The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition

by Larry Nemecek

  The story, which Taylor said “broke like butter” despite Piller’s skepticism over its brief roots, is filled with other gems, as well: a Cardassian on the bridge in one universe, his people conquered by warlike Bajorans; another where Ogawa is a doctor and ship’s medical officer; and still others where Picard is killed by the Borg and—most haunting—a fugitive Enterprise on the run from the all-victorious cyborgs. The last line “Champagne,” originally unscripted, was written by Taylor at director Wiemer’s request for a more definitive ending—after a huddle over just how direct Worf should be. Wiemer noted that even Worf’s initial shuttle scene is not set in his “real” universe, but admitted the thought didn’t occur to him until after he was done with the show! For the record, seven alternates are seen in all.

  In an alternate universe, Worf meets Lieutenant Wesley Crusher.

  Braga also revealed that the throwaway Wes Crusher role was first written for Tasha but felt to be redundant (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”/163); he would soon return in “reality” anyway (“Journey’s End”/272). Worf’s party song was to have been the traditional “Happy Birthday” in Klingonese—until producers learned the broadcast fee quoted by the copyrighted song’s royalty holders. He made his nephew a namesake again (“Liaisons”/254, et al.) for Worf and Troi’s “son,” and he returned to the Argus Array (“Nth Degree”/193), a favorite design, just to have it break down again. The shuttle Curie was originally dubbed the Borges, after the one of Braga’s favorite authors whose parallel-worlds story “The Garden of Forking Paths” greatly predated quantum mechanics as a science; the craft design is also finally given a name, Type 6. Bormanis said the “subspace pulse” of Geordi’s VISOR is not a warp-like field but merely a computational speed accelerator, much like a transistor.

  Also: Worf’s birthday apparently fell on SD 47391.2, after a brief bio screen gave it as December 9 (“Conundrum”/214); his party featured a seventeen-candle cake, with twentieth-century balloons tied to chairs and poppers optically enhanced; Alexander is said to be visiting the Rozhenkos on Earth; the Galor-class Cardassian warship is mispronounced from its original “gayler” (“The Wounded”/186). Troi’s chocolate fetish has a long history (see “The Game”/206, “Liaisons”/254) as does Worf’s bat’telh, as well as a muddled spelling (back to “bat’tehl” of “Reunion”/181).

  The alternate realities have a host of trivia, too: Troi’s wardrobe from the entire series (except for the buttoned-down Season 1, of course) is emptied here; set pieces from the alternate bridge would turn up in the finale (“All Good Things …”/277-278), while Barash’s future comm badges with included rank bars (“Future Imperfect”/182) are worn here with pips. The fourth deep space station ever mentioned, DS5, is seen to be a Regula One design from the second Trek feature; the others besides DS9 are DS3 (“Inheritance”/262) and DS4 (“Suspicions”/248). “Starbase 47” is the redressed cryocapsule/relay station (“The Neutral Zone”/126, “Aquiel”/239), while we finally get a glimpse of Utopia Planetia’s land-based facility, complete with surrounding red Martian terrain.

  Recalling the earlier “cake crisis” (“Phantasms”/263), Braga early on contacted FX supervisor Ron B. Moore about a feasible way to create a “hundred Enterprises” to fill the screen after the fissure’s collapse. Rather than using the “abomination” of stock shots with dozens of light-source angles, he and his coordinator Michael “B.” Backauskas developed a motion control plan to film the model while rotating and lit in the same direction but from above and below and varying distances. The “multiple Worf” shuttle scene, conceived of as a clip sequence, was accomplished with split-screen shots, two with a standin in the back to allow more easy-to-matte crossing movement. Tossed in with a “less ominous” all-new anomaly and an old explosion effect (“Timescape”/251) for the Borg Enterprise, Moore was able to boast that his formidable segment’s FX came out under budget and on time: “I don’t know how many Enterprises are on the screen, but it’s a good deal more than a hundred!”

