Taylor praised actress Renee Jones but felt she had too much of a burden to live up to, and the chemistry with Geordi never clicked. “Star Trek sometimes does to actors what it does to writers—people who are very effective in one kind of thing feel very exposed,” she said. “So I don’t think this was quite her cup of tea.” Despite TNG’s ongoing tough luck with mysteries (“The Royale”/138, “A Matter of Perspective”/162), Taylor vowed to keep plugging away (see “Suspicions”/248). Even FX supervisor Ronald B. Moore commented he was not completely satisfied with the creature, a computer-generated effect subcontracted out that was delivered as promised but not in time to do any of the touch-ups to add the texture and motion he felt was needed.
To make the relay station, RS-47 was Letter on a redress of the module from the cryo capsule of “The Neutral Zone” (126), and carries it on its shuttle as well. We also learn that Geordi drinks iced coffee, and keeps a Phaser II in his quarters; that stored phasers are all set to Level 1; and there’s been no Klingon raid on the UFP in “Seven years”—a fact Moore created to show that things can still be shaky in the Alliance. Also, Geordi learned Haliian and many other languages during his “Starfleet brat” childhood (“Imaginary Friend”/222), and the Enterprise’s computer voice is also used on the station. Somewhat strangely: Dr. Crusher beams in meters away and on a different level from the rest of the away team during its first visit; Worf touches hot metal only seconds after he’s cut through it with a phaser; Geordi has the same long artwork on his wall as Data has; and actress Jones has a minor blooper when she refers to Starbase “12” instead of 212.
Despite its faults, a sense of humor still reigned in “Aquiel”: Moore said it was all he and Braga could do to not push for their preferred episode title of “Murder, My Pet!” And until the plot change made it moot, a planned closing scene had Data in Geordi’s quarters, commenting with a matter-of-fact “Spot doesn’t do that” as his friend ticked off his various newly discovered problems like chewed boots and soiled carpet. Finally, after Maura trots over to drool on his own boots, the android gets to deliver the punch line: “Geordi, I think I am a cat person!” Maura (played by Friday, a terrier mix) was also Commissioner Robert Scorpio’s dog for four years on General Hospital.
“Aquiel” also marked the beginning of an in-house joke in the manner of original Star Trek’s “Jefferies tubes” (“The Hunted”/159): the “Mees panel,” a script note referring to set decorator Jim Mees’ ongoing complaints about the cost—about $1,000—of detailing the interior of an opened wall console. “Ron Moore and I have had a long-standing running joke,” he explained. “Every show he ever wrote they always ended up going into a panel and fixing something. And I said to him: ‘Ron, do you know we’re not on a real ship here? Do you know that if they pull that metal thing off there isn’t anything there? It costs money to do it, it takes time to design these things!’ So they now call them the Mees panels, because I’ve bitched and moaned so much!”
FACE OF THE ENEMY
* * *
Production No.: 240 Aired: Week of February 8, 1993
Stardate: 46519.1 Code: fe
Directed by Gabrielle Beaumont
Teleplay by Naren Shankar
Story by René Echevarria
GUEST CAST
Subcommander N’Vek: Scott MacDonald
Commander Toreth: Carolyn Seymour
Ensign Stefan DeSeve: Barry Lynch
Khazara Pilot: Robertson Dean
Corvallen Captain: Dennis Cockrum
Ensign McKnight: Pamela Winslow
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
* * *
Kidnapped from a conference, Troi awakens to find herself aboard the Romulan Warbird Khazara, disguised as a Tal Shiar special intelligence officer and smack in the middle of a plot by the Empire’s underground to smuggle out three high-level defectors to the UFP via a neutral Corvallen freighter.
At first, the dazed “Major Rakal” is dependent upon Subcommander N’Vek, her contact, as the usually soft-spoken counselor uses all her wiles in dealing with the ship’s bitter and suspicious Commander Toreth, whose father was a midnight victim of the Tal Shiar.
After N’Vek destroys the Corvallens when Troi senses they are traitors, Toreth is furious when “Rakal” orders the Warbird to cloak and wait, buying time for a backup plan.
