4x18 Identity Crisis

[5.4/10] My usual mantra is that endings are hard. It’s comparatively simple to hook the viewer in with the promise of a good idea. And stinging the audience along with intrigue as to where your story will go is a time-tested method. But tying everything up in a satisfying way can be challenging for even the best storytellers.

But you know, middles are hard too. Sometimes you know where you want to start and where you want to end, and somehow finding a path between them, let alone an interesting one, is tricky. That’s certainly true for “Identity Crisis”, an episode that starts well and finishes well, but has a whole lot of nothing in between.

The episode is a mystery. One of Geordi’s old crewmates from another ship, Commander Leijten, has joined him on the Enterprise. She’s there to investigate the strange series of disappearances by other officers who were all on a particular away mission with the two of them. The duo rekindle a longstanding friendship at the same time they’re straining to figure out why their old comrades have all gone rogue and disappeared.

It’s a good basis for an episode! You have the plot element and problem-of-the-week established nicely, with an intriguing question that needs answering. You have an ominous ticking clock, with the fear that whatever happened to Geordi and Leijten’s crewmates will soon happen to them if they don’t solve this. And you have the human element of Geordi’s friendship with his former colleague, one that’s introduced very quickly, but which feels believable given the good performances and rapport between the two of them.

But there’s a raft of problems that emerge from there. The first is one that was more common in the early seasons of the show -- the mystery is really easy to guess. From the second our heroes find reptilian footprints on the planet where their away mission took place, and where their former colleague has crashed, it becomes pretty clear that the people on that mission are transforming into lizard creatures and returning to the site of their infection like salmon swimming upstream to spawn on instinct.

The concept is a little silly, but well within acceptable tolerances for Star Trek. Still, there’s not much intrigue when the answer seems obvious from the jump. More to the point, there’s little progression in terms of Geordi and Leijten actually solving it. There’s few breaks in the case or neat wrinkles and developments along the way. They just struggle to figure out the answer when it’s practically staring the audience in the face.

The answer also isn’t terribly interesting. There’s no “Aha!” moment that lets the audience understand the “why” of how it happened. They just picked up a parasite on that away mission, and it’s messing with their DNA. The end. Neither Geordi nor Leijten figures it out; it’s just Dr. Crusher. And even there, Beverly doesn’t do anything particularly clever. She simply runs a super scan and delivers the exposition. It all feels very mechanical, without something novel or exciting to justify all the time spent chasing a predictable mystery.

Worse yet, so much of it is just plain boring. Geordi’s forensic analysis of a mysterious shadow cast on the video of the away mission is just excruciating. I generally appreciate TNG’s willingness to show characters deliberating or mulling over some potential clue. But these scenes with the Chief Engineer going all CSI: Starfleet are excruciating. And they don’t even go anywhere! He discovers that...something was casting that shadow, even though we couldn’t see them. It’s emblematic of the long stretches of “identity’s Crisis”’s go-nowhere middle section.

So what works in the episode? Well, for one thing the make-up and design work is pretty great until it isn’t. Watching the slow, veiny transformation of Commander Leijten is a thing to behold. Her gradual metamorphosis catches the eye, and makeup artist Michael Westmore and his team do great work at showing the steady transformation for Leijten once the change has begun.

It’s a shame, because that good work is overshadowed (no pun intended) by the end of the episode when a fully-transformed Geordi looks like a walkaround character from a regional amusement park’s Halloween horrors night. The black leotards splashes with glow in the dark paint look patently ridiculous. And watching what looks like a low-rent production of Cats play out on the Paramount soundstage undermines some good thematic and character work happening in the episode’s climax.

That’s right, despite the numerous dull stretches here, the performances and ideas at play show this one wasn’t unsaveable. Guest performer Maryann Plunkett in particular does a good job of not only selling the panic and compulsion of the transformation, but the bond between Leijten and Geordi. “Identity Crisis” is, more or less, another horror show in a season that’s been surprisingly big on them, doing a monster mash/metamorphosis story this time. But ultimately, it’s also a story built around the notion of friendship.

Geordi and Leijten have a shorthand that makes them feel believably close, and when the episode isn’t spinning its wheels on the mystery plot, it delivers some convincing work with their relationship. Likewise, Data admits to Dr. Crusher that he’s “particularly motivated” to solve this week’s mystery because Geordi is involved. And in the end, a recovered Leijten’s reminder of friendship to Lizard Geordi is what snaps him out of his instinctual rancor and gives Beverly the chance to save him. There’s a lot of the old “power of friendship” business going on here, but it’s actually done in a very human, lived-in way, which just makes it more of a shame to have that subsumed by a weak mystery, laughable costuming, and an interminable stretch between the start of the episode and the end of it.

There’s merit to introducing two old buddies reconnecting in the face of their common friends disappearing under peculiar circumstances. There’s even more merit in one friend using their connection to rescue the other, appealing to someone’s human side before a more atavistic side takes over. But you have to build a compelling road between those two points, one that justifies the audience’s interest in the premise and builds to the payoff in a more engrossing way. Comical costumes and out there premise aside, “Identity Crisis” could have been a decent episode, if it just gave us a good reason to keep watching between the first act and the final one.