  THE PEGASUS

  * * *

  Production No.: 264 Aired: Week of January 10, 1994

  Stardate: 47457.1 Code: pe

  Directed by LeVar Burton

  Written by Ronald D. Moore

  GUEST CAST

  Admiral Margaret Blackwell: Nancy Vawter

  Admiral Erik Pressman: Terry O’Quinn

  Commander Sirol: Michael Mack

  * * *

  Painful memories and choices are stirred up for Riker when his first captain, Erik Pressman, joins the Enterprise to lead a mission to retrieve their old ship, the Pegasus, before the Romulans can salvage the secrets it was testing.

  Pressman, now an admiral, upsets Riker when he reveals his plan to salvage the ship and continue with the original test: a phased cloaking device that not only allows ships to pass through solid material but violates the original Treaty of Algeron with the Romulans.

  Riker, ordered not to share the secret with Picard, is haunted when the frustrated former captain reveals that a cover-up muffled the news that Pressman’s crew mutinied just before the ship was lost.

  After a standoff with a Warbird looking for the Pegasus, Pressman orders Picard to take the Enterprise inside a fissure of the huge asteroid, where the Pegasus is eventually located. Aboard the ship, now phased partly into solid rock, Riker puts the loyalty he gave Pressman as an ensign behind him and defies the enraged admiral. But the two are suddenly beamed back with the salvaged phasing cloak as the Romulans seal the Enterprise inside the fissure. Riker reveals Pressman’s secret as an escape option. Picard takes it—revealing the technology to the Romulans and arresting Pressman for the treaty violations, with the promise of an inquiry to expose his Starfleet allies.

  Winning praise as LeVar Burton’s second directorial stint and one of Ron Moore’s finest efforts, the writer said this story began as a bare-bones “Raise the Titanic” idea and struck paydirt when the conflict-torn Riker story was coined. Though it grew from the secret project, Riker’s silence on the subject, and his “straight arrow” character as a young officer, Moore acknowledged a certain resemblance to the themes of honor and duty of his own “The First Duty” (219), where Wes Crusher didn’t have the benefit of fifteen years’ good record to minimize his early-career mistake. In contrast to Pressman, Picard is also portrayed as the type who’d pick his first officer sight unseen from resumes—a fact not explored since the pilot.

  As a sidelight, Moore also jumped at the chance here to nail down the eternal question: Why not a Federation cloaking device? “I thought, let’s sew this up,” Moore explained, “not because it’s the last season but because I’m sick of that question at the conventions! It’s such a screamingly obvious thing to the fans, and I was just tired of it and wanted to put it to rest.” After some thought, the treaty ban seemed to be the “cleanest” explanation, he added—and much better than the “bizarre theories” he’d heard in the past: “‘The cloaking device hurts humans but not Vulcans and Romulans,’ or ‘It wouldn’t work on Federation starships because of their design’ … or that the Federation wasn’t smart enough to figure it out! Somebody also said, ‘We don’t sneak around’—and I thought that was kind of ridiculous too.”

  Ironically, the “phasing cloak” is the same concept that the “devious” Klingons and Romulans were known to be testing at one time or another (“The Next Phase”/224). Moore also wanted a lighthearted teaser to contrast with the coming heavy drama, but revealed that instead of “Captain Picard Day”—written to utilize Jonathan Frakes’ never-aired Stewart impersonation—his first idea was a rehearsal of Shaw’s “Pygmalion” performance shipboard directed by Crusher with Troi, Riker, and Data as Eliza, her father, and Professor Higgins. “After the [story] break, Michael kinda frowned and said, ‘OK, give it a shot,’ but it was just insane—it didn’t fit at all,” he said, hoping in vain that the scene could have been one of many saved and used later on.

  The show debuts the first black Romulan, mak
ing it the latest Trek species to be depicted as multiracial, although not everyone got the message at first: actor Michael Mack—due back as the human Starfleet Ensign Hayes at tactical in the first feature—recalled that he was made up as a traditional Romulan with “lightened” skin for his first shooting! A second take with correct makeup had to be reshot a third time when the producers wanted his intensely menacing portrayal softened.

