Lenard’s work is complemented by the mind-meld scene in which Stewart is Sarek with a brilliant portrayal of pent-up emotional anguish. Though Sarek’s famous son Spock is later seen to be very much alive (“Unification”/207-208), Behr recalled the battle at the time just to mention the character at all, with caution still in place about dealing with the original series. Picard does say he attended the wedding of “Sarek’s son” as a lieutenant, though again Spock is not specified.
References are also made to “Journey to Babel”’s Coridan issue and to Amanda, Sarek’s first wife, played by Jane Wyatt in the 1960s and in Star Trek IV. Given the human life span, it was decided that Sarek would have remarried; his second wife is played here by veteran actress Joanna Miles, a new kid on the Trek block. As Riker learned in school, Sarek is given credit, among other things, for the early Klingon-Federation treaties—credit that he shares with Riva (“Loud as a Whisper”/132).
On the trivia side, note the scroll given Picard by the Mintakans (“Who Watches the Watchers?”/152) is seen draped over his chair in this episode. And for music lovers: the first selection played at the Mozart concert is the String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, also known as “The Dissonant,” while—in a blooper—the second is actually by Brahms, the andante moderate movement from his Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major.
MÉNAGE À TROI
* * *
Production No.: 172 Aired: Week of May 28, 1990
Stardate: 43930.7 Code: me
Directed by Robert Legato
Written by Fred Bronson & Susan Sackett
GUEST CAST
Lwaxana Troi: Majel Barrett
DaiMon Tog: Frank Corsentino
Dr. Farek: Ethan Phillips
Nibor: Peter Slutsker
Reittan Grax: Rudolph Willrich
Mr. Homn: Carel Struycken
* * *
Picard and Betazoid officials have their doubts about allowing Ferengi to take part in a biannual Betazed trade conference, but it seems to come to a smooth conclusion for all except Lwaxana Troi, Deanna’s mother, who is followed by a pesky lovestruck DaiMon Tog.
Riker and Troi stay behind for a rare romantic shore leave on the planet while their ship finishes a routine assignment. But just as Lwaxana interrupts once again to nag her daughter about settling down, Tog appears and kidnaps all three, determined to use Lwaxana’s telepathic skills for his own profit—and to make her his mate.
Riker and Troi outfox their guards and try to secretly signal their ship while Lwaxana keeps both Tog and her conscience at bay. Meanwhile, Wesley is due to leave to take his Starfleet Academy orals but stays behind at the last minute to help decode Riker’s signal, which later earns him a field promotion to ensign.
Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett) can’t escape an obsessed Tog (Frank Corsentino).
Tog’s doctor suspects their escape attempt almost too late, but Lwaxana, already in pain from his mind probes, asks him to let Riker and Deanna go free while she stays behind.
Then, with the young officers safely back aboard the Enterprise, Lwaxana signals the captain, her old would-be flame. Picard plays along by pretending to be her jilted lover. His performance is good enough to scare Tog into giving her up without an incident.
Rob Legato crossed over from his position as supervisor of visual effects to direct this episode, which included the first-ever look at the Betazed surface. Actually the Betazed scenes were filmed on location at the Huntington Library Botanical Gardens in San Marino, an LA. suburb. Legato recalls that the show was thick with visitors, including Gene Roddenberry, since it was the first sale for his assistant, Susan Sackett, and also the yearly vehicle for GR’s wife, Majel Barrett. To mark Wesley’s promotion to full ensign at show’s end, the Great Bird presented actor Wil Wheaton with his own ensign’s bars, earned in the U.S. Navy thirty years earlier. General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was on hand for the ceremony.
Sackett recalled that the comic idea began with an 0. Henry short story, “The Ransom of Red Chief”—the tale of a hostage nobody wanted. Still, aside from the moment when Riker and Troi are about to share their first on-screen kiss, the most memorable scene may be the one in which Picard mangles his beloved Shakespeare volume to get Lwaxana back.
