Plot
Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge of the Federation starship Enterprise, en route to the planet Risa for shore leave in a shuttlecraft, is captured by Romulans. While an impostor that looks like La Forge is sent to Risa, the Romulans tap into La Forge's visual cortex via his visor sensors, giving them a limited form of mind control over the human. After several days, La Forge's mind is wiped of his capture but given memories of going to Risa, and put back aboard his shuttle, to return to the Enterprise. He arrives as the Enterprise are working with the Klingon Ambassador Kell to deal with rebels attacking the outlying Krios colony. The Governor of the colony, Vagh, asserts that the rebellion is being aided by the Federation, thus requiring the Federation's presence to resolve.
At the colony, Vagh shows Captain Picard and Kell several Federation weapons and medical supplies taken from the rebels. Picard orders his crew to investigate. Commander Data finds that strange E-band radiation is nearby but cannot detect the source. He and La Forge also discover the apparent Federation weapons were replicated using Romulan technology and powered by Romulan energy cells. Later, under the direction of his controllers, La Forge unknowingly transports a case of Federation weapons from the Enterprise to the rebel base, and then subsequently erases the logs. Vagh, monitoring the transport, immediately accuses the Enterprise of its deception. Data and La Forge review the transport logs but find no evidence for the transport even though the weapons originated from the Enterprise, and realize that only they themselves and two other crewmembers could have falsified the logs in that manner. Again, outside of his control, La Forge enters Kell's quarters on the Enterprise, where it is revealed that Kell was the person sending the E-band transmissions used to control La Forge. Kell orders La Forge to assassinate Vagh in a public setting before witnesses in such a manner as to utterly convince Vagh's people of Federation involvement.
Picard invites Vagh to come aboard the Enterprise as to witness the transport logs first hand. As Picard takes Vagh around the ship, Data comes to learn that the E-band radiation is coming from aboard the Enterprise and that La Forge never made it to Risa. He orders Security Chief Worf to immediately detain La Forge. The assassination attempt is blocked, and Data arrives to explain the situation, saying that the limited transmission range means the device controlling La Forge must either be in Picard's or Kell's possession. Kell refuses to undergo a search, but Vagh offers to take him to the colony to do so there. Fearing the consequences of being investigated by his own people, Kell quickly requests asylum aboard the Enterprise, which Picard says they will certainly consider after his name is cleared of any wrongdoing by the Klingons. Kell is taken away by Vagh's guards. La Forge is cleared but struggles to understand what happened to him.
Read more about this topic: The Mind's Eye (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)