The total effect—the marriage of modern construction, research, and twenty-six-year-old footage—held up so well it fooled many viewers and even passed muster with visiting Original Series producer Bob Justman, who was amazed to point out only one small error: the carpet color. “They had that gray carpet but it looked rust,” James recalled with a smile, “and I just assumed it was that because in those days that was such a common color. But he pointed it out and I said, ‘Why didn’t I call you?’ And he laughed and said ‘I don’t know!’”
Even beyond the art staff, much of the creative team went above and beyond in their own way to make the segment special. Curry, for instance, recalled seeing a box in storage labeled “Star Trek Transporter Sparkle” from his days as an intern at Cinema Research Corp., and thus was able to retrieve the actual sixties-era photographic element from the original transporter glitter effect; to match it, co-producer Wendy Neuss hunted down the old transporter whine from studio archives (although technically both effects would have predated the changed look and sound of the movie-era Jenolen). Original Trek’s live FX man Jim Rugg had given Greg Jen bridge buttons from his keepsakes for the consoles. “The people in the production department put in a lot of extra hours and a lot of free work because they really wanted it to look good,” Moore said. “They really wanted to sweat the details because they knew everyone was going to be watching us—it’s the kind of thing you better not screw up or you’re going to be hearing about every little thing!”
Through it all, Moore praised his two top bosses for standing by him to help present one of TNG’s magical moments. “Michael and Rick were both very supportive and said ‘All right, let’s do it!’ Two years ago they may not have, but I think the show has gotten to the point where they’re more comfortable with the Original Series stuff. Here it was always just a question of money.”
Moore reveals that the story had its roots as a uncredited premise bought from Michael Rupert about a crewman saving himself in a transporter loop, which Piller prophetically suggested could be a vehicle for returning a Kirk-era character if the chance ever arose again. “Everything gravitated toward using Scotty,” he said. “McCoy is old [“Encounter at Farpoint”/101], Spock’s playing James Bond on Romulus [“Unification I-II”/207-208]—and we couldn’t do Kirk; it would raise too many other things. Nothing against the other characters, but Scotty seemed like the one with the most ‘fun’ quotient.” Given a movie format, though, Shatner’s Kirk would eventually cross paths with the TNG crew in Star Trek Generations.
So many lines are in-joke references to some of actor Doohan’s best scenes in sixties Trek: the first Moore conceived was based on Scotty’s reference to a beverage as only “It’s green,” from his duel of drinking in “By Any Other Name”; the line about needing thirty minutes to restart a cold warp engine is right from “The Naked Time”; and of course the Dohlman of Elas was the guest character of “Elaan of Troyius”—making, coincidentally, a sampling from each of original Trek’s three seasons.
The writer mentioned two scenes he hated to lose: the “It’s green” Ten-Forward scene with Data originally written for Guinan before her schedule ruled it out, and a filmed but cut-for-time scene just before that showed Troi’s visit with Scotty after his blowup with Geordi. At first taken with “the lass” and her charms, Scotty indignantly declares that he’s “not crazy” and tells her “I know what I need and it’s not here!” before stomping off to the lounge. The three-page scene also revealed that counselors have been assigned to starships for about forty years—and explains why he gives Troi a kiss in what now seems to be her first appearance at story’s end.
In contrast to the rest of the well-oiled episode, Moore sheepishly admits that nothing can explain how Scotty and Geordi were beamed through the Jenolen’s shields in the climactic scene—a nominal violation of long-established Trek technology—unless the shield cycling technique O’Brien once used explains it away (“The Wounded”/230). “It’s just a straight, flat-out mistake!” he admitted. “I didn’t think about it, I didn’t catch it, the producers didn’t catch it, the technical consultants didn’t catch it—it was just one of those things and a single line of dialogue could’ve explained it away.”
