The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition

by Larry Nemecek

  With the original contract options ending, rumors amid fans and the industry press surrounded the cast—especially Patrick Stewart—about their plans to return for an additional season, though Berman certainly talked of a possible seventh season and even an eighth, provided all the terms could be agreed on. But the future of the franchise finally came into focus in early April 1993 when GR’s heir apparent formally announced a TNG theatrical feature by Christmas ’94, shot after a brief respite following a moved-up seventh and final TV season. At the time, Berman said he was working on stories for two separate screenplays: one by former TNG associate Maurice Hurley, most recently a supervising producer on the latter-day Kung Fu series, and the other by ongoing staff writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga. And both, he added, could be structured to include some of the original Trek cast.

  The immediate acceptance of DS9 by fans and new viewers—the pilot drew a syndication-high 18.8 for the season, thanks in no small part to TNG’s lead—pointed up how it was not so long ago that even TNG had found it rough gaining acceptance from original Trek fans. And if a few “old-timers” still resisted, those not won over by the “Unification” two-parter had another generation-bridging event in the new season’s “Relics” (230): a sentimental and effectively used appearance by James “Scotty” Doohan in which the engineering “miracle worker” is conjured up by inspired transporter jury-rigging and left in good health at tale’s end to roam the era of both TNG and DS9. Its ratings weighed in at the time as the third-highest-rated episode in the series’ history with a 13.9, after “Unification II” and the 1987 pilot. (As with “Devil’s Due” in Season 4, the oddities of the late-winter February sweeps would give the uneven “Aquiel” (239) the season high with a 14.1.)

  TNG’s early season numbers were so strong that even baseball fanatic Piller was likely impressed with the studio’s two-page color trade-magazine ad that boasted “Baseball’s World Series lost to our worlds’ series” above the image of the 1701-D streaking past a planet and a world-sized baseball. The ad revealed that TNG beat the six-game ratings average of the 1992 Series among all adults eighteen to forty-nine and both the adult and menonly brackets for the eighteen-to-thirty-four age group—by as much as twenty-three percent!

  That success led to a November 6 Los Angeles Times feature examining why the series had suffered so little from the death of Roddenberry a year earlier, with the series’ own average rating now at 13.5, or over twelve and a half million households—a twenty-two-percent jump during the early going of the sixth season over even the prior year’s new highs, and domination for the fourth year of Wheel of Fortune in syndication. True, it was noted, TNG benefited in ratings numbers from being shown twice a week in about half its 248 markets of the time, but that didn’t take away from the fact that the last half hour of “Rascals” (233) beat out the Monday-night competition on all four networks in the Los Angeles market. Other reasons cited for the ratings rise: the audience gained from increasing numbers of stations who “strip” TNG in daily showings, and the move into prime time by even more stations—including four network affiliates who dumped their own programming to air it!

  Even the venerable New York Times Syndicate, offering features from articles to crossword puzzles for newspapers nationwide, got the message when it announced in February a weekly “Inside Trek” column for sale—a review of stars, plots, upcoming episodes, and even fandom; a year later, columnist Ian Spelling noted that the strip was running in around thirty-five papers. And more than ever, Trek entered the academic world with news reports of a Klingon Language Camp for linguists in Minnesota and a law-journal article examining the twenty-fourth-century justice system of Starfleet and the Federation. Outside academia, Star Trek’s legendary galaxy of merchandising was on the boom too, as the studio estimated sales of all Trek products through 1991 had hit $2 billion. And Pocket Books—Trek’s exclusive publishing licensee since 1979—noted in February of 1993 that its 100-plus Trek titles include sixty-four on the New York Times best-seller list.

  Yet a third group of numbers also revealed what a phenomenon TNG had become—if it was still a secret. Lolita Fatjo, who had replaced Eric Stillwell as script coordinator for both series when he left to join Creation Entertainment at Season 5’s close, reported that about three thousand scripts—both from pros and amateurs—had had poured in to her office over the nine-month period. After outside readers compile a two-page “coverage” memo on each script, that will be perused by Piller, only one in two hundred writers sell, even the bare story premise, one in fifty is invited in to “pitch” one or more ideas to someone on staff, and less than one percent of them sell a teleplay. Still, several premises would be bought from thrilled amateurs all over the country during the coming year, providing still another way to keep the fans involved and the writing staff fresh.

