Plot
Geordi La Forge’s friend and former crewmate, Lieutenant Commander Susanna Leijten, has come aboard the Enterprise-D; she is concerned that she and La Forge are the only two members of a previous 5-man away mission from the USS Victory to a seemingly abandoned colony on the planet Tarchannen III that are still unaccounted for; the other three, independently, have stolen a shuttlecraft from their current post and returned to the planet. Picard orders the ship to Tarchannen III; there, they find one of the stolen craft, manned by Lt. Hickman, attempting to land on the planet. The Enterprise is unable to communicate to Hickman, and the craft is incinerated during re-entry.
On the surface, Leijten and La Forge discover another shuttlecraft, empty; strange footprints are seen near it. Leijten starts feeling ill, and they return to the Enterprise. Leijten improves immediately, but Dr. Crusher finds evidence of alien skin in Leijten's blood, not indigenous to the planet. While reviewing the data on the original Victory away team, Leijten becomes jittery and insists they return to the planet, and then starts exhibiting bright blue veins across her body. In Sick Bay, Dr. Crusher restrains Leijten and determines she is transforming into another species, and worried that this fate will befall La Forge. La Forge continues to study the data and discovers an anomaly in the original mission data. Starting to feel the same effects as Leijten, La Forge uses the data in the holodeck to discover that their team was in the presence of an invisible alien humanioid creature that resembles what Leijten was transforming into. He suddenly goes into convulsions himself and soon transforms into the alien creature, easily escaping the Enterprise due to his invisibility and beaming down to the surface.
Dr. Crusher discovers that Leijten's transformation was triggered by an alien parasite that was capable of overwriting its host's DNA; removing the parasite quickly returns Leijten to normal. Leijten joins the away team on the surface searching for La Forge. Using ultra-violet light, they discover a number of the creatures, all transformed members of the colony and the former Victory crewmembers. Leijten recognizes one as La Forge, and is able to coax him away and take him back to the ship where he is similarly cured. However, the other crewmen have been transformed far too long to be saved, and they are left behind on the planet; Picard orders warning beacons placed around the planet to protect both the creatures and the Federation.
Read more about this topic: Identity Crisis (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“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)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)