Original air date: October 4, 1993
With the help of Crusher and Data, Geordi is testing out a new neural interface that allows him to pilot a probe and feel as if he's there himself. The plan is to use the probe to examine the wreckage of the Raman, which is trapped in the atmosphere of a gas giant. Due to Geordi's VISOR uplinks, he's uniquely suited to the task. Before going on his mission, however, Picard receives the bad news that the Hera, captained by Geordi's mother, has gone missing.
Geordi watches the last message his mother sent him, in which she mentions that her ship has a new chief engineer who likes to tinker. Riker volunteers to take over the Raman mission to give Geordi time to mourn, but Geordi insists that his mother is only missing, and he's the most suited to the task. Geordi pilots the drone and discovers that the entire crew is dead. When a fire breaks out, Crusher breaks his connection, but not before Geordi's hands get burned. Crusher realizes that Your Mind Makes It Real, so getting too close a sensory connection to the probe is dangerous.
Geordi continues to insist, both to fellow officers and his father, that his mother is only missing, so any memorials are premature. He wanders by Data's quarters claiming he doesn't want to talk about the situation but eventually relents that he does. He still thinks she's alive, but Data gives him the hard truth that it is very unlikely.
Back in the VR suit, Geordi is moving through the Raman when he suddenly comes across his mother, just standing there. She tells him that the crew of the Hera are trapped on the planet's surface, but when he tries to touch her, the feedback knocks him unconscious. Upon reviving, Geordi tells everyone the news, but no one believes him. The Hera was 300 light years away when it disappeared. Geordi speculates that the Hera's new engineer accidentally created a "warp funnel" that teleported it back where it had been a few weeks ago. But lacking any evidence, Picard deems it too dangerous for Geordi to return to the Raman.
Riker tries to commiserate with Geordi about his own lost mother, but Geordi insists that he can do something about his mother, so he's not going to give up on her. Geordi puts himself back in the interface suit, preparing to go in alone, against direct orders. Data predicts his behavior and arrives to stop him, but Geordi convinces his friend to help him instead. Limiting the sensory input of the interface for safety, Geordi goes back in and reunites with his mother.
Geordi pilots the ship lower into the atmosphere to rescue the crew, requiring Data to dangerously increase the sensory input to maintain his connection. By now, the bridge staff have arrived to stop Geordi, but he's in too deep to simply pull out. As they prepare a method to bring him out safely, Geordi discovers that the Hera is not on the planet's surface. His "mother" is actually from a species native to the planet who got caught in the Raman's wake and accidentally killed them when trying to communicate. Geordi's interface is what saved him. He pilots the ship low enough to free them, and she departs just before the crew pull Geordi safely out of the interface.
Picard sternly informs Geordi that he'll have to put this incident in Geordi's permanent record, but then consoles him for failing to find his mother. Geordi says that the experience felt so real that, in a way, he was able to say goodbye to his mother.
Tropes featured:
- Arbitrary Skepticism: When Geordi says he's been seeing visions of his possibly dead mother the rest of the crew attribute it to grief or denial, even though Geordi has never shown behavior like that before, and not something unusual with the probe, the ship, or planet, like it has been every other time someone has seen an apparition.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The neural interface allow the pilot to feel is if he's physically there, but at the end of the day, it's just a remote-controlled drone that gets deemed too dangerous to use. A less awesome but more conventional method of piloting it would ultimately have been more useful.
- Believing Their Own Lies: Riker tells Geordi a story from his childhood where, after starting school, he pretended to his new friends that his mother was still alive and eventually started to believe it himself. When his teachers got word of this, they and his father sat young Will down and made it clear to him that his mother was dead and he needed to accept it, a dose of reality that initially devastated the child, but which the adult Riker accepts was necessary.
- Bittersweet Ending: Geordi managed to save the aliens and was able to achieve closure about his mother, but his actions are being noted on his permanent record, and his mother is still likely dead.
- Brain/Computer Interface: The probe Geordi pilots is controlled via direct neural input via his VISOR implants.
- Hand Blast: Played with: the probe Geordi interfaces with has phaser capability, and Geordi uses that to open a door at one point. To him, it looks like the phaser beam comes out of the palm of his hand, but of course the probe doesn't actually have hands; the things that it looks to Geordi like he's doing with his hands and feet are actually done by tractor beams.
- I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: Geordi's parents are played by Madge Sinclair and Ben Vereen, who costarred with LeVar Burton in Roots (1977).
- Info Dump: A sizeable one about the probe and why Geordi's the perfect candidate to use it gets delivered by Data and Crusher in the opening scene. In-context they appear to be briefing Riker about the probe, but a later scene indicates that Riker is just as familiar with the probe as the other three are.
- In Medias Res: A minor example. Geordi is shown wandering around a ship without his VISOR, though still able to see the chemical composition of gas, and also suffers no ill effects to temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees. Then it's finally revealed that the "Geordi" we see is actually a drone piloted by him as practice for an upcoming mission.
- Life Will Kill You: Geordi's mother is killed on a routine mission, and nobody knows why or what happened.
- The Mirror Shows Your True Self: Geordi's experience with the probe is represented as Geordi himself (sans VISOR and with sighted eyes), but reflections show the probe's actual appearance.
- The Oner: Geordi's initial exploration of the Raman runs for nearly two minutes without a cut.
- Riddle for the Ages: What really happened to the Hera is not revealed by the end of the episode.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Geordi disobeys Picard's orders against operating in the interface suit to try and save his mother. In turn, Data decides that he would rather violate orders himself and help Geordi, rather than letting the latter put his life at risk.
- Searching for the Lost Relative: Geordi seeks out his mother, who disappeared along with her entire spaceship. Eventually, however, he gives up after finding an alien pretending to be Captain La Forge.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: Geordi gets his hand burned during an interface, and discovers his hands have actually been burned. Crusher tries to Hand Wave this in the next scene by saying that what actually happened was that the flames create a positive feedback loop that caused Geordi's hand sensors to physically heat up to dangerous levels.