  And freshness would be at a premium as the usually quiet early-summer hiatus of 1992 took on a new fervency as much of the creative team worked double-duty shifts, especially at first, to plan for DS9’s launch. “Some people have split their time between the series, but those who did so had put together a good enough staff of people over the past five and a half years and they rose to the occasion,” noted Berman. For instance, David Livingston won the job of supervising producer on both series, while sole TNG title changes saw Peter Lauritson upped to producer’s title, Unit Production Manager Merri D. Howard promoted to line producer, and associate producer Wendy Neuss now a co-producer.

  Also, with fellow FX supervisor Rob Legato taking the title of visual effects producer with a move to Deep Space Nine and overseeing his own alternating crews, Dan Curry would do the same by remaining with TNG. Now heading up alternate shows were five-year co-worker Ronald B. Moore, an FX veteran from the likes of 2010, Ghostbusters, and Poltergeist II, and newcomer David Stipes, a twenty-four-year veteran of films, commercials, and movies such as the “V” sagas, Tales of the Gold Monkey, The Flash, Creepshow, and Reel Genius—including eleven years with his own firm (see “Conspiracy”/125)—who had once tried to get on during original Trek’s last season as a green college grad, then later worked with Curry at Universal and just missed a shot with DS9 when the TNG slot opened.

  Michael Westmore, Bob Blackman, Rick Sternbach, Mike Okuda, and composers Jay Chattaway and Dennis McCarthy were among the others who toiled on both series, usually with split crews. Others won promotions, as rotating film editor J. P. Farrell did when he became supervising editor and allowed Berman to cut his previous time in the editing room from six sessions a week to just two.

  “It’s made long days even longer,” Berman said of the dual-series load, “but I have managed to step back [from TNG] and limited but not eliminated myself from production and post-production. I’m amazed that I’ve made it through! And I can still be proud that we’ve put on forty-six hours of pretty good television in just eleven months.” And Piller praised the advent of the dual production schedule for helping lift TNG out of the staid formula he feared it might fall into. “Rarely do you find a television show this late in its lifetime that continues to do fresh, challenging material like we do,” he observed. “It’s nice to see that the brotherhood of Deep Space Nine has contributed to The Next Generation.”

  Among the writers in the Hart Building, supervising producer Jeri Taylor won both a promotion to co-executive producer and the praise of both Berman and Piller at year’s end for keeping the ship afloat while their attention was diverted. Thanks to Taylor’s veteran hands-on experience, Berman was able to relinquish TNG’s top casting decisions to her, while Piller began staying out of the infamous writing staff “break sessions” until after a story had been hashed out in detail on the wipe board. “Basically I approve the stories and give notes,” Piller said. “They wrangle and I take the credit!”

  “Michael did absolutely the right thing, which was to throw me into the water and refuse to rescue me,” Taylor recalled with a laugh. “So I felt like I went down a couple of times and was choki
ng on scum water but I finally learned to swim.” Her touch was evident in subtle ways too, such as the “graying of Starfleet” aboard the Enterprise in Season 6 that followed her specific request in extras casting that not everyone aboard be “under thirty.”

  Initially, veteran writer-producer Frank Abatemarco had been hired on at Taylor’s old title for Season 6 as her right-hand man. Abatemarco had scripts for Equal Justice, the latter-day Mission: Impossible, and Cagney and Lacey to his credit—the last a staff job where he first worked with Piller. “Frank is a wonderful writer—I’ve known him for years,” Berman said. “He’s done some of the best cop shows and movies-of-the-week of anyone I know.” However, after thirteen episodes he would go the way of Michael Wagner, Lee Sheldon, and other professionals who just didn’t fit the Star Trek system; Taylor noted, for one thing, that Abatemarco hadn’t been asked to complete the usual “audition script” to gauge his future success writing in the Star Trek vein.

  Joe Menosky, the two-year veteran who had worked up to co-producer with Moore, was offered a producer’s job on Deep Space Nine but elected instead to take a break with an extended sabbatical overseas to “recharge his batteries,” as Piller put it. Despite his absence, two scripts with his partial credit (“The Chase”/246, “Suspicions”/248) as well as a DS9 segment would resurface for infamous rewrites during Season 6 and even drew his hands-on attention during an unannounced trip home to work on a proposed TV pilot with Braga. “Joe just wanted out of Hollywood and loves it in Italy, where he has relatives,” Taylor said. “He is one of a kind and he follows his heart.”

  Executive script consultant Peter Allen Fields did go on to become a co-producer on DS9, where he was joined by Ira Steven Behr, who had been so much a part of the TNG writing staff during Season 3 before leaving to work on a screenplay for a later-shelved Harrison Ford project.

  Moore, whom Piller praised for taking up the slack after Abatemarco left, returned along with newly hired story editors René Echevarria—the busy freelancer whom Piller and then Taylor finally coaxed into moving out west from New York City to take the slot opened up by Fields’ departure—and Braga, who had been on staff since his initial stint as an intern in Season 4. By year’s end the latest junior member of the writing staff was science adviser and “The First Duty” co-writer Naren Shankar, another onetime intern who brought aboard his doctorate in engineering and physics when he was hired at midseason (after his “The Quality of Life”/235) to fill the last open slot.

  Taylor said she gave a wide berth to her young staff, headed in age by Echevarria at thirty during Season 6. “I try to provide a nurturing atmosphere and let them feel safe that they can say anything, that we can fight and that dissension is desired because frequently you can get to a greater truth when you have people in conflict … and nobody’s going to be demeaned or made to feel bad. It gets very alarming at times, it gets very exciting at times, because people feel things passionately and argue things passionately—and I become a referee after a while!”

  Intent on getting away from the “soap opera” plots of the past year, the writers’ new focus on “high-concept science fiction”—or “weird shit,” as Piller put it—lasted through the first third of the season, which flowed from a series of Sunday-afternoon brainstorming sessions at Taylor’s home that were modeled after Season 5’s infamous yet highly productive “Mexican Incursion” writers’ retreat. But then available premises and the crush of deadlines once again became the driving force behind what viewers saw from week to week. “You can say you want to do ‘X’ and you can write shows with more humor and you can give them a certain touch,” Braga said, “but the stories come pretty much at random—more more random than you’d think.” And Berman added: “Everything goes in waves, like cop shows and Westerns. We can get too many Data shows, too many Klingon-Romulan shows, too many ‘strange diseases.’ My goal is just to turn out twenty-six good hours of television.”

  And by season’s end, he and the rest of the staff could point to what they called the “most eclectic season ever” on TNG—and Piller could boast that for the first time a season passed without a single shipboard technological breakdown as a plot device. “What really works best for Star Trek is a mix of things,” Taylor added. “This is a canvas that can contain many different kinds of stories, obviously, so I see no need to limit ourselves.”

  Limitless, yes, but with a vision grounded in continuity and plausible “extensions” of today’s technology that GR had always insisted on—a tenet that long ago helped his creation become the darling of the “real” science community. Nowhere was that more apparent than the Paramount lot itself as Season 6 wound down—first with the walk-on role of onetime space-shuttle astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison in “Second Chances” (250), and then with physics genius Dr. Stephen Hawking, appearing as himself in the teaser of the season finale.

  The new year of TNG would also reflect on-camera changes wrought by the coming of a sister series. By midsummer, after actors Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao agreed to the move and the weekly commitment, plans called for Miles, Keiko, and little Molly O’Brien to transfer aboard the alien space station that would provide the format for Deep Space Nine. Both characters would continue to serve aboard the Enterprise until midseason, though, when a two-hour pilot like TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint” would launch the series. And by grounding the new Commander Sisko’s background in the battle of Wolf 359 with the Borg (“The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2”/175) it allowed appearances in both past and present by Patrick Stewart’s Locutus and Picard, helping christen the new show as a guest star to lend the needed continuity.