  There’s history of another kind in Act III, when longtime bridge extra Joyce Robinson—having finally gained a character name (“Phantasms”/258)—got to utter an uncredited reply to Picard. The line was written for Data but actor Brent Spiner—joined by the rest of the cast, when too late to change the setup—pointed out that the helm and not the ops officer should carry out the “course plotted” order.

  Also for trivia hounds: Moore marks the difference here between Starfleet Security (internal) and Intelligence (external), noting that “There was a time when you couldn’t even mention Starfleet Intelligence on the show—and I kept sneaking it into scripts—and finally people sort of stopped caring.” His dating of the Treaty of Algeron puts in at the time of the never-detailed “Tomed Incident,” the last Romulan-UFP encounter before TNG’s first season (“The Neutral Zone”/125). Contest winner Paul Menengay was named for a friend of Brannon Braga’s, although the entries actually came from two area elementary schools and prop man Alan Sims’ own children. Science adviser Andre Bormanis was proud to contribute his first original “technobabble”; a “duonetic field,” coined from Daystrom’s original duotronics (“The Ensigns of Command”/149) as the field equivalent of the fictitious verterons (“Force of Nature”/261 and DS9’s “In the Hands of the Prophets,” “Playing God,” et al.) and tetryons, when factual forms became too awkward to say repeatedly.

  Admiral Pressman, former commander of the Pegasus.

  Other past references include Admiral Shanti (“Redemption II”/201), the Excelsior-class U.S.S. Crazy Horse (“Descent”/252), the JAG office (“Gambit, Part II”/257), extending shields to protect another object (“The Next Phase”/224, “Final Mission”/183, “The Defector”/158, “Deja Q”/161), and the first emergency exception for exceeding warp five (“Force of Nature”/261). We learn that Riker trains for the bat’tleh with sticks and, curiously, says his beard is four years old; perhaps he shaved it after the second season!

  Thanks to a convincing early test shot, the Enterprise-D for the first time was seen illuminated within the darkened asteroid with only its own sources and spotlights—actually, inexpensive focal spots attached to Image G’s motion-control camera—to avoid what was facetiously dubbed “magic cave lighting.” “To me, that’s what really sold the show,” FX supervisor David Stipes said. “I really wanted to get that creepy quality, dangerous and claustrophobic: Picard doesn’t want to be there!” The five-foot carved-foam asteroid model and the many cave wall pieces were again Tony Doublin models, with the molten wall made of backlit paraffin and dissolvable styrene, plexiglass, and aluminum foil. Though Rick Sternbach readied sketches of a new ship based on Enterprise-“C”-era designs (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”/163), budget forced the reuse of the Grissom model of ST III (“The Naked Now”/ 103, “The Drumhead”/195, “Realm of Fear”/228) in unaltered form with the “rock” simply pressed in around it; Richard James’ interior set was tilted at a fifteen-degree angle.

  HOMEWARD

  * * *

  Production No.: 265 Aired: Week of January 17, 1994

  Stardate: 47423.9 Code: hm

  Directed by Alexander Singer

  Teleplay by Naren Shankar

  TV story: Spike Steingasser

  Based upon material by: William N. Stape

  GUEST CAST

  Dobara: Penny Johnson

  Vorin: Brian Markinson

  Kateras: Edward Penn

  Dr. Nikolai Rozhenko: Paul Sorvino

  Tarrana: Susan Christy

  * * *

  Worf and his shipmates are disturbed to find that his foster brother Nikolai, a cultural observer on primitive Boraal II, has sheltered the natives in caves to protect them from the planet’s suddenly dissipating atmosphere—an obvious Prime Directive violation.

  Like Nikolai, Worf assumes Boraalan guise to blend in and assess the social damage. Picard insists on true noninterference under the Prime Directive, which would mean the Boraalans would perish along with their world.

  But Nikolai won’t back down, and he secretly creates a duplicate of the Boraalan caves in the holodeck. He transports them, planning to keep them safe until a new home planet can be found and the natives transported there, thinking only that the “storms” of their world have at last dissipated.

  Picard and Worf are furious but feel forced to go along now, especially since Nikolai reveals he has fathered a Boraalan child and plans to stay with the people. In addition, one Boraalan, Vorin, is overwhelmed when he accidentally wanders out into the Enterprise; when he can’t choose between staying or returning once he knows the truth, he kills himself.

