Booby Trap

TNG Season 3 Epsiode 6
Air Date: October 30th, 1989

Plot

The Enterprise is investigating an asteroid field when they receive a distress call from a Promellian ship that is over a thousand years old. Picard puts on his archaeological hat and beams over even with Riker not supporting the action. As they are investigating this old ship the Enterprise starts experiencing a power drain. They find out that they are in a thousand year old booby trap set during a war between the Promellians and the Menthars. It was the same booby trap that caused the crew of the Promellian ship to die all those years ago.

They discover that the booby trap steals energy from the ships it ensnares and turns that energy into a deadly radiation. So if they try to use the impulse engines it would just exponentially increase the radiation. They eventually determine the best way is to let the computer handle course corrections which will increase the radiation but have the best chance to get out before the radiation is lethal, or to do one impulse burst and manually use maneuvering thrusters to get out.

Picard decides to do the latter and leads the Enterprise out of the trap himself, using a large asteroid as a slingshot.

Commentary

This episode is mostly centered around Geordi who is looking for love. At the beginning he is on a date on the holodeck but his over eagerness ends up pushing his date away. When he is trying to solve the problem of the Menthar trap, he recreates the Enterprise when it is being built in dry dock to get a better view of the engines before they are built. In doing so he meets the holographic representation of one of the engines designers, Dr. Leah Brahms whom he starts to fall in love with.

The interesting part is after all the work trying to find a way out of the trap by looking at the engines and trying to optimize them, they finally decide to not use the engines at all and manually leave the asteroid field.

There is a scene where Geordi is talking to Guinan about his love life and he asks her what attracts her. She says she like bald men referring to one that was nice to her once. I don't know if the writers were looking forward to the episode where Picard time travels back to the early 1900s and meets Guinan but it was an interesting tie in.

Quotes

"Uh oh." - Wesley
"I beg your pardon, Wesley?" - Data
"Geordi had that big date with Christy tonight. He spent days putting together the perfect program. Looks like it ended kinda early." - Wesley
"Uh oh." - Data

"As a woman, what's the first thing you look at?" - La Forge
"His head."- Guinan
"His mind, of course." - La Forge
"No, his head. I'm attracted to bald men." - Guinan
"Seriously?" - La Forge
"Seriously." - Guinan
"Why?" - La Forge
"Maybe because a bald man was kind to me once, when I was hurting. Took care of me." - Guinan

"I'm with you every day, Geordi. Every time you look at this engine, you're looking at me. Every time you touch it, it's me." - Brahms