  DS9 was originally planned to take a cue from its sister series in another way. Michelle Forbes, whose Ensign Ro character was talked about for a promotion and transfer to the station as its first officer, opted to shoot a motion picture and not commit to the new weekly venture. Instead, Piller said, the door was left open for her to continue her recurring role aboard the Enterprise—though for Season 6 that amounted to only a cameo on “Rascals” (233), which ironically also provided the last pre-DS9 scene for Keiko O’Brien and one of only two appearances for the year by Guinan, thanks to Whoopi Goldberg’s ever-burgeoning schedule. Also, though she turned up on DS9 in “The Forsaken,” Lwaxana Troi was a familiar face completely absent from TNG in Season 6. Comparing the situation to the drought of Q stories the year before, Taylor said three Lwaxana scripts in development all fell through.

  In contrast, young Brian Bonsall’s busy career was not the only reason he would make only two appearances as Alexander this season: once again there was the desire to break away from the so-called personal “soap opera” stories that could be told on any contemporary program. “It was almost the sitcom thing, with the single parent and his trials and tribulations,” Taylor said. “A few of those were a change of pace, but to make Worf a suburban dad did not seem to be serving him well.” Although a line explaining Alexander’s absence as a visit back home to Earth had to be cut for time, he is free to reappear if a story demands it “in a unique and special way”—as in “A Fistful of Datas” (234).

  About the only real downer in the latest triumphant year of TNG was the series’ continued snubbing in the so-called creative side of TV’s Emmy Awards, such as acting, writing, and direction—a category whose mere connotation Berman outright rejected. “Why somebody decides writing a screenplay is ‘creative’ and somebody scoring a soundtrack isn’t is just ego,” he said.

  “I’d like to think the Academy [of Television Arts and Sciences, awarders of the Emmy] is coming around, but we’re a ‘science fiction’ show, a ‘sequel,’ and syndicated,” he noted—all marks against the series in a system dominated by traditional network-oriented voters. “Anybody who watches it almost immediately becomes addicted to it,” Piller added. “Unfortunately there’s just not enough of them.” The eye-opening success of DS9 is gradually helping to change that—“We’ve been on the business page more than the calendar section,” he s
aid—but with the clock ticking down to the big-screen transformation, Berman ironically noted that “TNG may not be around to enjoy the rewards of what it pioneered.”

  Before the season Piller had said no major character “arcs” were planned, but two of the regular cast marked milestones in their own lives as both LeVar Burton and Marina Sirtis got married during the year. The year also saw the death of Original Series and first-season TNG costume designer William Ware “Bill” Theiss, who died December 10 from complications arising from AIDS, and the posthumous awarding of NASA’s distinguished Public Service Medal to Roddenberry at the close of the held-over Trek exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

  TIME’S ARROW, PART II

  * * *

  Production No.: 227 Aired: Week of September 21, 1992

  Stardate: 46001.3 Code: t2

  Directed by Les Landau

  Teleplay by Jeri Taylor

  Story by Joe Menosky

  GUEST CAST

  Samuel Clemens: Jarry Hardin

  Mrs. Carmichael: Pamela Kosh

  Policeman: William Boyett

  Jack (London) the Bellboy: Michael Aron

  Dr. Appollinaire: James Gleason

  Alien Nurse: Mary Stein

  Young Reporter: Alexander Enberg

  Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg

  Male Patient: Bill Cho Lee

  Computer Voice: Majel Barrett

  * * *

  Having traveled back to 1890s San Francisco, Picard and his senior officers go “native” to retrieve Data and stave off his apparent destruction while probing the real reason that the energy-consuming aliens found on Devidia II are coming to the Earth of that time.

  When they find two of the aliens in disguise, sapping the energy from dying cholera victims in one infirmary, Dr. Crusher snatches their time-vortex “cane” after a group fracas, and they find Data.