Braga had the idea of deevolving the crew as far back as Season 4, but Rick Berman had objected to it until a plausible scientific explanation could be devised, Science adviser André Bormanis noted the reality of introns among many other types of dormant genetic material but said the non-fatal shock of the rapid body changes might be chalked up to it being an “alien” virus; even so, makeup designer Michael Westmore said a “reversal” sequence was readied for Ogawa’s simian but never applied or shot.
Working closely with Westmore for the first time, Braga finished his teleplay two weeks early to give the makeup team more lead time for the enormous amount of research and design needed; the holiday break also came in handy. “Makeup was going to make or break this show,” noted Braga, who forwarded examples of physiological details from his “Incredibly Weird” nature photo books as reference for Westmore, “Fortunately, [director] Gates has worked with Jim Henson and the Muppets, so that was good—she did some interesting things.” The writer was also proud to use Spot—by now a confirmed female (“Phantasms”/258, “Force of Nature”/261)—as a plot point rather than a joke, although a scene with Data giving away the kittens was dropped in the final draft.
Westmore noted that all the actors wore their own makeup except for Worf stunt double Rusty McLennon; sculptors Michael Key, John Blake, and Michael Smithson handled the extra load, with the latter working over the holiday on Worf’s creature and Barclay’s “spider”—a fascinating partial design not seen as much as planned, His initial appearance that shocks Picard was to have been a drop downward but was cut for time; McFadden had wanted it and Schulte, appearing here for the first time this season, had agreed to do the stunt himself. Also cut was Troi’s long and hard-to-film scene with waterproofed makeup in Trek’s first-ever bathtub, showing her impatiently climbing in fully clothed, “I wondered about that bathtub; we’ve always seen a shower, but the writers wanted it,” noted production designer Richard James.
Makeup was not the only department who had fun here, though. Along with Monster and Brandy again playing Spot the cat (“Descent, Part II”/253, et al.), Baja the iguana is voiced with the “reptilian purr” of a monitor lizard. “Our editors were real proud of that one,” laughed post-production producer Wendy Neuss; