“Interface” strikes me as a classic case of the writers being hard up for new episode ideas. It is an episode built upon two main “hooks” that want to make a claim on its audience’s interest and attention, neither of which is remotely inspired or interesting enough to actually warrant an episode. The result, predictably, is eminently forgettable.
First, we have the titular “interface”—a moderately cool-on-its-own-terms, yet bizarre and somewhat pointless-seeming in context, bit of sci-fi tech that the episode seems to think we’re going to find really interesting. I mean, on the one hand, is it cool to imagine controlling a probe via a virtual reality interface that allows you to experience the probe’s environment firsthand? Sure. But on the other hand, is there any apparent reason for the Enterprise to suddenly be messing around with this tech? Does it really enable them to accomplish anything that they couldn’t do without it? As far as I can tell, the answers to these questions seem to be “no.” So, essentially, what we have here is “let’s play around with a ‘new’ tech idea that actually seems well within the established capacities of our fictional world, yet also has no clear purpose, and hope that this will be enough to buy audience engagement!” Bzzt. Try again. Plus, the longer the episode goes on, the less clear it becomes what exactly is even going on when Geordi is hooked up to the probe. Why does it need to be controlled in this unusual (and, apparently, increasingly Geordi-endangering) way? What are the factors limiting what he can do when in the suit? What are the stakes? (The latter issue is largely addressed by way of a bunch of talk about what percent of tolerance the sensory inputs are set to, which is hardly riveting stuff to begin with and becomes even harder to get invested in when it seems like the rules keep changing.) In short, the probe interface is just not much of anything as a story idea.
Secondly, of course, the episode wants us to get interested in the idea of Geordi trying to cope with the disappearance and possible death of his mother. On its face, this character issue is a much more plausible story hook than the tech gizmo. However, to begin with, trying to get us invested in the (loss of a) relationship between a main character and a parent whom we’ve never met or even really heard of before, six-plus seasons into the show, feels like a classic late-in-series reach. Geordi has scarcely ever mentioned either of his parents over the course of the 150 or so episodes prior to this one. If we had met his mother in some previous episode, or if he were at least a guy who frequently talked about his parents or his childhood (so that we had a sense of what she might mean to him beyond just “well, she’s his mom, so he probably loves her”), then an episode like this one might have had something to work with—but no. Worse, the episode also makes almost no effort of its own to get us interested in Geordi’s mother or his relationship with her. We get a brief video message that doesn’t manage to establish anything remotely distinctive or interesting about her, and a deeply unconvincing conversation between Geordi and his dad that’s mainly focused on selling the idea that everyone else has accepted the reality of his mother’s loss, and only Geordi continues to hold onto hope. The writing makes no attempt to convey genuine grief, and the acting is wooden and detached. It all just feels extremely perfunctory, leaving the impression that the writers only care about this story to the extent of setting up Geordi’s delusional straw-grasping and can’t be bothered with showing any actual emotions, much less working to evoke them in the audience. And on top of all of that, I also completely fail to buy into the psychology of Geordi’s reaction to the situation. His initial “I’m fine, just let me keep playing with the probe” attitude is boring. When he stops by Data’s quarters, but denies (twice) that he wants to talk about things (despite Data seeing immediately that he does), it feels out of character to me—and when, a few seconds later, he admits that he actually does want to talk, it feels contrived. When that scene ends with him saying he doesn’t know what he’s going to do if his mother is really dead, it feels cheesy and totally unearned. (I do like the later scene where RIker tries to get through to Geordi by talking about his own mother’s death, but Geordi’s reaction is just more of the same boring, unconvincing denial.) And as things progress to Geordi buying into the illusion of his mother appearing on the Raman, and indulging in wild theorizing to rationalize how this might be possible, my suspension of disbelief just goes out the window. So, like the “interface” plot, the attempt at a character story also doesn’t work at all.
The plot resolution is also, frankly, terrible. Geordi all-too-predictably decides to disobey orders. Data, to his credit, actually does predict this behavior, but apart from that, everything else about how things play out is just dumb, from the fact that no one else foresees his actions, to the fact that Data caves and helps him do the dumb thing instead of actually stopping him, to the fact that there end up being no real consequences for any of this. And all of this for the “payoff” of an extremely ho-hum “rescue the aliens” ending, and zero emotional catharsis or resolution of any of the character stuff that the episode has half-assedly been trying to deal with. Oh, sure, the episode tries to pretend that it has wrapped up the character story, by having Geordi make the completely bogus claim that his final interaction with the alien-in-the-form-of-his-mother (the interaction that led him to realize what was really going on, that is) was “so real” that he “felt like he had a chance to say good-bye.” Uh-huh. From hard-core denial, and disobeying direct orders in pursuit of absurd straw-grasping theories, to “all good, ready to move on” in the blink of an eye, just because one of the non-corporeal aliens he rescued appeared in the form of his (presumably, actually dead) mom. Sure.
This comparison never occurred to me prior to this re-watch, but “Interface” is rather a lot like a worse version of season’ three’s “The Bonding”: someone loses their mother, but then a weird alien impersonates the dead mom, with the result that the character who experienced the loss gets stuck in denial for a while. You’d think the fact that it’s Geordi, rather than some random kid we’ve never met before, who is going through these experiences, would make this episode better than the previous one, but you’d be wrong. Sure, the child actor in “The Bonding” wasn’t good, but at least the psychology was more believable for a child than it is for Geordi—and also, of course, “The Bonding” simply made way more of an effort to convey genuine emotion.