  Boraal’s plasmonic storms harm the holodeck system so much it almost collapses, but before it does a new planet is chosen and reached, and the Boraalans transplanted. The brothers, despite their differences, finally come to value their cooperation and part on warmer terms. But for Picard and the others, the experience has left the pros and cons of the Prime Directive just as unresolved as ever.

  Yet another celebrity fan, actor Paul Sorvino, appears in this story, which not only continued the season’s “family” theme but re-aired the old Prime Directive debate (“Pen Pals”/141, “Who Watches the Watchers?”/152, et al.). Director Singer, working his sixth and last TNG outing, was concerned going in about working with well-known Sorvino and ensuring the Boraalan society was believable, but while those fears proved groundless he soon found his chief worry would be Mother Nature: surrounded by wildfires on location November 2 in the familiar Bronson Caves area of Griffith Park.

  “We were simply told ‘Finish, get out. No time to talk, get out’” he recalled. “The fire people said ‘We can’t protect you—there’s only one way in and one way out and you’re a sitting duck and the fires are out of control.’” He and line producer Merri D. Howard praised the crew for getting shut down and out in about forty minutes—and was thankful the area didn’t burn after all, saving the extra expense of scouting a matching area. “It was exceptional—within two hours we were filming back here,” Howard added. The schedule was reshuffled, only a half-day was lost, and the second time out proved more efficient with familiarity.

  It was tough matching the outdoor camp on location, with the “fake” holodeck scene on stage, and then in the “real” nighttime scene shot onstage—a nightmare made even worse with the rescheduling due to the fire. “We had to go back in there, undress what we’d spent the whole day on before, put it up on the stage, and then undress it and bring it back to the park,” set decorator Jim Mees recalled. “And it’s a hundred degrees, and people are digging holes and building a stairway with seventy steps; my boys have not had a fun year!” Good thing the “Village” included only fifteen actors and extras.

  As for the story, Taylor had nixed as “strained credibility” Steingasser’s premise about fooling primitives with a holodeck home mockup—until Echevarria had successfully married it to Stape’s idea about finally seeing Worf’s once-mentioned foster brother (“Heart of Glory”/120). “I do that with Michael,” Taylor said of a writer’s persistence. “He’ll say no and I’ll say, well, I’m gonna wait and maybe I can try this again—and I’m glad the boys do the same thing, because I am not the be-all and the end-all of knowing what will work.” Still, the unanswered questions about the Prime Directive’s application don’t reflect well on the crew and Starfleet, Shankar noted; Echevarria wondered if the premise could even serve as a model for future such cases but recalled that Piller wanted to keep the status quo and the hard choices it forced: whether better to watch a planet die or incur the later suicide of those who c
ould not handle the “change.”

  Though recalling that he was a bit more “temperamental” than TV actors, Taylor noted the nice serendipity of Sorvino asking to be on the series just as the teddy-bear-sized role of Nikolai came up—making him a believable echo of his “father,” played by Theodore Bikel (“Family”/178). Nikolai’s comment that Worf had “changed a lot in four years” implies they must have met at that time, possibly at Earth during the starship’s post-Borg refit (“Family”); in any case, actor Dorn got to go without his Klingon makeup for the first time, donning only a Boraalan nose.

  Worf infiltrates a doomed village.

  On the trivia side, the Enterprise observes the warp five limit (“Force of Nature”/261); stellar cartography is seen again (“Lessons”/245, “Liaisons”/254, Generations); Dr. Crusher still hasn’t got the hang of Pulaski’s “memory wipe” (“Pen Pals”/141, “Who Watches the Watchers?”/152); and mention of “Holodeck 5” on Deck 10 implies that more than the first four on Deck 11 are now available, as with Holodeck 7 (“The Perfect Mate”/221). On location, a last-minute request for food on a spit for the Boraalans’ camp was solved thanks to the day’s catered set meal; prop man Alan Sims took the leftover chicken fillets, wrapped them on a stick, and charred the whole thing to look like rabbit!