Singer, a self-taught veteran of the craft with five features and 262 series episodes to his credit since moving out West from Brooklyn in 1959, knew full well how lucky he was to draw what he called “an instant classic” as his first-ever Star Trek assignment. An associate of both Rick Berman (on MacGuyver) and Jeri Taylor (In the Heat of the Night Jake and the Fat Man), he had counted himself a science-fiction fan since his boyhood in 1938 but had never worked on a Star Trek series until now. So touching was the day’s shoot on the old bridge set, he recalled, that both he and his less sentimental wife—not necessarily a Star Trek fan either—were moved to tears at the “mythic quality” of the moment and what it meant for American pop culture. Though he had not worked extensively with SF series lately, he breezed through the filming with the FX and art staffs helping out and was asked back for two more episodes in turn and three the next year. The Jenolen itself, NCC-2010, was named for some caves Moore visited during a convention trip near Sydney, Australia, which in turn provided its “Sydney class” designation. The craft actually began as the admiral’s shuttle seen briefly in the opening of ST VI: The Undiscovered Country, built for the movie by former ILM modelbuilder John Goodson. Turned upside down with an added bridge module and Starfleet nacelles, the design was at one point a candidate for the new runabout vessel for DS9, said illustrator Rick Sternbach—and the forward and side windows in that craft’s full-size cockpit set were based on it. The movie shuttle’s three front windows were combined into two and the set was built around them. Greg Jein built the huge model of the Dyson sphere and doors, shot from various angles, with the interior supplied via a matte painting by Eric Chauvin. And the fate of the newly built bridge section? It was struck and given to DS9 and onetime TNG designer Herman Zimmerman for use in a planned Star Trek theme park.
Given that the current year is 2369 (dated from “The Neutral Zone”/125), it’s apparent from clues here that Scotty was born in 2222 and disappeared at age seventy-two, after having served on eleven different ships. We also learn here that there is a Fleet museum which numbers a Constitution-class starship among its artifacts, and that isolinear chips debuted about “forty years ago,” while transporters, sensors, and subspace radio have remained largely unchanged since Scotty’s time and impulse engines have been little altered for two centuries—or the era of the first Romulan War. And we find out that synthehol is not all Guinan has available in the bar.
Also: Bartel is called a lieutenant although she wears an ensign’s pip; the small Jenolen displays a graphic of a Galaxy-or other large-class starship’s warp reactor; and the holodeck computer knows without asking that Scotty wants the Constitution-class version of his Enterprise’s bridge, even though the uprated ship of the first three movies was also known simply as NCC-1701—with no suffix letter.
SCHISMS
* * *
Production No.: 231 Aired: Week of October 19, 1992
Stardate: 46154.2 Code: sc
Directed by Robert Wiemer
Teleplay by Brannon Braga
Story by Jean Louise Matthias & Ron Wilkerson
GUEST CAST
Ensign Sariel Rager: Lanei Chapman
Mot: Ken Thorley
Kaminer: Angelina Flordellisi
Lieutenant (j.g.) Shipley: Scott T. Trost
Crewman: Angelo McCabe
Medical Technician: John Nelson
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
* * *
The crew is puzzled when various members report strange symptoms following a false-alarm “explosion” in a cargo bay, thought to result from La Forge’s attempt to rechannel warp energy into the deflectors to more efficiently map an extremely dense cluster.
Riker reports extreme exhaustion, Worf and La Forge experience sharp
pains and anxiety, and even Data has apparently “dozed off” for ninety minutes he can’t account for. No medical reason can be found, although it is soon realized that all were involved with the call to the cargo bay.
After a particle stream from outside this universe is detected, signs point to abduction by aliens when one of two crew members initially found to be missing returns and dies in agony. Then Troi leads the affected crew members in a re-creation of what she finds to be a common description of what they fear: an alien lab of some kind.
Armed with a stimulant and a homing signal, Riker volunteers to track where the missing people are being taken. He awakes in the lab to find insectlike inhabitants there battling to close a “rupture” between universes that the Enterprise crew has tracked and now opened on their own. Riker finally grabs the last missing crewmate and dashes back as the rupture closes, but the aliens’ exact origin is never discovered.