Nearly abandoned as adversaries, here the Ferengi are developed even further in a tale recalled later by Lwaxana in DS9’s “The Forsaken.” Their four-node brains resist empathic contact by Betazoids and other races—which leaves Troi’s earlier sensing of Bok (“The Battle”/110) unexplained—and their erogenous ears are sensitive to stroking, or oo-mox (also in “Chain of Command, Part I”/236 and DS9’s “Q-Less”). Corsentino, after Armin Shimerman and Max Grodenchik, became the third to play more than one Ferengi (“The Battle”), while Slutsker would later join them (“Suspicions”/248, “Bloodlines”/274) and Phillips would win the role of Neelix on Voyager. The Ferengi phaser debuts here, while another anime joke creeps in: Tog’s code is “Kei-ee, Yur-ee….”
The USS Bradbury, of course, is named for the great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, while “Cochrane distortion” pays homage to the discoverer of the space warp, Zefrem Cochran, mentioned in 1967’s “Metamorphosis.”
Michael Westmore peppered the trade delegates with a Klingon female and uniformed male, a Vulcan woman, a Selayan, a Zakdorn male, two Bolian females, and a Mizarian male, along with the Algolian musician. And yes, body doubles were used for Barrett and Sirtis in the nude scenes.
Grax knew Lwaxana’s “first” husband, who was not Troi’s dad, Ian (“The Child”/127, “Dark Page”/259), unless she reverted her last name later; she says her first was “not much of a conversationalist,” a cold view in light of her memories (259). Ian may even have been her third, if Zon, her next lover briefly mentioned, was a husband.
TRANSFIGURATIONS
* * *
Production No.: 173 Aired: Week of June 4, 1990
Stardate: 43957.2 Code:tf
Directed by Tom Benko
Written by Rene Echevarria
GUEST CAST
“John Doe”: Mark LaMura
Commander Sunad: Charles Dennis
Christy Henshaw: Julie Warner
Lieutenant O’Brien: Colm Meaney
Nurse Temple: Patti Tippo
* * *
A severely injured humanoid—known as “John Doe” because of his amnesia—is found in the wreckage of an escape pod. After being linked to Geordi’s nervous system to initially stabilize his body functions, the man recovers much faster than expected.
The good-natured John brings an unusually strong sense of serenity and confidence to those around him: La Forge, for one, who resumes his romance with a onetime holodeck date.
But as he recovers, John Doe is racked by fits of pain marked by a glowing energy burst within him.
The mystery man also demonstrates incredible healing powers, but increasingly severe bouts of pain frighten him into trying to steal a shuttlecraft. After he is subdued, John tells Picard he knows he is a threat to the crew and asks to leave.
The truth is revealed when a Zalkonian ship approaches and demands that the Enterprise turn John over to them. When the alien captain uses a paralysis beam against the Enterprise, John’s memory finally returns. He frees the crew from the beam’s effects. Then he explains that he is among the first of his people to have taken the next step up the evolutionary ladder: transmutation into a being of pure energy. He is also the only survivor of his fearful government’s attempt to exterminate this new life-form on their world so as to preserve their own power.
John now completes his transformation into an energy-being and prepares to return to his people and tell them of their own coming rebirth.
Longtime TNG film editor Tom Benko, brought onto the series by Corey Allen when he directed the pilot, got his own chance to break into directing with this simple piece, Rene Echevarria’s second. The episode was originally designed as a love story for Beverly Crusher, but that plot wou
ld have to wait another year for “The Host” (197). Benko had previously sold scripts to Magnum P.I. and The Fall Guy and directed the second unit for The Rockford Files, Kojak, and Battlestar Galactica.
With Geordi gaining new confidence with women, the returning character of Christy gained a last name, Henshaw (“Booby Trap”/154). The shuttlepod El-Baz is also in “Time Squared” (139) and “Descent” (252-253), while motor-assist bands were used again in “Ethics” (216). Surprisingly, the alien’s last scene was done live with actor LaMura donning a flourescent orange suit that literally glowed on the special film used and required little touch-up.
The evolving “John Doe” (Mark LaMura) brings Worf back to life.
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
* * *
Production No.: 174 Aired: Week of June 18, 1990
Stardate: 43989.1 Code:bb
Directed by Cliff Bole
Written by Michael Piller
GUEST CAST
Lieutenant Commander Shelby: Elizabeth Dennehy
Admiral J. R Hanson: George Murdock
Lieutenant O’Brien: Colm Meaney
* * *
The Borg are suspected of having caused a Starfleet colony’s utter destruction, and Starfleet sends its best tactician to deal with the threat.
