Code of Honor is so bad I thought for sure it was an unproduced TOS script they decided to recycle for TNG. Nope! Brand new story made for TNG. Astounding given that I'm pretty sure it would've been out of place even during TOS's run.

Then again, the pitch wasn't specifically for pseudo-African aliens. Someone else added that:

The African theme of the episode was brought in by director Russ Mayberry, who had the Ligonians race cast entirely from African-American actors. Mayberry was fired during production by the show's creator Gene Roddenberry, and First Assistant Director Les Landau completed the episode. Star Trek novel author Keith DeCandido later recalled that this was because of the casting itself, while cast member Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher) thought that it was because Mayberry was racist towards the guest stars after they were cast.

Even without that though the underlying "Strong Woman Suddenly Weak When Faced With Average Man" theme was pretty bad.

Alright, I'm done making new comments ranting about Code of Honor, I promise.

I thought Masks was great, Spiner absolutely kills in that episode

Sub Rosa's message was "I'd rather be writing gothic horror romance stories, but I'm stuck writing for Star Trek" which is an important enough message that they managed to bring it back as a subplot for the first two seasons of Voyager.

And I didn't mean to say that Transfigurations is necessarily worse than Sub Rosa (though I do enjoy it less), I just wanted to bring it up because I think it's awful in so many ways, and yet I've never seen it discussed.

Transfigurations has an ending consistent with Trek, but not consistent with the rest of the episode. It's a medical mystery plot, then an alien influence plot for all of 30 seconds mixed with a "Geordi is bad with women" plot, then an amnesia mystery running parallel with our love interest of the week plot, followed by a tyrannical alien civilization plot mixed with an energy being with godlike powers plot. A little focus and polish could have made any of those work, but instead it just feels like Trek Trope Mad Libs.

It also uses lazy plot devices that make no sense and seem utterly inconsistent with how Star Trek works. In the beginning, we see a medical device that regulates alien biology by syncing it with human biology, despite the two being potentially very different (and even if they aren't the best it could do would be to mirror what a device designed for humans would do). But we need that to have Geordi get hit by some alien influence I guess. But then we'll mostly drop that plot, except to have the alien tell Geordi that the magic was in him all along.

Later we get an enemy ship that has a "force choke a thousand aliens at once on another ship even though their shields are up" button. How does this technology work? Couldn't they use that effect to target a warp core or something? Who knows, it's just there so that our alien messiah can have a way to save the entire ship using healing powers.

Hell, I can't give credit to the ending because the ending is just a massive exposition dump trying to justify the rest of the episode. Our bland guest star of the week spends several minutes telling us about things we should have seen if they wanted us to care.

In fact, you can see at least one version of what this episode could have been with some trimming and focus by watching Counterpoint on Voyager. You have a tyrannical alien government attempting to wipe out those with mental abilities that they view as a threat, and in the midst of this we have a love interest of the week from that alien civilization, but with questions about who he really is and perhaps whether or not he can be trusted. It doesn't have every element of this episode, but the ones it has are actually fleshed out, and we even have some interesting chemistry in our romantic subplot for a change.

Shit, I just realized that Beverly's love interest in Transfigurations is essentially an energy ghost. She officially has a type. It must run in the family too, because Wesley also had a romantic subplot with a shapeshifter that turned out to be an energy being. And that's not counting the Traveler, who is basically a godlike energy being, and whose interest in Wesley has always had a "there's free candy in the back of my van" vibe to it.

And now I think I need a shower.