Trivia watchers will note Koral’s “Toron-class” vessel is the alien shuttle redressed again (“Liaisons”/254), seen alongside the Justman (“Suspicions”/248); the “Judge Advocate General” harks back (“The Measure of a Man”/135), while the Federation-Klingon treaty is quoted for the first time. Finally, the brief TNG clip with Frakes and Spiner that was used for the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards was shot during a break in this episode.
PHANTASMS
* * *
Production No.: 258 Aired: Week of October 25, 1993
Stardate: 47225.7 Code: ph
Directed by Patrick Stewart
Written by Brannon Braga
GUEST CAST
Ensign Tyler: Gina Ravarra
Sigmund Freud: Bernard Kates
Admiral Nakamura: Clyde Kusatsu
Workman No. 1: David L. Crowley
* * *
La Forge is embarrassed by the ongoing failure of a newly installed warp core just as Data becomes troubled by disturbing nightmare images from his dreaming program.
From memories of eating a living cake in the shape of Deanna Troi to workmen apparently disrupting a plasma conduit, Data seeks out a Sigmund Freud holodeck program and even Troi herself for answers. Though wondering if he’s developing human neuroses, Troi, like La Forge, dismisses Data’s dreams as just a new level of humanity—until he drifts off during a work session, begins seeing eating and mouth images on crewmen and finally stabs Troi in the shoulder when he sees a mouth image there—even with his dream program turned off.
With Data confined to quarters and the new warp core still a problem, in sickbay Dr. Crusher finds an interphasic, leechlike creature on Troi at the point of her stab wound. She learns the creatures, largely invisible, are all over the crew and are fatally extracting cellular peptides.
Sensing that Data’s dreams are a clue to their removal, Picard and La Forge enter a holodeck sequence connected to his dream program and encounter the images Data has been seeing. Upon awakening, the android successfully uses a high-frequency interphasic pulse to drive out the creatures, whose effects—including the warp-core failure—had been depicted in his dreams.
In his weirdly offbeat trademark style, staff writer Braga delved successfully into the nightmarish side of Data’s dreams—a goal ever since he introduced the idea of dreams earlier (“Birthright, Part 1”/242)—but around the set the episode went down in Trek lore as simply “the cake show.” Perhaps the most infamous production headache since the first season’s Armus creature (“Skin of Evil”/122), “the cake” reveals that even TNG’s well-oiled production machine has its breakdowns.
“The episode was fun and easy and it turned out great,” recalled the writer, who enjoyed taking jabs at Freud’s theories, “but the cake was the big thing: the production team, for some reason, God bless ’em, it threw ’em for a loop.” Never mind the old “saw a lady in half” magician’s trick table, or the same gag used in one of his own low-budget student films or the Tom Petty Wonderland-themed rock video; from the first production meeting Braga had wanted a full-length, anatomically correct cake with more gore, but that was pulled back by Berman and simplified to what staff members thought they’d finally agreed on: a torso sheet cake on a cutaway table.
Prop man Alan Sims, who at first suggested building the cake right over Sirtis’ body to employ her own limbs, told of a morning rush-hour call to his Santa Clarita baker after director Stewart, helming his fourth TNG outing, realized two hours before shooting that a “life-sized torso” wasn’t that large after all; store-bought sponge cakes added on and color-matched frostings were the jury-rigged answer. “The producer’s there now, the production manager’s there now, everyone’s upset, Patrick’s upset,” he recalled. “You can’t see it before [shooting day], so that’s why I ask these questions in the production meetings—‘You want arms or you want it like a Venetian statue?’” “Dreams are not practical … because no matter what you do someone’s gonna say ‘Oh, that’s not what I thought it was going to look like,’” agreed designer Richard James. “You virtually have to throw the head back because otherwise the head’s going to be looking right into the cake … but they didn’t want her ‘thrown back.’”
“I think there was a little bit of panic that day” was producer Peter Lauritson’s understatement, while set decorator Jim Mees was more blunt: “I thought everyone was going to kill each other! It was one of those things that if you could have you’d have pretended you were dying in a hospital rather than come to work!” And Dan Curry, who tried the “box” out himself, recalled that “if you put a prisoner of war in there you’d be put on trial for war crimes…. Marina (Sirtis) was a trooper about it.”
In Data’s dream, Deanna appears as a cake.
Despite it all, Braga said he was more “stunned” that Data’s stabbing scene of Troi was left in. “It’s really a very shocking moment, very disturbing—I fully expected children in the audience to scream about Data hiding in the closet to their parents!” Lines cut for time featured Data’s study of 138 dream theories, including Dr. Syrus of Tilona IV (“Frame of Mind”/247) and a banquet featuring Ktarian spice cake (see “The Game”/206) and a keynote speech on Bajoran aqueduct management (as in “Birthright, Part I”/242). Braga’d named Ensign Tyler after his girlfriend’s niece, and pointed out that Data did not yet know he had a “mother” (“Inheritance”/262).
Kutsatsu reprises Nakamura, one of Starfleet’s fifty-plus admirals, all the way from Season 2 (“The Measure of a Man”/135), while longtime con extra Joyce Robinson gets dubbed “Ensign Gates” here, an homage to actress McFadden. Also for the trivia buffs, Alexander is finally mentioned this season and said to like Riker’s jazz (“11001001”/116, “Second Chances”/250), and the “new” hatch cover was meant to be an all-new reactor core, cut for budget; the metaphasic scanner prop (“The Next Phase”/224) is an anyonic scanner here.
Finally, in Data’s room we see another casually stored phaser (“Aquiel”/239), Jenna’s gift (“In Theory”/199), and his getups for Dixon Hill (see “11001001”/116) and Sherlock Holmes (“Elementary, Dear Data”/129, “Ship in a Bottle”/238); despite his bedtime ritual we know he needs no rest (“The Best of Both Worlds”/174) although he has tried it (“Tin Man”/168). Ongoing here are the jokes about Spot’s pet-sitters (“Timescape”/251, “Genesis”/271), and his picky appetite, now up to feline supplement 125 from 74 (“Data’s Day”/ 185, “Force of Nature”/251). And in the season’s biggest blooper, the cat’s clear status as a male here would soon change (“Force of Nature”/261, “Genesis”/258).
The surreal imagery translated into a full plate for the post-production teams, the most complex being the quick holodeck dissolve from Ten-Forward to Freud’s office while Picard is talking on Data’s “chest phone.” Aside from director of photography Jonathan West and second-unit DP Tom DeNove matching lighting on the various sets to blue-screen shootings and to the half-second transformational cross-fade, the scene already required that prop man Alan Sims’ telephone within a cast Data “chest” be matted in on the imaged Data, who himself would dissolve with the backgrounds and the phone receiver that Picard holds.
Modelmaker Tony Doublin created two different creature puppets for the episode, including cable-actuated foam models for the “mouths” initially five times larger than the finished shot and then scaled down, with the background blended digitally so even Geordi’s skin muscles appeared to move. His interphasic creatures were originally much more complex, sporting visible tentacles and shot on two plates for a transparent “jellyfish” effect with internal organs visible on the fourteen-inch model. After the shots had all been filmed and composited, FX supervisor David Stipes recalled with a groan, the word came down to make them more mollusk-like with embedded tentacles and not so much movement apparent in “this” dimension—so the extras were all painstakingly “painted” out. “You can still see their guts moving but it’s about a tenth of what we did,” Stipes said.
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br /> Finally, the dream aura allows a reality warp on the sets: As Picard and La Forge round a corner to enter Ten-Forward, the wall of “fake” cabin doors can be seen backing up to the wall behind the bar.
DARK PAGE
* * *
Production No.: 259 Aired-Week of November 1, 1993
Stardate: 47254.1 Code: dk
Directed by Les Landau
Written by Hilary J. Bader
GUEST CAST
Ambassador Lwaxana Troi: Majel Barrett
Maques: Norman Large
Hedril: Kristen Dunst
Lieutenant Ian Andrew Troi: Amick Byram
Kestra Troi: Andreana Weiner
* * *
While escorting and tutoring the Cairn, a telepathic species who until recently had no concept of spoken language, the normally boisterous Lwaxana Troi seems tired when the group visits the Enterprise. Despite Lwaxana’s playing matchmaker for her with Maques, a Cairn, Deanna is troubled by her mother’s unusual moodiness and prods her to get a checkup.
Lwaxana is seen to be low on psilosynine, a Betazed neurotransmitter used in telepathy, but defies Crusher’s order to avoid mental contact and collapses. Maques helps them learn that something has triggered a past event that Lwaxana had blocked into her metaconscious mind—the Betazoid protection from psychic trauma—and caused the comatose shutdown.
After assuring the crew that his presence is not the cause, Maques offers to act as a telepathic “bridge” so Troi can explore her mother’s mind and unblock the damage. There she encounters images trying to drive her away: Picard, a wolf, and even her late father—as well as Hedril, a Cairn girl.
Still baffled, Troi reads her mother’s diaries and finds seven years have been deleted by her mother. Using Maques as a telepathic bridge again, she uncovers her mother’s self-guilt over the drowning of a previously unknown older sister, Kestra. After helping her mother say goodbye to her daughter and the guilt, Troi gives her grateful mother an old photo of the whole family that Mr. Homn, their valet, had saved for just such an occasion.
Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett) with Deanna Troi as a baby.
The season’s next “family reunion” not only featured Lwaxana Troi in another less “Mame”-like turn but finally gave a glimpse of Deanna’s father, previously only hinted at (“Encounter at Fair-point”/101-102, “The Child”/127, “The Host”/197) but seen here to be a Starfleet lieutenant played by Byram Amick—who previously appeared as Paul Hickman, one of La Forge’s former crewmates (“Identity Crisis”/192).
Bader kept retrying her basic pitch of a telepathic mental/ emotional rescue through various guises-Crusher and another female doctor, then a Geordi story, then Crusher and Troi, then Troi and someone else, and then Lwaxana rescuing Deanna—before it took its present form. Taylor was glad to continue fleshing out the story behind the boisterous Lwaxana and to deliver the unique science-fiction “rescue”; the hard part for her and Bader, noted uncredited polish writer René Echevarria, was coming up with a dark enough secret that after seven years wouldn’t portray Lwaxana “unsympathetically.”
Echevarria’s regrets were being told to tone down Maques’ sometimes comical attempts at language into halting and simple pauses, and doing without location lakeside scenes in favor of the less-expensive arboretum set—which was larger than usual (“Data’s Day”/185, “Imaginary Friend”/222) with its own pond this time. Bader had included the part of valet Mr. Homn but had to make him an unseen long-distance contact when Carel Struyken was not available; the staff was unaware that Deanna originally did not recognize Homn in the first Lwaxana story (“Haven”/105).
After “Phantasms,” a move toward more fictional neural “tech” led to the uniquely Betazoid telepathic neurotransmitter psilosynine, the metaconscious, and the paracortex lobe of telepathy. Bader’s one homage that stood was originally the “Lake El’Nar eddy,” named for her late friend Eddie Elnar.
Actor Large had already played Romulan proconsul Neral (“Unification I-II”/208-7) and a Kobheerian captain on DS9’s first-season “Duet.” Young Kristen Dunst was also seen in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, while Teddy and backup Buck of Working Wildlife, the rented wolves who chased her and Troi, had played Two Socks in Dances with Wolves and were later in The Jungle Book. As usual the past two seasons, all the animals were arranged by Rob Block’s Critters of the Cinema, who’d provided Data’s most recent Spot as well as Simon, the mixed Pomeranian appearing as Kestra’s dog.
Actually no chase was involved, since actors and most crew weren’t allowed close to the trained but still-wild animals—“Nobody wanted to be there with the wolf except Dan Curry,” Lauritson quipped. Instead, extensive split-screen shots against blue screen were used: for instance, Dunst actually petted not the wolf but the knuckle of a handy C-clamp stand, with the animal matted in later. To inject motion into othewise static lockdown shots, the camera panned with Troi running through a doorway, then locked down to film the wolf running through, apparently only a moment later.
Block revealed the wolf’s growl was achieved safely by the “give-and-go” method: first the leashed wolf gets a lick of a bolted-down meaty bone before it is covered, then the cameras are readied to catch the animal’s reaction when it is revealed again as a trainer moves as if to take it. Staring down the lens at that sight, “the second unit cameraman said he’d never been more scared in his life,” Sims recalled. As with all animal shots, an American Humane Association offical was on hand to help oversee the five pages and fifty-seven guidelines on animal handling in film work.