Riker and Borg expert Lt. Commander Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy) investigate the destruction of Jouret IV
Lieutenant Commander Shelby, who proves to be as smart and ambitious as she is beautiful, lets Riker know she wants his job. Riker refuses the latest command offered him, setting the stage for mounting friction, which heats up when Shelby tells him he’s gone soft and lost his edge.
Meanwhile, the Borg finally appear and demand that Picard personally surrender to them. Thanks to Shelby’s quick-witted strategy, the Enterprise breaks away and hides out in a sensor-blinding nebula to buy time for repairs and strategy.
La Forge and his team devise a weapon using the main deflector, but the ship will have to drop out of warp to use that power supply. The weapon is only part finished when the Borg find the ship, beam over, and kidnap Picard. The aliens then set course directly for Earth.
Shelby leads an away team to find Picard, who is already being assimilated by the Borg. As Locutus, he will serve as the cyborg race’s speaker with humans.
Shelby’s team does enough damage to force the Borg to drop out of warp, but they cannot retrieve Picard. Returning to the Enterprise, they find Geordi’s jury-rigged weapon ready at last. The engineer insists they must fire on the Borg immediately or lose their only chance to destroy the invaders.
This spectacular movie-quality offering, the first true two-parter in this series, is still perhaps TNG’s proudest achievement. Michael Piller, who says he didn’t know how the saga would end when he first sat down to write it, began with the need for a cliff-hanger and came up with the Borg plot to kidnap Picard—after having tried all season long to work up a new story about the cyborg race.
Needing a so-called Queen Bee among the Borg collective for dramatic storytelling needs, Piller came up with the idea of Picard’s abduction. Originally, he intended for Data and Picard to be “Borgified” into one unit. The later addition of Inker’s career-advancement quandary gave Jonathan Frakes a chance to do some of his best work as Riker. For Piller personally, the subject matter was timely, coming as it did at his own contract-renewal time.
“When [Riker] talked to Troi about ‘Why am I still here?’ and she’s telling him, ‘because you’re happy,’ that was a conversation I had with myself several times during the course of writing that show,” Piller confided.
The exceptional guest cast includes Elizabeth Dennehy, the daughter of actor Brian Dennehy, and George Murdock, a veteran of years of character roles. Trek fans may recognize Murdock as the “godhead” from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, he was also the doctor on Battlestar Galactica.
Kidnapped from his own bridge by the Borg
The freighter U.S.S. Lalo had reported the Manheim time loop effect (“We’ll Always Have Paris”/124); the Melbourne, which became the third command Riker had turned down, was in “11001001” (116) and is seen in DS9’s pilot, “Emissary.” A nice continuity touch that would be repeated later is the addition of Riker’s trombone to his cabin, but a continuity gaffe has Riker and Shelby leave the main bridge for the battle bridge by way of the normal forward turbolift instead of the direct connection to starboard. We also hear that Picard “recruited” Riker as first officer and promoted him, a story fleshed out later in “The Pegasus” (264).
All in all, so great was the impact of “The Best of Both Worlds” that even the hardest of the hard-core original-Trek fans had to concede that TNG had finally arrived. Over that summer of 1990, fan debates raged, computer bulletin board lines hummed, and fanzine letter-writers argued, fueled by rumors that Stewart’s contract talks with Paramount had stalled: Would Shelby die while saving Picard? Would Picard die heroically? Would Riker be promoted to captain? Would Shelby become his first officer? Paramount’s publicity department ran its first-ever promotional campaign for a single TNG episode since “Farpoint”; ads and radio spots were specially prepared for the season opener.
Now only one question remained: could anybody write an ending that would live up to all the hype?
Picard has no idea of the fate that awaits him.
Notes
1Marc Altman, Cinefantastique, Oct. 1991, p. 18.
2Star Trek: The Official Fan Club Magazine, Oct./Nov. 1989, p. 4.
3Star Trek: The Official Fan Club Magazine, Aug./Sept. 1989, p. 9.
PRODUCTION STAFF CREDITS— THIRD SEASON
* * *
(In usual roll order; numbers in parentheses refer to episode numbers.)