Meanwhile, the Enterprise has picked up a rare Romulan defector, whose message from Spock and the underground leads them to the wrecked Corvallen ship and then the cloaked Khazara—aided by a subtle signal from the Warbird’s sympathetic engineer.
The stoic Toreth braces for a battle or a collision until Troi, having bolstered the wavering N’Vek, surreptitiously beams over the defectors. N’Vek is killed when Toreth senses the plan and retakes her bridge, but a relieved Troi is beamed home just in time.
This “fish out of water” plot, which Marina Sirtis herself felt was a series-long landmark for the character, began as a Dr. Crusher story until the staff realized Troi’s empathy would make her better suited to espionage. Michael Piller, among those roundly praising both Sirtis and Seymour for their performances, recalled that a similar Hunt for Red October-style premise had been killed until the staff “cajoled” Rick Berman into giving it a try. (Ron Moore recalled that long-ago Q premise in which the whole crew is deposited on a Romulan Warbird had been discarded for its likeness to Quantum Leap.)
The prize to be delivered to the Federation evolved from a Romulan ship to actual Romulans—Vice-Preconsul M’Ret would have been just under Proconsul Neral of “Unification” (207-208); The Empire’s underground and Spock’s “cowboy diplomacy” phrase also hark back to that story. As Shankar rushed out the easy-flowing first-draft teleplay in six days from Echevarria’s staff-generated story outline, at one point Piller had joked about allowing the Romulan “Popsicle people” to reveal that Spock tried to get out but didn’t make it. “It was one of those craaaazy moments,” Shankar added. “You can’t kill somebody like that offscreen!” The writer also was pleased to break Troi out of the caregiver role for once, make the Romulans sympathetic, with a three-dimensional internal conflict, and create the first Federation defector ever seen. A trimmed scene follows defector DeSeve after the food units refuse his Romulan beverage and he struggles to remember “coffee.”
Winslow had last appeared two years earlier as McKnight (“Clues”/188, “In Theory”/199), while Seymour makes her second appearance as a Romulan (“Contagion”/137) and her third overall on TNG (“First Contact”/189); McDonald would later turn up human in the second spinoff series Voyager’s pilot. Shankar said Seymour might reappear as Toreth; the name change came because it was initially assumed her earlier Romulan, Taris, had been killed. Toreth was created as a male, and Shankar recalled writing dialogue as if Red October’s Sean “Captain Ramos” Connery himself were delivering it—an interesting twist when the unchanged words were kept intact after the female-female conflict was hit upon. He named the Romulan’s KGB-like “Tal Shiar,” indicated by an extra strip on the chest sash’s right side, as an homage to the “tal shaya,” the fatal Vulcan neck-break created by D. C. Fontana for 1967’s “Journey to Babel.”
This story allows TNG’s first real peek aboard a Warbird: the senior officers’ “wardroom” mess is just off the small bridge (a nomenclature change since “Control Central” of 1969’s “The Enterprise Incident”) and the helmsman is dubbed the “pilot,” We learn too that “Imperial Romulan Warbird” is the formal prefix for the ships, which use a forced quantum singularity as a power source and monitor their EM emissions while cloaked. Also, the cloak-detecting tachyon field (“Redemption, Part II”/201) is recalled, while the Corvallens’ old Antares-class freighter is of different design than the Bajorans’ flat angular ship of the same name (“Ensign Ro”/203).
Worf’s ponytail debuted here but it was a long time coming, according to hairstylist Joy Zapata: she and Dorn had both long lobbied for it—“[Worf’s hair] used to remind me of a Klin
gon that had gone to the beauty salon; it looked like Donna Reed!”—but in relenting Rick Berman didn’t want it to look trendy, as if copied from 1992’s Last of the Mohicans or any of the other long-hair look features out that year. “Now we tie it back, he carries himself differently—he’s a whole different person” The two wigs, alternated for daily use, are made of hair sold by Russian children for the money and cost $5,000 each.
Deanna Troi in disguise aboard a Romulan ship.
Amid a light FX show, supervisor David Stipes got director Beaumont to agree to let the illfated Nevek die a more gruesome, writhing death than usual on TNG when vaporized.
