| The Next Generation | |
| 90 | |
| Galaxy's Child | |
| 44614.6 | |
Geordi is going to get to meet his holorgasmic bint. That's right, the real Dr Leah Brahms is coming onto the Enterprise to see what he has done to her engine designs. I wonder how well he will cope now that she isn't just a holodeck fantasy. He waits with eager anticipation in the transporter room, and as she appears he seductively says "Hi". Her response: "So you're the one who's fouled up my engine designs!". Smash! Ego? Who needs one...
Meanwhile on the bridge, Data discovers unusual energy readings coming from a ship orbiting an unsurveyed planet. As the Federation has given them a mandate to be nosy, they head towards it immediately. The alien ship isn't a ship after all, rather it seems to be some unknown lifeform. Picard looks smug when Data tells him that this has never been seen before. Riker orders three level 5 probes to scan the space cuttlefish.
It obviously doesn't think much of them as it scans them back, and when convinced that they are a soft target, attacks them with a lightning energy damping field. Well at least it looked impressive. Picard's smug tone wanes as he orders the ship away. Too late, the energy damping won't allow engine functions. Just to make it worse, the crew are also being subjected to another near-lethal exposure of radiation. In a very Riker-like move, Picard orders Worf to phaser it in the hope that it will leave them alone. He succeeds, probably more than he wanted to, as the cuttlefish's internal energy stops. It is dead. Major bummer. I wonder if this is yet another breach of the prime directive? Unfortunately before Picard can consider ritual suicide, Data gets a new energy reading from the entity - maybe it isn't dead after all.
Geordi's fantasy is not turning out the way he wanted. Rather than an immediate rapport that he was expecting, Leah is acting very bitchy. To try and start over again, he asks her to dinner, and surprisingly she accepts. Geordi is keen again, and gets appropriate mood lighting and music, and... it still does him no good. Leah is cold as usual, and says that it would be inappropriate. Looks like Geordi will be eating alone again.
The new energy inside the lifeform is not a resurrection, but rather an attempted birth. The bug was pregnant, but unfortunately the baby is too premature to escape its mothers body. The Riker that we have grown to know and ridicule suggests that they use the ships phasers to perform a caesarean section. Way to go Billy-boy!
The reason that Geordi is getting nowhere with Dr Brahms is finally made clear - she's married! Probably to someone as equally exciting. Gee, what a fun household that would be. Where do you go when you're upset on the Enterprise? To the counsellor? Nope, straight to the bar to have a whinge to Guinan. She's about as sympathetic as Leah was. It must be pick on Geordi day.
Now that Picard has done the best he can to salvage a bad day, by rescuing the baby bug, he decides that it is time to put some space between them. This doesn't turn out to be that easy, as it chases them and finally latches on. It thinks that the Enterprise is its mother. This would be funnier to the crew if it wasn't leaching off large amounts of main power direct from the fusion reactions. Not a bad trick that.
Leah finally discovers Geordi's holodeck simulation and goes completely ballistic. Geordi claims that it was entirely innocent, but she doesn't believe it for a moment. He says that he is guilty of a terrible crime - offering her friendship. I would have said that he was guilty of intractable geekiness.
According to Worf, the baby thing has increased its volume to 46 million cubic meters. Wait a moment, that is a sphere of radius 222 metres, which clearly does not match with the visuals, given that the Enterprise is about 650 metres long. Looks like the screenwriters didn't bother to check the maths before pulling a random number out of the air. Oh well, I wish I was surprised.
They try and blast it from the hull by evacuating a shuttle-bay that it is covering. Other than giving it a bit of a thrill it achieves nothing. Actually it's worse than that because it has now caused an auto-shutdown of the main reactors. Life support is holding - just. To increase the tension a little more, we have "Flight of the Space-Slugs" that well-known Wagnerian tune as three more of them head towards the Enterprise at high speed.
Geordi hypothesises that if it is nursing, they need to ween it by souring its milk. The leaps of insight made in this series never cease to amaze me. Apparently everything in space vibrates in the 21cm band, which is about 1.4GHz. Assuming that the baby needs this, if they tune the power source so that it has nothing in this range, maybe the baby will let go. As they tune away the 21cm band, nothing happens, but when they finally get down to 0.02 cm, it lets go.
After the danger is over, Geordi and Leah have a drink in 10-Forward and laugh about it.