Beverly is puzzled by the strange illness striking the crew.
This latest of Braga’s darkly macabre outings and one of the “high concept” hard-SF stories sought early on, “Schisms” proved disappointing due to a scaled-back ending less costly to shoot than the one he had envisioned; a single insectoid claw around Riker’s bed in the alien lab, with only a few sparse bits of light and the ever-present clicking sounds to break up the darkness. Veteran TNG director Bob Wiemer joined Braga and Michael Piller in their disappointment, saying the alien scenes were too “languid” and should have featured more cuts to aid in the off-balanced feeling. “There was a story consensus to do lighting control, smoke control, to limit what one saw, but it’s always harder to paint with light when you’re on the crush of time.”
None of the three liked the look of the aliens and Piller said they wouldn’t be back, despite the open ending, “I felt they looked like monks—fish monks,” Braga said, “and monks aren’t terrifying,” Still, the tale was a far cry from the last TNG effort of the Matthias-Wilkerson writing team (“Imaginary Friend”/222), and in his rewrite Braga was proud of the “creepiness” and atypical mysteriousness of the first three and a half acts that pushed the show’s limits, his use of the holodeck as an investigative tool, and especially Data’s bad poetry, the bulk of a light teaser in direct contrast to the dark story to follow. He hoped the verse would reappear again beyond (“A Fistful of Datas”/234).
On her fourth appearance, Lanei Chapman’s Ensign Rager (first seen in “Galaxy’s Child”/190) gets a first name, Sariel, while Trost’s character Shipley would appear to have been promoted since he previously appeared as an ensign transporter operator (“Unnatural Selection”/133); Ken Thorley’s Mot is put to good use again (“Ensign Ro”/203) as the series’ latest Bolian (“Conspiracy”/ 125, “Data’s Day”/185, and DS9’s “The Forsaken”), We also learn that Data not only is “marked” by traces from a warp field whenever aboard a starship, but that he can record and file that data for retrieval.
Picard’s Aunt Adelle’s home cures are mentioned again (“Ensign Ro,” “Cause and Effect”/218), as is the “FGC” catalog prefix for space phenomena (“Imaginary Friend”/222); Geordi’s diagnostic device and Riker’s arm beacon are props recycled from “Cause and Effect” (218), and tetryons would figure anew in another story (“Suspicions”/248). Though Cargo Bay 4 is on Deck 4 the indicator light in Main Engineering is seen to be below the battle bridge (Deck 8). Counting each grid as two feet square, the empty holodeck’s opposite walls seen here can actually be figured to be at least sixteen feet high, twenty feet wide, and thirty feet long. And Braga revealed that the Amargosa Diaspora was named for a spot near Death Valley and his mother’s onetime pet finch, while the character Kaminer was named for author Wendy Kaminer.
Riker’s lateral abduction into the dimensional doorway—“Not another vortex!” groaned FX supervisor and “Time’s Arrow, Part 2” veteran Ronald B. Moore—was accomplished by mounting a fast-speed camera atop a tower before blue screen and shooting down as a stunt man jumped off stiff-legged, then tilting the footage laterally for the playback at the slower film speed; it took three takes to get it right.
Co-producer Wendy Neuss, who counts overseeing sound effects mixing among her many duties, recalled that the funniest session of her tenure came as she, sound editor Jim Wolvington, and supervising sound editor Bill Wistrom brought to life the carefully crafted clicking language of the aliens. “We had decided what kind of clicks we wanted with Rick [Berman] and Peter [Lauritson] at the spotting session,” she recalled, “Then the three of us actually sat there one night and wrote a script in English and then transposed it to ‘clicks.’ We wanted it to be organic, not synthesized, and we had a cadence to it; we decided where the clicks should be and what kind of feeling they should have. Then we brought in the group people to do it—so in addition to the individual clickers we had group clicking: you see five people clicking, really intently, like the professionals that they are. And I just had to leave the stage—that’s when you think, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this!’”
TRUE Q
* * *
Production No.: 232 Aired: Week of October 26, 1992
Stardate: 46192.3 Code: tq
Directed by Robert Scheerer
Written by René Echevarria
Based upon material by Matthew Corey
GUEST CAST
Amanda Rogers: Olivia d’Abo
Orn Lote: John P. Connolly
Q: John de Lancie
* * *
A young honor student’s world is turned upside down when she realizes during her Enterprise stint that the powers she has been trying to ignore mean she is actually a member of the Q Continuum of superbeings.
Picard’s old nemesis, Q himself, turns up to take the girl back with him but agrees to let the girl decide her own destiny with either humanity or the Continuum.
The girl, Amanda, is confused and torn between the newfound abilities Q tempts her with and her love for her old friends—even willing Riker into a romantic fantasy until its lack of reality grows disappointing. When Data discovers that her supposedly natural human parents were killed by an odd tornado on Earth, Q admits that the two were actually executed as renegades from the Continuum—and the same fate might befall Amanda.
Informed of this, the furious girl gets Q to back down to his original agreement—but he tells her that if she remains with humans she must pledge to give up her powers. That seems an easy task until Amanda can’t help herself by intervening in a planetary disaster, and sadly realizes the best choice for all is for her to go live among her own kind.
Originally entitled “Q Me?” until well after live filming was finished, the first Q story in one and a half seasons on TNG did not come easy after various premises had been considered and discarded (a “Q Olympics” story and another with him creating doubles of the officers based on their opposite character poles)—but it did finally live up to Piller’s goal of returning the super-alien to a more malevolent tone “so that he’s just not there for the jokes.” Showing how far the series’ writing had matured since Season 1’s “Hide and Q” covered much the same human-turned-god theme, the story mirrors that with the stress of adolescent-turned-adult.
Geordi gives Amanda (Olivia D’Abo) a tour of the ship.
The premise by seventeen-year-old Matt Corey from North Carolina had the guest role as a young man so he could play it, Taylor said. Despite its original plot involving Wesley Crusher, a teenage love affair, and an unwanted pregnancy, Echevarria noted it was “quite good”—and it provided a special thrill when Taylor let him call Corey to tell him of the sale. “It was kind of the mirror of three years ago, when Michael Piller called me one day—after more than a year of sending scripts to Star Trek and having them rejected—and then saying they wanted it.”
Even then, Echevarria said his first show as a staff writer had its share of stress in working for the first time on deadline, and admitted with a laugh that he didn’t even know that the various colors of script rewrite pages we
re coded to keep them in order. But the humor didn’t suffer: for the young woman’s character he had “sneaked” the name of Samantha—Elizabeth Montgomery’s supernatural sitcom nose-twitcher of Bewitched—through several drafts before Rick Berman caught it.
If Amanda’s holodeck fantasy with Riker seems more airy and offbeat than usual, it’s due to the late decision by Piller to punch up the underlying tension by letting the audience hear just before that Q might kill her—a change made after the fantasy scene was filmed. As in “Relics,” the single biggest scene cut for time involved Troi, who early on brought Amanda a vacationing crewman’s dog named Henry to “dog-sit”; a scene with a puppy litter she conjured up was cut for time, although a white blur is visible next to Q on the sofa immediately after.
FX supervisor David Stipes recalled that the big challenge here was filming the warp-core breach, accomplished by having live FX man Dick Brownfield actually squirt the ever-useful liquid nitrogen onto the reactor set over specially appliquéd flashing bulbs. Animation to both widen and heal the breach was added by Digital Magic.
On the trivial side, it is spelled out that Jack Crusher died when Wesley was five and that a “Weather Modification Network” largely protects Earth from severe storms like tornadoes. Starbase 112 had been mentioned earlier (“Identity Crisis”/192), while the shuttlecraft, named for the twentieth-century pioneer atomic physicist, is seen to be Shuttlecraft 16 in the next outing, just before its destruction.
RASCALS
* * *
Production No.: 233 Aired: Week of November 2, 1992
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 38