A serious atmospheric storm forces Trip and Hoshi to use the transporter to return to Enterprise, but once she's back aboard, Hoshi starts to believe she is disappearing. Then she sees aliens setting bombs on the ship and must try to warn someone…

This is a really interesting little mystery, as it's not clear whether Hoshi is just experiencing lingering after-effects of the transporter or if she really is disappearing somehow. Until the end. It's good to see Hoshi getting an episode to herself, but a shame that it isn't something better suited to her skills than this. A weird story about transporter phobia could really be for pretty much anyone in the crew; it just happens to be Hoshi's turn to finally get an episode. I'd rather have seen something where she took centre stage and we learnt more about her.

As you might have spotted earlier, the ending is the key part here, simply because it's truly appalling. Despite having been done by countless series before, the finish to this episode is the tried and trusted 'it was all a dream' approach. Not only does it utterly destroy an episode that's actually rather enjoyable, but it makes you look back over what you've been watching and realize not very much of it makes sense, presumably so that writers Berman and Braga can say 'Well, it was in her mind, wasn't it?' There's no reason for most of the events of this episode, yet none of them suggest some kind of dream. If there was a hint of some kind it would help, but all we get is 40 minutes of something that never happened.

On the one hand I can't blame the writers; I am glad it wasn't a transporter problem, as that would have required Malcolm to suddenly become a genius on all its parts and be able to fix it and reverse Hoshi's problem. At least this way is easier. The aliens, though, are a pretty desperate threat, as they come from nowhere and have no reason to bomb the Enterprise in the first place.

It's a shame as there were at least three different ways the story could have gone that would have been better than the sucky ending supplied. What's especially galling is that I was enjoying it right until the point where I discovered there wasn't going to be a 'real' ending. Hopefully Hoshi's next solo outing will be an improvement.

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