Without the wolf, Sirtis did complete her own stunt for the “jump into space”: leaping off a huge blue-screened platform onto air mattresses. The shot was matted in with the starfield, corridor walls, and computer-enhanced shadows and interactive light for both on and off the ship—a four-hour compositing job involving seven elements.
On the trivial side, we see Deanna’s office is on Deck 8 and hear again she’s “good with languages” (“11001001” 116); the Federation Council is mentioned, as is Data’s dream program (“Birthright, Part I”/242, “Phantasms”/258). For Troi fans, much backstory is finally revealed here: Though Lwaxana once said Deanna’s accent reminded her of him (“Haven”/105) he doesn’t show it here, where he’s seen to be a lieutenant in the gold-color duty division of the time—either engineering, helm, or weaponry. Taylor’s injection of “Down in the Valley” being Deanna’s favorite at bedtime fits with past facts that her father read Westerns to her (“A Fistful of Datas”/234) and sang to her (“The Host”/197). While her “Mr. Woof” for Worf is obvious (“Half a Life”/196, “Cost of Living”/220), Lwaxana’s nickname of “little one” for Deanna (“Manhunt”/145, “Ménage à Troi”/172, et al.) takes on new meaning; lan’s name was revealed earlier via his namesake, Deanna’s “son” (“The Child”/127). The Trois’ marriage on SD 30620 is an odd stardate compared to other timeframes dated, but the event works out to about 2328 reckoned with the clues given here. Deanna’s “genetic bonding” mating ot Wyatt Miller (“Haven”/105) likely occurred before lan’s death, when she was seven, circa 2343—and perhaps was what pushed Lwaxana to delete her seven years of log entries. In lines cut from the last scene, Lwaxana says Kestra was never jealous of her sister and she swore Ian never to mention her, while Deanna reveals she’d just received the photo from Homn after an update on her mother’s condition.
ATTACHED
* * *
Production No.: 260 Aired-Week of November 8, 1993
Stardate 47304.2 Code: at
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Written by Nicholas Sagan
GUEST CAST
Ambassador Mauric: Robin Gammell
Security Minister Lorin: Lenore Kasdorf
Kes aide: J. C. Stevens
* * *
In beaming down to meet with the Kes, a society whose bid to join the Federation is the first by a nonunified world, Picard and Dr. Crusher are intercepted and taken hostage by t
he Prytt—the Kes’s isolated and xenophobic neighbors on Kes-prytt—to discourage their suspected Kes-UFP union against them.
As Riker and Worf discuss their options with Mauric, the Kes begin to show a few paranoid signs of their own. Picard and Crusher escape with the help of a Kes agent but find they have been rigged with devices that open up uncontrollable telepathy between the two.
During their escape and flight toward the Kes-Prytt border, Picard and Crusher discover they become sick if they try to separate and regain some privacy. That closeness leads them to find that not only are they strongly attracted to each other, but that Picard was once in love with her yet repressed it because of Jack and his death.
Prytt guards cause a detour that delays their beam-up, leading Mauric to turn the tables and accuse Riker of a UFP-Prytt conspiracy. Riker beams Loric up against her will for a face-off, but the unending roadblock leaves him telling the Kes that their membership bid will be denied and that Prytt will be invaded by Starfleet investigators unless the two are returned.
Back aboard finally, Picard asks Crusher about their newfound feelings but she prefers to just stay friends—at least for now.
The long-hinted-at spark between Picard and Dr. Crusher is finally explored in this story from twenty-three-year-old Nick Sagan, son of well-known physicist Carl Sagan and a summa cum laude graduate of UCLA’s film school. He won Gates McFadden’s praise for “turning her season around.” After an uneventful session with DS9’s staff, the newest of TNG’s favored freelancers recalled that his idea of Picard and Crusher kidnapped by a cult group and physically shackled together as in The 39 Steps was the last premise of twelve he’d pitched a year earlier; the telepathic link was added from an uncredited writer’s premise. “He was one of the most comfortable freelancers we’ve ever had,” Taylor said of Sagan, whose optioned screenplay for Orson Scott Card’s Hugo-and Nebula-winning Ender’s Game novel first impressed her.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 48