TAPESTRY
* * *
Production No.: 241 Aired: Week of February 15, 1993
Stardate: Unknown Code: tp
Directed by Les Landau
Written by Ronald D. Moore
GUEST CAST
Ensign Cortan “Corey” Zweller: Ned Vaughn
Ensign Marta “Marty” Batanides: J. C. Brandy
Nausicaan No. 1: Clint Carmichael
Penny Muroc: Rae Norman
Q: John de Lancie
Maurice Picard: Clive Church
Ensign Lean-Luc Picard: Marcus Nash
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
* * *
After being gravely wounded by terrorists during a diplomatic mission, Picard awakens in a white limbo to find Q, his old nemesis, announcing that the captain’s artificial heart has failed him—and that He, Q, is God.
Though Picard scoffs at that, he cannot deny the regrets he feels about his rambunctious younger years and wishes that he could change them. Instantly, Q whisks him back to the eve of one of his life’s biggest turning points: the fight where, as a fresh-faced ensign just before shipping out, he was stabbed through the heart during a brawl with three large Nausicaans.
Determined to change history, Picard avoids the situation which caused the fight, Q returns him to the present once he escapes injury, where Picard finds himself a junior lieutenant in astrophysics, bluntly told by Riker and Troi that he plays it too safe to have a chance at command.
Pleading with his old foe, Picard begs Q to let him relive the fight so he can die rather than live his new dreary life. History is reset, the fight ensues, and Picard again falls to the Nausicaan—until he comes to back in sickbay, recovering from his wounds and actually grateful to Q for the new insight.
Based on a brief mention way back in Season 2’s “Samaritan Snare” (143), Picard’s Nausicaan encounter was actually just part of “A Q Carol,” a Dickensian premise pitched years ago in which Q tours the “mistakes” of Picard’s life: the stabbing, a family scene, and an event aboard the Stargazer, possibly Jack Crusher’s death. Ron Moore said his longtime yen to do such a Capraesque script led back to that old premise as a starting point, pruned down to only the Nausicaan incident that had always piqued his curiosity—although, as with Picard’s brother (“Family”/178), we do get a taste of his father’s disdain for a Starfleet career. The tale also reinforces the contrast in Trek’s two captains, Moore noted: Picard was the hard-drinking womanizer who became studious, reserved, and cool, while Kirk was a bookworm at the Academy before becoming a hell-raiser later on. He felt the segment overall was better than his own “Relics,” while Michael Piller had mixed feelings about it but took its popularity as a sign of audience interest in metaphysics and examining one’s mortality.
But the premise behind Q’s first tale since the pilot, whose title did not include his “name”—had murky roots. No one could remember the source of the “near-death white light” premise, especially after one pro with a similar old pitch passed on the claim; it was not until after the show aired that a heartbroken and disillusioned letter arrived from James Mooring, who’d actually pitched the exact same idea after submitting a spec script. With the first-season story-credit disputes ironically unknown to this staff, they immediately set out to settle up and make amends. “I talked to him, Ron talked to him,” Jeri Taylor said, “and they paid him. He was very happy. All he wanted was acknowledgment of this, and we apologized profusely; I hope it restored his faith in our integrity, because we would never do anything like that intentionally.”
Unaware of Bob Justman’s formative idea to credit the ban on captains’ dangerous beam-downs to Picard, Moore said the brief mention of just such an instance with Picard taking command was meant to show that his “twenty-two-year mission” on his old ship as laid out in GR’s original Writer’s Guide was not all spent as captain. Also, he added, the stabbing is not the major event Boothby talks of in “The First Duty” (219), and Jellico (“Chain of Command” 236-37) was his later-nixed first choice for Enterprise’s captain in Picard’s altered future.
Station Earhart, Picard’s “laugh at death,” and the Bonestell facility (filmed on an extra, non-Star Trek Stage 10) are taken right from “Samaritan Snare” populated by many of Michael Westmore’s aliens from DS9, such as buck-“toothed” alien and the “tailhead”; a script note warns against the use of Ferengi before their discovery, but within inches of each other here are a remarkably calm Antican and a Selay—supposedly some thirty-five years before they make peace in “Lonely Among Us” (108). The nonspeaking Nausicaans are veteran TNG stunt men Tom Morga and Dick Dimitri, the latter seen sans makeup as the “henchman” with the Bandito (“A Fistful of Datas”/234) and the cabdriver of “Emergence” (275). Finally, Q may not be so omniscient: he says the just-graduated Picard is twenty-one in 2327 although his file says he was born in 2305 (“Conundrum”/214).
