The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition

by Larry Nemecek

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  This book is lovingly dedicated: To the memory of the man who dreamed he could fill us with wonder again, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry; To those involved at every turn in making sure that dream stays alive; and To those who most helped me achieve this dream by sacrificing a large part of our first year together: my own Janet and Andrew, Sarah and Nathan.

  “Fate protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise.”

  —Riker, “Contagion”

  Acknowledgments

  As a work in progress rooted in its original circumstances, this second revised TNG Companion boasts even more thoughts of the Star Trek family, then and now. I have to straddle an entire, incredible decade to remember all those who have lent their time, energies, and memories to make this history as wide-ranging as it is.

  Aside from those doing double duty from the TNG series, thanks during the movie era to Marty Hornstein, Jerry Goldsmith, John Eaves, Terry D. Frazee, and Bill Dolan; and, on Star Trek Generations, David Carson, John Alonzo, Carolyn Dahm, Victoria Wilson, Michelle Wright, Ron Wilkerson, and Liz Radley…. For Star Trek First Contact: Neal McDonough, Matt Leonetti, Deborah Everton, Judi Brown, Jerry Fleck, Lolita Fatjo, Bob Gillan, Janet Nemecek, Ron Wilkinson, Shawn Baden, John Josselyn, Tony Bro, Tom Arp, Jake Garber, Brad Look, Sonny Burman, Scott Wheeler, Michael Westmore II, and Ben Betts…. On Star Trek: Insurrection: Sanja Hayes, Geoffrey Mandell, Kurt Hanson, Monique Chambers, and Maril Davis…. And for Star Trek Nemesis: John Logan, Stuart Baird, Tom Hardy, Ron Perlman, Dina Meyer, Bob Ringwood, Roland Sanchez, Cherie Baker, Shawn Baden, Monica Fedrick, Thomas Mahoney, Edwin Garcia, Ron Nomura, Jerry Moss, Drew Petrotta, Lyn McKissick, Glenn Cote, Jeffrey Kimball, Jackie Edwards, Joanna McMeikan, Gretel Twombly—plus Steve Johnson, Edge FX; Ron Jackson, ProTruck Racing Corp; and Rich Mingus, Baja Concepts. Special thanks to each film publicist—Don Levy, Alex Worman, Sandy O’Neill, and Michael Klastorin—as well as Sonya Ede, Rikki Leigh Arnold, Tim Menke, Carol Sewell, and Kristine Gierthy throughout, plus photographers Elliot Marks and Sam Emerson.

  At the visual effects houses, appreciation to John Knoll and ILM, with George Murphy, Alex Yaeger, Bill George, and Nagisa Yamamoto especially on Star Trek: First Contact; John Grower at Santa Barbara Studios, Shannon Gans with Hunter-Gratzner, and Jim Rygiel at BlueSky/VIFX for Insurrection; and Mark Forker, Todd Isroelit, and Kris Rich at Digital Domain on deadline for Nemesis.

  From the series years, my appreciation goes to the many folks off-lot at Image G, Modern Sound, Composite Imaging Systems, Digital Magic, Rob Bloch and Karen Thomas-Kolakowski at Critters of the Cinema, Sid Dutton and Bill Taylor at Illusion Arts, artist Anthony Vergona, and Greg Jein’s model shop. Most especially, the passage of time will never dim the original help of the late Ed Milkis, the feature art departments’ Penny “Moneypenny” Juday, and past Star Trek toilers Eric A. Stillwell, Richard Arnold, Rob Legato, and Bob Justman.

  The input of those in and out of Paramount Pictures and the Star Trek offices, past and present, has been essential: in Viacom/Paramount Licensing, from Carla Mason and Karyn Folbe through John Van Citters and Paula Block now … with Guy Vardaman, Harry Lang, Berndt Heidemann, and Lili Malkin in the archives; Junie Lowry-Johnson’s casting office, with Ron Surma and J. R. Gonzalez; Gary Holland in Advertising and Promotion; Matt Timothy and later Megan Costello and Ann Foster in Paramount Research; and, finally, the largely unsung assistants and coordinators past and present (many of whom moved on or into production posts over the various series) who aided while “holding the fort”: Dawn Velazquez, Dave Rossi, Heidi Smothers, Terri Potts, Kim Fitzgerald, Zayra Cabot, Maggie Allen, April Rossi, Robbin Slocum, Sandra Sena, Jeanie King, Cheryl Gluckstern, Duffy Long, Kristine Fernandes, Joanna Fuller, and Lolita Fatjo.

  Among those who contributed too were atmosphere and stand-ins Carl Banks, Pam Blackwell, Dennis Tracy, Lorine Mendell, Nora Leonhardt, Cameron Oppenheim, and Keith Rayve; series freelance writers Ron Wilkerson and Jean Louise Matthias, Nick Sagan, and Hilary Bader; directors Alexander Singer, Cliff Bole, Robert Wiemer, Rick Kolbe, Chip Chalmers, and Adam Nimoy; guest stars Jonathan del Arco, John de Lancie, Robert O’Reilly, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Patti Yasutake, Colm Meaney, Suzie Plakson, Michael Mack, Shannon Fill, Alex Enberg, James Horan—and of course Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden, Wil Wheaton, and Denise Crosby.

  Lastly, my gratitude to those who breathed life into the 1701-D and took the time to tell me how: Philip Barberio, Joe Bauer, Michael Backauskas, Ira Steven Behr, Tom Benko, Bob Blackman, André Bormanis, Brannon Braga, Dick Brownfield, Dan Curry, Wendy Drapanas, Doug Drexler, John Dwyer, René Echevarria, J. P. Farrell, Peter Allan Fields, Anthony Frederickson, Cosmo Genovese, June Ashton Haymore, Merri Howard, Gary Hutzel, Richard James, Alan Kobayashi, Peter Lauritson, David Livingston, Joe Longo, Dennis Madalone, Jim Magdaleno, Jim Martin, Jim Mees, Ron B. Moore, Ron D. Moore, Andy Neskoromny, Wendy Neuss, Denise Okuda, Michael Okuda, Dick Rabjohn, Naren Shankar, Alan Sims, Al Smutko, Rick Sternbach, David Stipes, James van Over, Sandy Veneziano, Jonathan West, Michael Westmore, Eddie Williams, Herman Zimmerman, Joy Zapata—and of course Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller, and Rick Berman.

  And, way back at the beginning, thanks to Geoffrey Mandel for that first college-age rush of cross-country collaboration on the Star Maps, when Trek backgrounding was all so much simpler; to my mom and dad, who helped get the Macintosh that made my “return” to Trek research a reality; and to all those fans at home and around the world for feedback on the earlier Companion, my old annual TNG and DS9 concordances, and everything since. Those who helped the crunch to get the original Companion written in just five months were Mike and Tamara Hodge, Mark Alfred, and my former Norman Transcript coworkers Jane Bryant, Ed Montgomery, Charles Stookey, Jan Burton, and Karen Dorrell. Finally, hats off to all my editors at Pocket Books—from Dave Stern, Scott Shannon, and Kevin Ryan to John Ordover and now Margaret Clark (we finally work together, Margaret!) for helping you the reader get “the biggest bang for your buck” within these covers. Still a great deal.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  REBIRTH

  FIRST SEASON

  SECOND SEASON

  THIRD SEASON

  FOURTH SEASON

  FIFTH SEASON

  SIXTH SEASON

  SEVENTH SEASON

  Star Trek Generations

  Star Trek: First Contact

  Star Trek: Insurrection

  Star Trek Nemesis

  INDICES

  Introduction to the Second Revised Edition

  It is, as they say, “déjà vu all over again.” Can it be only ten years ago that I crunched out the first five seasons’ worth of credits, history, insights, and trivia of the wildly popular Star Trek: The Next Generation … and then, only two years later, raced ahead of a movie on deadline to get out a timely update soon after the movie premiered? Here in 2002, the race is with Star Trek Nemesis, not Star Trek Generations, but the coincidence points up how much has changed since then.

  The world is certainly a different place, both in and out of Trekdom. As I predicted in 1992, the tome would not be the last of its kind; back then, only one
other “modern” Star Trek reference was in print, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, and the flood of magazines, books, multimedia, and Internet traffic was yet to be felt. This edition adds on the past three films, but as usual there’s never enough room to get it all in! Still, this resource lives up to its aim of providing far more than a good grounding in the whys and hows as well as the whos of what’s onscreen.

  The Next Generation’s family of characters are all well known as familiar archetypes, and their endearing quality has remained constant even with the different demands of the big screen. If there was any doubt as to the cool factor of Picard and his crew, it can be seen in the post-9/11 yen for family, heroes, and old-fashioned values—even if they come via the twenty-fourth century. It’s an old twist on the ongoing quest for the essence of Star Trek’s appeal, and one that is not likely to diminish anytime soon.

  The Next Generation itself wears its age well as a quality television series, much less as a fun group of fictional friends; if there’s any doubt, just ask the folks at The New TNN, where TNG often outdraws all others in prime time. Over at UPN, first Star Trek: Voyager and now prequel Enterprise fly as the flagship of the network, but TNG’s place in history is still secure: from spurring one-hour dramas in syndication to new post-production methods, the genre TV, and the merchandising boom to even Paramount Pictures itself—all have been forever changed after the trails blazed by Gene Roddenberry’s “new Star Trek.”

  As before, all episodes here are listed in production order, not aired order; the aired order is included in the complete index. (Studio production numbers are used throughout, but can be converted to simple ordinal numbers by subtracting 100: e.g., Episode 163 is the series’ 63rd hourly episode.) Also, the abbreviation “code” is my own—an attempt to provide an episode shorthand more meaningful than a jumble of numbers.

  Source books on producing all Star Trek, much less TNG, continue to multiply almost as fast as new series. As relevant titles for TNG I can still recommend the original reprinted 1968 The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry from Ballantine, and from Pocket Books the ST: TNG Technical Manual by Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach, and the Star Trek Chronology and Star Trek Encyclopedia by Okuda and his wife Denise, the latter with Debbie Mirek.

  Once again, it’s a pleasure in these pages to share the work of all these talents with those who appreciate them the most. There are so many, many tales to tell and so little space—I hope we have collared more than enough of them in these pages. As long as Star Trek in general and The Next Generation in particular still resonate with audiences, they will still be worth telling, crediting, and collecting. Engage!

  —LARRY NEMECEK

  Burbank, CA

  The regular cast, sans Worf (Michael Dorn), on the planet “Hell” set.

  REBIRTH

  Could lightning strike twice? The bombshell announcement that posed that question and simultaneously ended fifteen years of rumors was delivered officially by Mel Harris, then president of Paramount Television Group, during a studio press conference on Friday, October 10, 1986, in Los Angeles.

  “Twenty years ago, the genius of one man brought to television a program that has transcended the medium,” Harris said. “We are enormously pleased that that man, Gene Roddenberry, is going to do it again. Just as public demand kept the original series on the air, this new series is also a result of grass roots support for Gene and his vision.”

  The new series would come to be called Star Trek: The Next Generation. The syndicated hour-long drama with an all-new cast would be introduced in a two-hour pilot movie in September 1987, and that would be followed by twenty-four one-hour episodes budgeted at one million dollars each, with Roddenberry as executive producer.

  “Wait a minute,” fans said. “An all-new cast? New actors playing the old familiar roles of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy?” That issue had been hotly debated among both fans and studio executives whenever talk of a new Star Trek came up.

  No, Harris said, this new series would be set “a century after Kirk and Spock,” Harris mentioned that the earlier heroes had trekked “two hundred years into the future.” That remark, of course, revealed the uncertainty of the evolving TNG time frame as well as the confusion that still reigned over the exact era of the earlier series—a mystery that was finally solved once and for all in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: the original series took place in the late twenty-third century.

  As if to repeat Paramount’s emphasis on who would be in charge, a studio spokesperson reassured the press that day that the new series would adhere to Gene Roddenberry’s “vision, credibility, and approach.” It might have been enough to say that “the Great Bird of the Galaxy”—a nickname given to Roddenberry by original series producer Robert H. “Bob” Justman—had come home to roost.

  Even so, it was something of a miracle that Roddenberry even considered coming back to the weekly grind of churning out a quality series, especially in light of the bumps and bruises of budget battles and network hassles in the 1960s and the fact that the original show’s syndicated success in the 1970s yielded few financial or professional rewards.

