Episodes that revolve around Geordie rarely engage me, and that's no fault of Levar Burton but more the poor writing he always had to work with (not to mention the fact that we can't see his eyes). Geordie is so lacking in personality or charisma that it's difficult not to sigh when he has lots to do, and that's increased when it comes to his love life.
The rest of the episode is tense but brought down by this. Geordie apparently has so little regard for his engineering crew (or such a high opinion of himself) that he doesn't even bother to enlist their help when the ship is in extreme danger. Why did he limit it to just himself and Dr. Brahms?
The technobabble factor is also way too high here, but the episode has some fun moments. O'Brien has a cute moment early on and Captain Picard flying the Enterprise by himself is pretty cool.
[7.4/10] One of the great things about Star Trek in general, and Star Trek: The Next Generation specifically, is that it is deeply, committedly nerdy. Sure, our heroes swashbuckle at times, but deep down, they are dorks who get excited about archeology and orchestral concerts and reversing the polarity on their latest science experiments.
We see that with Captain Picard in “Booby Trap.” There’s something self-consciously amusing about his near-giddiness over the Enterprise running across a thousand-year-old spaceship. He insists on leading the away team and won’t be deterred. He practically scolds his fellow officers for not having built ships in bottles as children. His eyes light up with wonder when he strolls the bulkheads of the ancient vessels and communes with his counterpart across eons. It’s all deeply dorky, but in an endearing, almost inspiring way.
But the nerd experience circa 1989 wasn’t just getting excited about geeky pursuits; it also involved having trouble with the opposite sex. TNG doesn’t use a light touch here, but there’s still something comprehensible in the way Geordi laments that for all his technical prowess as the Enterprise’s chief engineer, he’s stymied by the lack of a technical manual for how to understand the objects of his affection. His unlucky in love misfortune is rooted in his inability to be himself, to not try so hard, to be who he is as an officer when he goes on a date.
The notion is a compelling one. So many of us are confident in one area and rise to the moment when we’re in our element, but can feel shy or all thumbs when we’re in unfamiliar territory. At the same time, Geordi’s predicament was relatable to a lot of young nerds watching the show (e.g., me) who considered themselves bright enough to solve problems but couldn’t quite figure out how you get someone to like you.
Fortunately or unfortunately for Geordi, one of the types of problems he usually solves arises. The ancient ship was felled by a nearby booby trap that has also ensnared the Enterprise. Every bit of power the ship uses triggers more deadly radiation from this corner of space, leaving them trapped and counting down the hours and minutes until it destroys them. That leaves Geordi to come up with some technical method of beating the trap and escaping it’s grasp.
Naturally, his attempt to solve the technical problem dovetails with his efforts to deal with his personal problem. His conversations with the computer about the design of the Enterprise and methods to adjust it for the present moment lead it to create a holographic version of Dr. Leah Brahams. She is the ship’s designer, and after a heap of Hepburn/Tracy-style banter, it becomes clear that the “two” of them are developing an attraction to one another.
Look, as with “Elementary, Dear Data”, you kind of have to turn your brain off about the holodeck here. It is, again, absurd that the computer would construct a person in response to Geordi’s vague but simple queries. It’s nuts that the computer can manufacture a personality for her, based on a personnel file and some debate records, that has a less than ten percent error rate. And it’s especially bonkers that the autogenerated facsimile of a real person for ship diagnostic purposes would be made with subroutines that leave the hologram feeling flirty and offering backrubs.
The show also doesn’t really engage with the creepiness of this exercise (at least not yet), but weirdly, it feels true to life. There’s some combination of “nerd falls in love with body pillow,” “nerd compulsively makes deepfakes of favorite celebrity” and “nerd obsesses over romantic video game character” going on here. While the dorky and unlucky in love rarely take the specific path depicted here, the way the show engages with STEM-minded folks who find themselves resorting to parasocial relationships and artificial romance is, if anything, eerily prescient.
And yet, the central notion behind these sequences is a more sympathetic one -- that Geordi has trouble being himself and relaxing in social situations, but he’s comfortable in engineering situations, and Dr. Brahms represents the rare overlap between the two. When Geordi finds himself attracted to the holographic Dr. Brahms, it’s some combination of him finally able to be himself in his element with his woman, and the fact that she represents the ship he does understand. Again, it’s a little odd, but hey, I think Kirk would have absolutely tried to schtupp the Enterprise if he could, and Geordi’s, shall we say, predicament, isn’t a far cry from ol’ James T.’s usual “I’m married to my ship” pronouncements.
In that same spirit, “The Booby Trap” also resurfaces the unassuming luddite streak that the 1960s Star Trek series had. Despite communing with a computer program that recommends trying to make thousands of nano-calculations per second to outsmart the booby trap, Geordi ultimately offers the opposite solution. Rather than trusting the ship’s well-being to the computer, he recommends a “reverse the polarity” type solution, that rather than trying to quickly outmaneuver the trap, they shut the whole ship down and steer manually so as not to feed it any more fuel to spit back at them as deadly radiation. It’s a solid answer to the problem rooted in the episode’s themes.
