“The Next Phase” (5×24)
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A deeply flawed science fiction story, but a strong character-driven story. It’s basically Tom and Huck attending their own funeral, allowing Geordi to hear what he means to his colleagues while Ro has a sort of crisis of faith.
It’s basically a ghost story, and features many of the tropes of a ghost story. But they are less successful with a scifi underpinning: Ghosts don’t need to breathe, but living beings do. If they were out of phase with the oxygen in the ship, why didn’t they suffocate? And if they were out of phase with all solid matter, why didn’t they fall through the floor? For that matter, why did the laws of gravity apply if the objects generating the gravity were out of phase?
The visual effects of this episode, very reminiscent of the visual effects in Ghost, would be relatively easy to pull off today, with modern compositing techniques. But back then it had to be very challenging on a technical level, because they would have had to eyeball which parts of each element would be visible in any given frame.
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