get invested in the friendship between Geordi and his former shipmate, Susanna Leitjen, but (at least for me) it fails miserably. And that’s it; there’s no other hook, no larger ideas at play…nothing to grab onto and care about. I find it simultaneously dismaying and (sadly) sort of unsurprising that “Identity Crisis” represents the first solo effort (albeit based on a story idea by an outside writer) by Brannon Braga: a writer who would go on to do some much, much better work, but also plenty of not-so-great work, and whose fatal weakness would always be a tendency to emphasize out-there, sci-fi weirdness over meaningful character work or big thematic ideas.
It’s a huge problem for this episode that I have never felt any sense of reality about the friendship that it tries to manufacture between Geordi and this Susanna character from his past. That we’ve never heard of her before is an easy criticism to make, but maybe an unfair one (or at least one that speaks to an unrealistic expectation for a show as episodic as TNG)—but for me to at all buy into the friendship, when it’s this out of the blue, I would at least need a scene of Geordi reflecting on how he hasn’t thought about her in a long time but is remembering how much she meant to him, or…something. Also, I can’t quite get my head around what sort of friendship they’re supposed to have had. She makes a reference to their relationship as having had a kind of pseudo-big sister / little brother dynamic, but at no point does anything about their interactions feel consistent with that. Meanwhile, there’s a tenderness and a physicality between them that almost suggests a romantic connection, but the episode is clearly not going for that take on things. And what to make of their comments about him going to her for advice on women? Given that it first comes up in the context of Geordi claiming (just two episodes after his pursuit of Leah Brahms!) to be fond of the bachelor life, is the joke supposed to be that her advice was actually terrible? I just don’t quite “get it.”
Also, though, I just don’t find the whole scenario in which the members of some away team from another ship, five years ago, are suddenly compelled to return to the alien planet they visited and are turning into weird veiny blue (then later invisible) aliens, very interesting at all. I mean, sure, that’s bad, and it would be ideal if we could prevent it from happening, and certainly I don’t want it to happen to Geordi, whom I like. But it’s just so random and weird and boring! And, like, why now? And why is the Enterprise the only ship that can ever successfully resolve mysterious things like this? And Susanna and Geordi behave irrationally, and the other characters largely let them, making everyone look dumb. (It’s all very well for the computer to track Geordi’s movements, but he obviously should not have been left alone! He also obviously was never going to immediately report any symptoms to Dr. Crusher, per her orders. Also, by the way…when he inevitably transforms and becomes undetectable to the computer that is supposed to be monitoring him, does it alert anyone? No, of course not.) And in the end, do our heroes even have to come up with anything particularly clever or interesting to resolve the situation? Nope, it’s just: Crusher does a surgery, and Data invents an ultraviolet flashlight, and an away team beams down and shines it around until they spot Geordi, and then Susanna talks him into coming back to the ship. Boring. (There is the sequence in which Geordi deduces the presence of an invisible alien from the old away team’s visual logs, which, though drawn out to interminable length, does at least do him some credit, as well as being kind of creepy. However, it’s all for naught since immediately after making this discovery, and before he can tell anyone else about it, Geordi transforms and goes running off to the planet.) Not to mention that the idea of people having their DNA rewritten such that they turn into weird alien beasts, but this being easily reversible with some quick surgery and having no lasting effects whatsoever, goes way beyond the bounds of my ability to suspend disbelief (and in a way that Braga will repeat several times in future episodes).
The other problem with the climax of the episode is that, even if it had done a better job of selling the Susanna-Geordi friendship, the nonsense idea that she alone can find and/or get through to him really rubs me the wrong way. His supposed connection to this former colleague magically trumps his relationships with all of his current shipmates (who also, incidentally, are characters that we, the audience, have an actual investment in)? Yes, okay, she had just had her own brush with the same alien transformation that was afflicting him, but did that really impart deep insights without which there would have been no reaching him? Earlier, the episode briefly gestures in the direction of Data being “highly motivated” to figure out what’s going on, for Geordi’s sake. The Data-Geordi friendship is one that I as a viewer actually care about, too. If Data had been the one to pull Geordi back from the brink, that might have given me some reason to actually get emotionally involved. But no.
It’s not laughable, or an all-out embarrassment, in the manner of a one-star episode…but “Identity Crisis” is a clunker, for sure.
Indeed. It’s a tedious slog.