Casting: (*) Junie Lowery
Main Title Theme: (*) Jerry Goldsmith, (*) Alexander Courage
Music: (*) Ron Jones (all even-numbered episodes, 150-174 except 168); (*) Dennis McCarthy (all odd-numbered episodes, 149-173; EMMY NOMINEE: dramatic underscore, series: “Yesterday’s Enterprise” [163]); Jay Chattaway (168)
Director of Photography: Marvin Rush
Production Designer: **Richard D. James (EMMY CO-WINNER: art direction, series: “Sins of the Father” [165])
Editor: Daryl S. Baskin (171); (*) Tom Benko (151, 154, 157, 160, 163; adds ACE: 166, 169); Howard S. Deane, ACE (172); (*) J. P. Farrell (150, 153, 156, 159, 162, 165, 168, 174); **Bob Lederman (149, 152, 155, 158, 161, 164, 167, 170, 173; EMMY NOMINEE: single camera production editing, series: “Deja Q” [161])
Unit Production Manager: Merri D. Howard (×)
First Asst. Director: Chip Chalmers (all even-numbered episodes, 150-174 except 164, 168); Brad Yacobian (all odd-numbered episodes, 149-173); Bruce Alan Solow (166, 168); Adele G. Simmons (×) (162)
Second Asst. Director: * Adele G. Simmons (all but 162); Jeff Cline (162)
Costume Designer: Bob Blackman
Original Starfleet Uniforms: (*) William Ware Theiss
Visual Effects Supervisor: (*) Robert Legato (all even-numbered episodes, 150-174 except 170) (EMMY CO-NOMINEE: special visual FX “Tin Man” [168]); (*) Dan Curry (all odd-numbered episodes, 149-173 except 169) (EMMY CO-NOMINEE: special visual FX: “Deja Q” [161]); *Gary Hutzel (×) (170); Ron Moore (×) (169)
Post Production Supervisor: *Wendy Neuss
Original Set Design: (*) Herman Zimmerman
Makeup Supervisor: (*) Michael Westmore (EMMY CO-NOMINEE: makeup, series: “Allegiance” [166])
Set Decorator: Tom Pedigo (149-155); **Jim Mees (156-174) (EMMY CO-WINNER: art direction, series: “Sins of the Father” [165])
Senior Illustrator: (*) Rick Sternbach (added Technical Consultant, 165-67)
Scenic Artist Supervisor: (*) Michael Okuda (added 167; EMMY CO-NOMINEE: special visual effects: “Tin Man” [168])
Set Designer: Gary Speckman
Script Supervisor: (*) Cosmo Genovese
Special Effects: (*) Dick Brownfield
Property
Master: (*) Joe Longo (all odd-numbered episodes, 149-173); (*) Alan Sims (all even-numbered episodes, 150-174)
Construction Coordinator: (*) Al Smutko
Hair Designer: Vivian McAteer (EMMY CO-NOMINEE: hairstyling, series: “Hollow Pursuits” [169])
Hairstylist: Barbara Lampson (149-158, 160, 162, 164-174), Rita Bordonaro (163) (both, EMMY CO-NOMINEE: hairstyling, series: “Hollow Pursuits” [169]); Tim Jones (159, 161)
Makeup Artists: **Gerald Quist (all but 174), June Abston-Haymore (both, EMMY CO-NOMINEES: makeup, series: “Allegiance” [166]); Hank Edds, S.M.A. (174)
Visual Effects Coordinator: Ron Moore (all odd-numbered episodes, 149-173 except 169; EMMY CO-NOMINEE: special visual effects: “Deja Q” [161]); Gary Hutzel (all even-numbered episodes, 150-174 except 170; EMMY CO-NOMINEE: special visual effects: “Tin Man” [168]); NONE on 169-170
Sound Mixer: *Alan Bernard, C.A.S. (EMMY CO-NOMINEE: sound mixing, drama series: “Yesterday’s Enterprise” [163] with re-recording mixer crew)
Chief Lighting Technician: Buddy Bowles
First Company Grip: Bob Sordal
Costumers: **Amanda Chamberlin (all odd-numbered episodes, 149-171); **Kimberly Thompson (150, 153, 156, 159, 162, 165, 168, 171, 174); David Velasquez (150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 160-173); Camille Argus (149, 152, 154, 157, 160, 163, 166, 169, 172); Kris Jorgensen (151, 155, 158, 161, 164, 167, 170, 173); David Page (162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172); Norma Johnson (174)
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 22