Interface
- FIRST SHOWN (US)
- 4 October 1993
- ON
- First-run syndication
- STARDATE
- 47215.5
- DIRECTED BY
- Robert Wiemer
- PRODUCTION NO.
- 255
WRITTEN BYWritten by Joe Menosky
Geordi tests a new interface that lets him feel a probe's surroundings as if he were there. When his mother's ship goes missing, the technology offers him a desperate hope.
Red alert: the full plot, ending included. Haven't watched yet?REVEAL SYNOPSIS
Geordi is testing an interface that links his VISOR to a remote probe, letting him experience distant, dangerous places almost in person. Then news arrives that the USS Raman, commanded by his mother, Captain Silva La Forge, has vanished in the atmosphere of a gas giant, and all aboard are presumed lost. Unable to accept it, Geordi uses the probe to search for survivors. He finds none, but he does find what appears to be his mother, insisting she is alive and asking for his help. Despite warnings that the link is harming him, and Picard's direct order to stop, Geordi connects again. He learns that the 'mother' is really one of the gas giant's native life forms, trapped aboard the Raman and trying to escape back into the atmosphere. Afterwards Picard reprimands him, and Geordi accepts his mother's death, knowing the encounter felt real because he needed to say goodbye.
- 01Madge Sinclair had previously played a Starfleet captain, of the USS Saratoga, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
- 02Madge Sinclair, Ben Vereen and LeVar Burton had all appeared in the miniseries Roots.
- 03The USS Raman is named after physicist C. V. Raman, winner of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics.