Hill’s gal Friday goes unnamed but becomes Madeline in their other reincarnations, (“Manhunt”/145, “Clues”/188); actors Boyett (“Time’s Arrow, Part II”/227) and Selburg (“Frame of Mind”/247) would return, while the Jarada would be mentioned just once more (“Samaritan Snare”/143), Ironically, the song “From Out of Nowhere” is heard as Picard enters the holodeck for the first time—a Bob Justman touch.
DATALORE
* * *
Production No.: 114 Aired: Week of January 18, 1988
Stardate: 41242.4 Code: da
Directed by Rob Bowman
Teleplay by Robert Lewin and Gene Roddenberry
Story by Robert Lewin and Maurice Hurley
GUEST CAST
Lieutenant Commander Argyle: Biff Yeager
* * *
Data experiences an almost human expectancy when the Enterprise returns to his “home” planet in Omicron Theta to discover the secret behind the disappearance of its 411 colonists twenty-six years before.
An away team finds the lab of the reclusive Dr. Noonien Soong, a renegade Earth scientist who originally built a “twin” of Data’s named Lore. Over time, the crew learns that Lore was disassembled at the demand of the colonists for being “too perfect.” Data was the second model.
Lore’s disassembled parts are found, rebuilt, and reanimated aboard the ship. But the reason for the android’s original disassembly soon becomes clear—he turns Data off and assumes his identity. He then summons the huge life-draining crystal entity that destroyed the colony years before after being lured there by him as revenge for his disassembly.
Wesley senses the switch, but no one listens to him until it’s almost too late. Finally his mother learns the truth and reactivates Data, but by then the crystalline being is almost upon the ship.
The two androids fight each other in a cargo bay until Lore is thrown into a wide-dispersal transporter beam. The crystalline being now has no contact with the Enterprise, and it departs.
By the end of season one, this episode was being cited by Berman as the one that changed the most from its inception. Lore was originally a female android, a non-lookalike love interest for Data. Her job was to go out and repair dangerous situations à la Red Adair, the oil well fire fighter. It was Spiner who suggested the old “evil twin” concept.
Data (left) confronts his android brother, Lore.
Because of the delays caused by rewrites, Rob Bowman landed this segment instead of its predecessor, switching with Joe Scanlan when the two stories traded places in the shooting schedule. Though he regretted losing a chance to direct “The Big Goodbye,” Bowman and Spiner met the challenge of “Datalore” and its troubled history head on, They produced a winner, thanks in no small part to an extra eighth day of shooting and to Spiner’s virtuosity in the dual role.
The original back story of Data’s creation by an alien race was tossed out. What emerged in its stead was the story of an android who originated in the laboratories of the Federation’s most brilliant cybernetics expert, Dr. Noonian Soong. Data’s positronic brain—an homage to the late sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov—was foreshadowed as early as October 28, 1986, when Justman suggested in a memo that the author’s “Laws of Robotics” be used and that a spoken credit be given. We discover in this episode that Data spent four years at Starfleet Academy, three years as an ensign, and ten or twelve years in the lieutenant grades. We also learn that only Beverly Crusher knows about his off switch. Two additional stories, “Brothers” (177) and “Silicon Avatar”(204), eventually stemmed from the episode. In addition, we learn that there is an “emergency close” vocal command that can shut the turbolift doors in a second, and that a phaser beam can be trapped within a transporter beam if timed just right. This episode would be the last of Yeager’s two stints as Chief Engineer Argyle, though he had been mentioned in “Lonely Among Us” (108).
In a rare verbal blooper, Riker drops a digit from his away team log stardate, giving the date as 4124,5—the style used in the original Trek’s stardates.
ANGEL ONE
* * *
Production No.: 115 Aired: Week of January 25, 1988
Stardate: 41636.9 Code: ao
Directed by Michael Rhodes
Written by Patrick Barry
GUEST CAST
Beata: Karen Montgomery
Ramsey: Sam Hennings
Ariel: Patricia McPherson
Trent: Leonard John Crowfoot
* * *
Searching for survivors from a freighter that’s been missing for seven years, the Enterprise visits the matriarchal planet Angel I and gets a frosty reception from its female leaders. Riker especially seems out of place as Yar and Troi handle the diplomacy, but he finds a more personal way to gain leader Beata’s trust.
Survivors are found, but they refuse to return. They have taken wives from among outcasts on the planet who don’t like the status quo: dominant women and submissive men.
Back aboard Enterprise crises break out as a virus from a holodeck file ravages the ship and Starfleet wants a response to a reported Romulan incursion near the Neutral Zone.
The renegade women are discovered and sentenced to death along with their Federation mates as enemies of society. Riker wants to intercede and violate the Prime Directive by beaming the outcasts aboard, but with the epidemic in full swing, Dr. Crusher forbids it.
Finally both dilemmas are resolved: the doctor finds an antidote to the virus, and Riker persuades Beata to forgo the death penalty. She allows the group instead to be exiled to a remote part of the planet, and the Enterprise warps out to counter the reported Romulan activity.
Heavy rewrites changed Patrick Barry’s original story—a direct, action-filled allegory on apartheid using the sexes instead of the races to make its point. In the original, Riker beams down with an otherwise all-female away team and stops the leader, “Victoria,” from striking him. Tasha immediately phaser-stuns Riker to prevent his on-the-spot execution by the natives. Data, with his machine nature, is held in higher esteem than Riker, who is thrown into jail with other slaves on the eve of a revolt led by the marooned human, Lucas Jones. Jones is killed after a verbal attack on Victoria and his death inspires the rebels to strike at last as the Enterprise leaves. A recovered Picard, the only one taken ill in this version, is reassured by Number One that the members of his team were only witnesses to, and not instigators of, the uprising.
Troi and Yar lead the away team on the matriarchal Angel One.
Except for a nice scene in which Troi and Tasha get to guffaw at Riker’s revealing outfit, the revised teleplay is a one-note morality tale with yet another shipboard disease as the subplot. Director Michael Rhodes, a four-time Emmy winner on the series Insights, came to his TNG assignment as part of a deal with the series The Bronx Zoo, also shot at Paramount, He recalls that he gave Wil Wheaton his first starring role, in a 1981 ABC After School Special.
Two notes of interest in this episode: Troi remarks that Angel I’s matriarchal oligarchy is “very much like” Betazed; and the Romulans are mentioned for the first time in TNG, as a reported threat in the Neutral Zone. And for students of stage design, Herman Zimmerman’s cleverly designed Stage 16 sets, which were used as Soong’s lab in the preceding episode, were re-dressed here and would be altered throughout the rest of the season to get even more mileage out of his budget.
11001001
* * *
Production No.: 116 Aired: Week of February 1, 1988
Stardate: 41365.9 Code: oo
Directed by Paul Lynch
Written by Maurice Hurley and Robert Lewin
GUEST CAST
Minuet: Carolyn McCormick
Commander Quinteros: Gene Dynarski
Zero One: Katy Beyer
One Zero: Alexandra Johnson
Zero Zero: Iva Lane
One One: Kelli Ann McNally
Piano Player: Jack Sheldon
Bass Player: Abdul Salaam el Razzac
Drumme
r: Ron Brown
* * *
The Enterprise visits Starbase 74 for an upgrade to the ship’s computer facilities—a task that will be performed by the Bynars. They are a race grown so dependent upon computers that they work in pairs and communicate directly in binary language.
While the crew puts in for shore leave, Riker tries out a new holodeck program for a New Orleans jazz bar where he can play trombone. There he meets Minuet, a sultry brunette and the most realistic character a holodeck ever created.
Soon Picard joins them, and he is amazed at the difference the Bynars’ upgrade has made—Minuet is almost too good. The reason why is soon discovered: the Bynars were using Minuet as a decoy, while faking a magnetic shield breakdown to empty the ship. The aliens’ ruse works and they hijack the Enterprise to take them home.
To avoid its capture Picard and Riker program the ship to self-destruct. But when they emerge on the bridge, they find the Bynars not defiant, but dying.
The aliens feared an electromagnetic pulse from a nearby nova would ruin their world’s master computer, so they wanted to “borrow” the Enterprise’s—the only mobile memory core large enough. But the pulse has already hit.
Now that they understand the problem, the officers use the ship’s computer to help rejuvenate the Bynars. But Riker discovers his Minuet is gone and can’t be re-created.
Another sign that both script quality and overall continuity were on the rise was this tale by Maurice Hurley and Robert Lewin in which we finally get some insight into Riker’s character. The story even allows Jonathan Frakes to demonstrate his real-life trombone playing, His rendition of “The Nearness of You” would be repeated later (“Conundrum”/214), and Minuet would appear again in “Future Imperfect” (182). Number One’s relationship with Minuet and his feelings about it showed that Frakes could do things with Riker if given the chance, and the Bynars and their troubled homeworld computer proved to be one plot frame that worked.
The four actors used for the Bynars were all women dancers whose voice track was mechanically lowered in pitch; initially, covert dialogue among them was designed to be subtitled. Gene Dynarski should be familiar to longtime Trek fans as Ben Childress in “Mudd’s Women” and Krodak in “The Mark of Gideon” from the 1960s series. His character, who says he headed the team that put the Enterprise together, is given the first name of Orfil in the script.
This episode features several subtle optical effects. The Enterprise seen outside a Starbase 74 window is reflected in the wall controls, and Probert’s painting of the docked Enterprise includes matted-in figures walking through the gangway tunnel. The shots of the planet Tarsas III, its moon, and the orbiting starbase are stock shots reused from Star Trek III. The autodestruct sequence is much more informally worded than the three-person code used in the Kirk-era’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” and in Star Trek III, and for the first time an emergency evacuation of the starship is shown. Also, a scene with a nonspeaking character named Dr. Terrence Epstein, a twenty-six-year-old research hero of Beverly’s, was cut to save time, and he became only a mention.
The Bynars are found near death after hijacking the Enterprise.
HOME SOIL
* * *
Production No.: 117 Aired: Week of February 22, 1988
Stardate: 41463.9 Code: hs
Directed by Corey Allen
Teleplay by Robert Sabaroff
Story by Karl Guers, Ralph Sanchez, and Robert Sabaroff
GUEST CAST
Kurt Mandl: Walter Gotell
Louisa Kim: Elizabeth Lindsey
Bjorn Benson: Gerard Prendergast
Arthur Malencon: Mario Roccuzzo
Female Engineer: Carolyne Barry
* * *
The Enterprise is asked to check up on a remote terraforming station on Velara III that is working to transform the supposedly lifeless planet into a fertile, habitable Class M world.
But during the visit, an engineer is mysteriously killed when the laser drill in the hydraulics room goes berserk. Minutes later, Data narrowly avoids the same fate. As he and La Forge check it out, they discover what comes to be called a microbrain.
This unusual inorganic entity is a real lifeform native to the planet. As Dr. Crusher and Data investigate the aliens, the tiny being declares war on the humans. By pumping and desalinating the Velarans’ narrow subsurface water ecosphere, the terraformers were killing its race.
The power it draws is strong enough to deflect the ships’ transporter beam. Finally it is deduced that the microbrain is photoelectric, and a shutdown of power weakens it enough so that it can be sent home.
Data and La Forge discover the tiny crystalline Velara III lifeform dubbed “microbrain.” In doing so, Picard’s crew promises to abide by the Velarans’ request for no UFP contact for three hundred years. The planet is quarantined.
This story’s theme of unintended destruction echoes that of original Trek’s “Devil In the Dark,” in which a silicon-based mother creature attacks the miners who are unknowingly taking her eggs. This TNG, however, was a lackluster show, which Hurley recalls as the one where just about everything that could have gone wrong did—including pages having to be rewritten the day before shooting. About the best thing this episode has going for it is an explanation of terraforming and the Velarans’ name for humans: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water. Walter Gotell, who plays Mandl, will be remembered as General Gogol in the James Bond films. An unused matte painting of the Velara III station, complete with parked shuttlecraft, was prepared by Andrew Probert.
The crew finds the microbrain’s growth in sickbay amazing.
WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS
* * *
Production No.: 118 Aired: Week of February 15, 1988
Stardate: 41509.1 Code: wb
Directed by Kirn Manners
Written by Hannah Louise Shearer
GUEST CAST
Radue: Jerry Hardin
Rashella: Brenda Strong
Katie: Jandi Swanson
Melian: Paul Lambert
Duana: Ivy Bethune
Dr. Bernard: Dierk Torsek
Leda: Michele Marsh
Accolan: Dan Mason
Harry Bernard: Philip N. Waller
Toya: Connie Danese
Alexandra: Jessica and Vanessa Bova
* * *
The Enterprise stumbles across the planet Aldea, a world completely cloaked from outsiders by a powerful force-shield. But the find is no accident: the seemingly friendly Aldeans kidnap seven youngsters, including Wesley, from the ship to perpetuate their race.
Parents begin to panic as all attempts at negotiations fail. The Aldeans, convinced they are permanently sterile, stubbornly offer only to trade for the children. As a show of force, their defense system knocks the Enterprise three days’ distance with one bolt.
But there Wesley finds holes in the Aldeans’ technology: their age-old Custodian supercomputer shows wear and tear, and no one now knows how to maintain it. A secret scan by his mother shows the race is dying from radiation poisoning due to an ozone leak caused by their shield.
When Wesley organizes a hunger strike, Picard and Dr. Crusher are asked down to the planet for help. Riker and Data use the opportunity to secretly beam into a computer center, and, backed with control of the cloaking shield, the Enterprise crew is finally able to convince the Aldeans of the nature of their true problem. Picard pledges UFP aid to help them regain their ecology and their health.
Retrieving the kidnapped children from Aldea provides a challenge for both Wesley and Picard.
This was an opportunity to utilize those often ignored shipboard families that Shearer initially pitched to Fontana, and it was this story that helped win her a spot on the writing staff. A subplot involving ship separation and the saucer being held hostage was phased out to focus on the main story.
The nonspeaking young hostages included Wil Wheaton’s younger siblings, Jeremy and Amy, as Mason and Tara; makeup designer Westmore’s
daughter MacKenzie played Roe. Hardin would return to TNG as Mark Twain (“Time’s Arrow”/226-227), while Paul Lambert later appeared in “Devil’s Due” (187).
This was another script in which Legato would provide an impressive yet inexpensive FX solution to a story need: the Aldean computer’s power room. “The script called for a ‘little black box’ power station, but that wasn’t enough,” he said. “It needed to be something that left you awestruck—but how, on a low budget?”
First Legato had a two-foot-tall model of a reactor and a cavern-shaft built with a ledge. Then he shot actors against a simple black background with a single hard white light rising on them, as if from a door opening from floor to ceiling. Next he burned their image into the black side of the model to establish the scale for a few seconds before camera picked up the live-action shooting on the set. “At three thousand dollars it was much cheaper than compositing the scene with mattes,” he added.
COMING OF AGE
* * *
Production No.: 119 Aired: Week of March 14, 1988
Stardate: 41416.2 Code: ca
Directed by Michael Vejar
Written by Sandy Fries
GUEST CAST
Admiral Gregory Quinn: Ward Costello
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 9