It even connects with Picard’s own nerdiness and the joys of his old model ships. With the ship on the line, he decides to take the helm himself. His maneuvering through the asteroid field is tense, and the slingshot maneuver he uses to get the Enterprise out of dodge shows a little cleverness and ingenuity from the good captain, of the sort that’s theoretically even beyond the capabilities of the ship’s state of the art computer. It dovetails with an earlier scene where Riker tells Jean-Luc that the computer’s good at taking orders but not giving them, and it requires that human intuition to genuinely win the day in unfamiliar territory, a lesson that the creatives of The Original Series would surely agree with.
But it’s a lesson Geordi takes to heart too. He’s the one who recommends “throwing out the number” and taking this creative risk. He’s also the one who realizes that real life and human relationships can be reasoned out and controlled from every angle the same way he does a warp engine, or a holodeck program during a date. And in the end, after a strange kiss, he even turns off the Dr. Brahs hologram, a seeming acknowledgment that this was an object lesson in why using the soothing certainty of technology as a substitute for the knotty tangles of real life is a spiritual dead end, and it’s time to take the training wheels off.
Given the number of discussions among Trekkies to this day over who the hottest, catsuit-fitted “Trek Babe” is, I don’t know how many viewers of “Booby Trap” managed to internalize the lesson. But even for a committedly poindextery show like *Star Trek: The Next Generation”, here the show seemed to be speaking directly to its nerdiest audience, whether or not any of them listened.
Amazing episode. Super tense and loved the ending. =)
Cracking. Tense episode. Great problem with creative solution.
The Geordi love plot was bad. I get that the message is once he started acting like himself and was not deliberately trying to impress, he finally attracted someone. But the reality of the situation is, he made out with an anthropomorphized representation of the ship's computer. Which is really fucking weird.
Also, it shouldn't have taken so long for all of these smart people to realize that all they needed to do was utilize short bursts. An object in motion stays in motion and all that. Use the bursts to navigate the asteroids and you're golden. They would stay in motion unless they collided with something.
Can't say I like this episode. As an engineer, I can relate to Geordie and his problem solving approach. To start with, I appreciate how cool this shipyard looks. Immersing in a problem like that really helps to find solutions. It's however very strange he has no support from his engineering department and it's certainly strange how much time he wastes recreating and flirting with that girl given the life or death scenario. I mean she's lovely. I give him that. I also like the fact that she's a female engineer. Despite this being the 24th century roles are still very traditional. Rarely you spot a female technician in this franchise (B'Elana had more testosterone than most men). Glad that she will return. This episodes was designed as a great triumph for our engineering wizard. However, in the end, I feel almost sorry for him. You get the impression that he's a looser who doesn't have any luck with girls and whose only friends are a robot and a holo-woman. That perhaps resonates with nerds. But that's not how I want Geordie to be. I don't want him to be a ladies' man neither but not acting like a teenager would be a start (OMG that beach scene is hard to watch - Geordie is stuck in the 1980's while she's from the 24th century). He should be a capable and confident officer given how far his career advanced. Luckily, later in this show, he will be all of that.
The other parts of the story are okay-ish but unremarkable most of the time. I like Picard's enthusiasm and Riker's and Troi's reaction to his excitement though. Sadly the scenario is also repetitive. I mean, it's not exactly the first time the Enterprise (TOS or TNG version) was trapped and has to cope with unwanted power drain ... (and it won't be the last story in the franchise). And talking about repetitiveness: it almost feels like every main character in TNG and VOY found love on the holo-deck at one point. The finale is sort of exciting I guess. But I can't overlook Geordie's awkward B-plot.
I’ll always enjoy this one! The awe of Picard, with his captain’s privilege of leading the away team and then the end when he takes matters into his own hands. I can overlook the Geordi romance stuff.
Computer: "There would be a 9.3% margin for error in the responses from the facsimile."
And that's enough for holodeck Leia Brahmns to find Geordie LaForge's clumsy eagerness charming and start talking cybersensual to him, design engineer to ship's engineer.
Okay, I actually don't hate it—in fact, I like it. It's equal parts cringe and cute, and, along with the history geek-out from Picard, and the tense life-or-death plot, it's all compelling, and it's a great watch every time for me. It's also a great setup for the Leia-Leia-Laforge episode where Geordie gets caught by the real Leia, after developing a relationship with character.ai chat bot Leia [category tags: Science, Romance].
Jordi gets a character trait other than being Data’s buddy: he’s also a kinda gross loser
Boy, Geordi is one huge SIMP in this episode.
Shout by FinFanBlockedParent2019-06-26T11:28:54Z
Geordi's desperate attempt to get romantically involved with a woman is a bit off. It just doesn't fit in with the idea of an evolved 24th century society. It feels more like a teenager in his puberty.
In any case the whole falling in love on the holodeck became too much off a topic throughout any off the Star Trek shows. It might be humanly explainable but I always thought it was to easy to create facsimiles of real life persons. There should be measures to prevent that but, of course, in the end it is nothing but a storytelling tool like many others. And the episode itself isn't awful or anything like that. The actual dilemma the Enterprise gets in is inventive as is the solution.