A thousand years ago, a war between the Menthars and Promelians devastated each other, leaving a vast swatch of the galaxy a massive debris field. However, the Enterprise seemingly receives a distress signal from the long lost Promelian Battle Cruiser Cleponji. This affords Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) a cherished opportunity to relive one of his childhood memories of building spaceships in a bottle. Beaming aboard the Cleponji, Picard is fascinated by its museum quality preservation, and has Lt. Commander Geordi LaForge retrieve a recording of the Promelian Captain describing the trap that destroyed the ship. Apparently, lethal radiation poisoned the atmosphere in the ship, killing its crew before they could save themselves, with Captain Galek Sar (Albert Hall) assuming full responsibility for that failure.
Initially, it looked like Captain Picard might have to turn over the operation of the Enterprise to the ship's computer to figure out a lifesaving course of action. It wouldn't have been necessary if Geordi had removed the Lang cycle fusion engines from the stranded Cleponji, and used a force-counterforce response to trigger the aceton assimilators on the Enterprise to make better use of its subspace processors. Had that been done, the crew might have avoided the fatal exposure countdown from the lethal radiation, but there's only so much you can think of during a forty-five-minute program.
Instead, Geordi had to rely on a holodeck simulation that recreated the image of Dr. Leah Brahms (Susan Gibney), one of the original team that created the computer system aboard the Enterprise. With her expertise, and Geordi's own hands-on knowledge of the ship, and a bit of Captain Picard's coolness under pressure, the Enterprise was saved from a disastrous fate. Geordi's love life took a one-two punch in the kidneys in this one, having been spurned by crew member Christi (Julie Warner) in the show's cold opening, and realizing that he couldn't make it very far with a holographic image once the crisis was over. You had to feel bad for the guy, seeing as how saving the Enterprise from deadly radiation just wasn't enough.
Initially, it looked like Captain Picard might have to turn over the operation of the Enterprise to the ship's computer to figure out a lifesaving course of action. It wouldn't have been necessary if Geordi had removed the Lang cycle fusion engines from the stranded Cleponji, and used a force-counterforce response to trigger the aceton assimilators on the Enterprise to make better use of its subspace processors. Had that been done, the crew might have avoided the fatal exposure countdown from the lethal radiation, but there's only so much you can think of during a forty-five-minute program.
Instead, Geordi had to rely on a holodeck simulation that recreated the image of Dr. Leah Brahms (Susan Gibney), one of the original team that created the computer system aboard the Enterprise. With her expertise, and Geordi's own hands-on knowledge of the ship, and a bit of Captain Picard's coolness under pressure, the Enterprise was saved from a disastrous fate. Geordi's love life took a one-two punch in the kidneys in this one, having been spurned by crew member Christi (Julie Warner) in the show's cold opening, and realizing that he couldn't make it very far with a holographic image once the crisis was over. You had to feel bad for the guy, seeing as how saving the Enterprise from deadly radiation just wasn't enough.