Original air date: May 4, 1992 (season 5 episode 22; overall episode number 122)
Counselor Troi is speaking to Clara, daughter of Ensign Sutter, about her imaginary friend, Isabella. Sutter is concerned that Clara is living in a world of fantasy rather than making new friends, but Troi assures him that imagination is typical for young children and to be expected when a child is bounced from starship to starship without the time to make real friends.
The Enterprise enters an unexplored nebula around a neutron star. While there, an energy ball gets into the ship and eventually passes through Clara's head while she is at the arboretum. Suddenly, Isabella appears before Clara and begins speaking to her. Clara agrees to show Isabella around the ship, which occasionally gets her in trouble with the crew, who can't see Isabella. When the ship hits some sort of Negative Space Wedgie, Isabella excuses herself for a moment, after which Data notes that the problem has "fixed itself."
Troi becomes increasingly worried as Clara begins to blame her misbehaviors on Isabella. She tells Clara that she must take a firm hand with Isabella, but Clara says that Isabella wants everyone to leave them alone. Troi convinces Clara to leave Isabella behind for a while and take a ceramics class, where Troi hopes she will make real friends. Clara meets Alexander, who shows her how to make things with clay. But Isabella starts sabotaging Alexander's creations, getting Clara in trouble again.
Clara becomes afraid that Isabella will hurt her, so Troi escorts her around her quarters to assure her that she is safe. However, Isabella appears and blasts the counselor with an energy beam. Enraged at being abandoned, Isabella tells Clara that she will not protect Clara and the rest of the crew from the "others."
The crew hits another Negative Space Wedgie, and this time, the issue doesn't fix itself. The crew realize that they're surrounded by strands of energy. They try to pilot around them, but as Isabella grows angrier, the ship eventually becomes trapped in a dense web. Another ball of energy appears and begins to drain the ship's shield energy. More balls appear and do the same. Within a few minutes, the ship will lose all power.
Learning about the presence of Isabella on board, Picard realizes that the two issues are connected. He goes to the arboretum to negotiate with the entity. Isabella appears and accuses the crew of being a hateful species because of the control they enforce over Clara. Picard explains that their rules for children are placed there out of love and concern for their protection. He then assures Isabella that the ship can provide energy to her species at no risk to the ship. Isabella agrees. The ship is freed from its web, and Picard orders the ship to fire a beam of warp energy into space for one hour before departure.
Isabella visits Clara one last time. They apologize to each other and express their desire to see each other again someday.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Abusive Alien Parents: Inverted. Isabella thinks humans are this trope. Because she's an Energy Being, Isabella doesn't understand the biological life cycle. The rules and restrictions placed on children make her think children are an oppressed minority and that humans are cruel.
- Creepy Child: Isabella comes off as this. She tries to act as a normal girl, but talks with a monotone and her smile is very forced, bordering on a Slasher Smile.
- Deadpan Snarker: Data gets in a good one when the Engineering department tries to come up with a good name for the nebula.La Forge: So, what are we gonna call this nebula? FGC 47 just doesn't have the proper ring to it.
Daniel Sutter: Why don't we call it Sutter's Cloud?
La Forge: No, I was thinking about something more along the lines of the La Forge Nebula. It has sort of a majestic sound, don't you think?
Data: Given the selections, I prefer FGC 47. - Does This Remind You of Anything?: Isabella and Clara's interactions have all the signs of a toxic friendship/relationship. Isabella pressures Clara into doing things she doesn't want, harms anyone whom she perceives to be taking Clara away from her, and resorts to threatening Clara when she thinks she's leaving her.
- Energy Being: Isabella and her species are actually glowing balls of light that feed off of energy.
- Foreshadowing: When the energy ball passes through a flower, it disintegrates it, indicating that it has some danger to it.
- Funny Background Event: Isabella looks rather intimidated by Worf when she and Clara run into him in the hallway.
- The Ghost: The arboretum is an important location in this episode, and Clara is said to be helping Keiko with gardening, but Keiko never appears in the episode.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: When Isabella gets mad at Clara leaving her to go with Troi, her eyes glow purple.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: The reason Clara even has an imaginary friend to begin with.
- Imaginary Friend: An energy being spends the episode passing itself off as Clara's imaginary friend, Isabella.
- Informed Attribute: Guinan announces that she's serving Clara a fruit juice "with extra bubbles," but the actual beverage is completely flat.
- Military Brat: Clara has moved around quite a lot over the past few years as her father, Ensign Sutter, changed postings. The episode also establishes that both of Geordi La Forge's parents were in Starfleet and he had a similar childhood, leading Ensign Sutter to ask him for advice about Clara.
- Missing Mom: Clara lives only with her father. It isn't known if her mother is dead or works elsewhere, although Geordi's discussion with Ensign Sutter about whether he never knew whether he'd be living with his mother or father would seem to imply the latter.
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: In both directions. Despite checking all the boxes for a Creepy Child, Isabella genuinely cared about Clara, and didn't mean to frighten her. Isabella's conclusion that humans are evil was based on a lack of understanding of organic life. Once it was explained to her, she and her people left the Enterprise in peace.
- Not Now, Kiddo: Clara's ominous warnings about Isabella aren't given a lot of attention by the adults. It's only when Isabella attacks Troi that the crew makes the connection that there's an alien life form causing trouble on board. This is ultimately in part of what motivates Isabella to believe that the Enterprise should be destroyed, that the adults aren't listening to Clara.
- Not So Above It All: Data brushes off Guinan when she describes the shapes she's seeing in the nebula, similar to cloud watching, and then gives us this gem:Data: It is interesting that people try to find meaningful patterns in things that are essentially random. I have noticed that the images they perceive sometimes suggest what they are thinking about at that particular moment. [Beat] Besides, it is clearly a bunny rabbit.
- Not So Stoic: When Clara and Isabella bump into Worf, he responds with typical Klingon stoicism, but as he watches them run off, he smiles to himself.
- Not-So-Imaginary Friend: For a while, only Clara knows that "Isabella" is now very real, Isabella claiming that she turns invisible because grown-ups don't believe she's real. Only Worf happens to see Isabella by chance when the two girls run around a corner and run into him because they weren't paying attention, which pays off later.
- Patrick Stewart Speech: And Picard says he's not good with kids!Picard: You are seeing this ship, all of us, from a unique perspective. From a child's point of view. It must seem terribly unfair and restrictive to you. As adults, we don't always stop to consider how everything we say and do shapes the impressions of young people. But if you're judging us, as a people, by the way we treat our children—and I think there can be no better criterion—then you must understand how deeply we care for them. When our children are young, they don't understand what might be dangerous. Our rules are to keep them from harm, real or imagined, and that's part of the continuity of our human species. When Clara grows up, she will make rules for her children to protect them, as we protect her.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Sandwich: Guinan welcomes Clara to the bar and gives her some purple juice "with extra bubbles", but it just sits there untouched until Clara leaves.
- Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: Guinan finds Troi aimlessly prodding at an uneaten piece of chocolate cake — which, as she observes, means either there's something wrong with the cake or something is really bothering Troi.
- Yandere: A non-romantic example. Isabella really doesn't appreciate it when someone appears to be preventing Clara from spending time with her, as Troi finds out...
- You Have to Believe Me!: Since "Isabella" can become invisible, this leads to a lot of Clara struggling to get the adults to understand the nightmare she's going through.