  “It was a hard time for me,” Roddenberry recalled later, speaking of the seventies. “I was perceived as the guy who had made the show that was an expensive flop, and I couldn’t get work. Thank God college kids discovered the show, because I made enough money lecturing to pay the mortgage.”1

  Roddenberry came close to doing a remake of the Kirk-era series with Star Trek II, but that project was abandoned in 1977 after the landmark SF movie Star Wars premiered. The short-lived series idea gave way to plans for a splashy big-budget theatrical release, but Roddenberry relinquished direct control of the films after Star Trek: The Motion Picture drew the disdain of critics and many fans alike—the result of a host of problems he often had no control over. Then, in 1986, there was a reunion party for the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek, and the emotions that were rekindled in some of the original production staff gathered there really got the ball rolling once and for all on a new Trek television series. Earlier that spring, Roddenberry had turned down the concepts for a remake that were pitched by studio executives flushed with optimism over the hit they knew they had with Star Trek IV—until they unexpectedly agreed with his claim that the only one who could do Star Trek right was Roddenberry himself.

  “I said absolutely not, no way,” he recalled. “The first show took too much out of me. I didn’t see my family for two years.

  “It was only when the Paramount people agreed with me and said a sequel was probably impossible anyway that my interest was piqued.”2

  Why a new series? Local stations had bombarded Paramount with requests for new episodes, studio executives said at the time of the initial announcement. More bluntly, an all-new cast and setting would provide fresh, less costly, and longer-lived actors to take advantage of the never-ending appeal of the Trek phenomenon—and that phenomenon was already quite obvious to a studio with one eye on the steady Star Trek profits and the other on the mounting ages and salaries of the original cast and their limited availability.

  Roddenberry, too, knew a weekly series with the original players was impractical, but he couldn’t see recasting the roles—a point on which most fans agreed with him—and so the decision was made to set the new series sometime in the more distant future and to create a whole new set of characters.

  “I don’t think we need a retread crew with people playing the same kinds of roles,” Roddenberry said then. “I’m not at all sure we’ll have a retread Vulcan. I would hate to think our imagination is so slender that there aren’t other possibilities to think about.”

  A year later, after the debut of the new series, he seemed even more certain about that decision. “How can you get the best writers and the best directors and tell them to do a retread?” he said. “To get the kind of energy and enthusiasm we needed, you have to have new characters and a new series.” Still, he
acknowledged later, such a path in light of the original show’s popularity had constituted “a considerable risk.”

  The embryonic series had a handle on characters and format, but would there again be bitter ongoing duels with network accountants and censors? For Roddenberry, it was just as well that all four networks, including the fledgling Fox, eventually turned down the new series. All had been intrigued, but none would commit itself Jo a full twenty-six-hour first season, an unchanging time slot, and an intense promotional campaign. “Nobody was going to give it the same kind of attention and care that we could give it,” Mel Harris said later, calling Paramount’s Trek franchise “one of our family jewels.”

  “I’m happy we’re not on the network,” Gene Roddenberry said. “It’s one more level of censorship and so on that I don’t have to deal with. I’m still bruised from some of those 1966 battles!”

  Bob Justman, who had begun with Roddenberry on the original pilot for Star Trek in 1964 as first assistant director and wound up as associate producer by series’ end, recalled some of those battles while reflecting on why he and others from the old show would take up the banner once again.

  “When I left Star Trek in 1968 it was a disaster,” Justman said. “It was a failure as far as the network was concerned, and the industry…. So I had a need to return to prove that the show did have value and was successful and that you can go home again and prove to the people who doubted you that there was value there all along, that this was a worthwhile—if you’ll pardon the pun—enterprise.”3

  So the motivation and the assurances and the basic blueprint were in place. Now all Roddenberry and Company—whoever they were to be—needed was the other 98 percent of the series. They had to tackle the fine points of twenty-fourth-century characters and technology updates, as well as the twentieth-century dilemmas surrounding budgeting, special effects, organizing a crew, and topping a classic. Those were the issues that had to be faced as Roddenberry, armed for once with complete studio backing, began assembling a team and organizing his ideas for the first TNG writers’ guide—the series “bible.”