The jacket-style uniforms of the 2320s here feature a previously unseen low-profile collar rather than the plush ones of the Trek films and the later bare look (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”/163). In that color style, Corty wears engineering gold, Marta has services blue-gray, and Picard, despite his later washout, has command white. Prop man Alan Sims said many of the odd “coins,” glasses, and tableware were from a Paramount vault of long-stored Ten Commandments props.
Q lets Captain Picard visit his past.
Lines trimmed for time indicated that a third of Academy freshmen cadets don’t make it and referred to Picard’s superintendent as Admiral Silona, perhaps the Betazoid he once mentioned (“The First Duty”), and to “Scobee Hall,” named for the captain of the illfated Challenger space-shuttle crew in 1986; another cut scene showed the low-ranking Picard reporting to a disinterested Geordi in Engineering, where engineer Duffy (“Hollow Pursuits”/169) is mentioned. Dr. Selar is also audibly resurrected (“The Schizoid Man”/131, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”/163, “Remember Me”/179), while “Penny” was named for an older woman Moore himself had once dated; her reference to Rigel as her home may be Rigel IV, as with fellow humanoid Hengist of 1968’s “Wolf in the Fold.” Corey’s posting, the Ajax, may be the one later worked over by Kosinski (“Where No One Has Gone Before”/106) and a part of Picard’s blockade (“Redemption, Part II”/201).
BIRTHRIGHT, PART I
* * *
Production No.: 242 Aired: Week of February 22, 1993
Stardate: 46578.4 Code: bi
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Written by Brannon Braga
GUEST CAST
Lieutenant (j.g.) Julian Bashir, M.D.: Siddig El Fadil
Jaglom Shrek: James Cromwell
Gi’ral: Christine Rose
Ba’el: Jennifer Gatti
L’Kor: Richard Herd
* * *
With the Enterprise docked at Deep Space Nine for a Bajoran aid mission, Worf is disturbed to learn from the moley Yridian Shrek that the Klingon’s father may have survived the Khitomer massacre only to be held ever since in a Romulan prison camp—especially damning since an honorable Klingon would have died rather than be taken prisoner.
At the same time, a device found in the Gamma Quadrant that the station’s Dr. Bashir brings aboard the Enterprise to test accidentally jolts Data, causing the android to shut down and experience a surreal vision of his creator “fath
er,” Dr. Soong.
Convinced by Bashir and La Forge that he was accessing images planted by Soong and in effect was “dreaming,” Data is compelled to paint images he doesn’t clearly recall, and for guidance asks Worf about a childhood vision the Klingon once described. The conversation convinces Worf to put conscience before pride, and he too sets out after his father, forcing Shrek to take him to the camp. Upon landing, he is stunned to be captured by the Klingons there, who have raised a new generation and don’t consider themselves prisoners.
Meanwhile, Data opts for a new daily “dreaming” shutdown period after he takes flight as a bird image, and image of Soong promises he will grow to be more than a machine.
Intrigued with the Bridge Over the River Kwai-like conflict between inmate Worf and prison commander Tokath (played by Alan Scarfe, previously a different Romulan in “Data’s Day”/185), Michael Piller suggested expanding this story to two parts—though Jeri Taylor recalled that the staff initially thought their boss’s quiet and furrowed brow after their break session meant he didn’t like the story at all! Two premises were woven together for the Worf story: One pitched by George Brozak about captured Klingons too proud to go home got Echevarria’s interest but initially duplicated an MIA story in the works for DS9 that was later shelved. The other, from Daryl F. Mallett, Arthur Loy Holcomb, and Barbara Wallace, concerned the news that Worf’s father Mogh might still be alive after Khitomer (“Sins of the Father”/165, et al.).
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 41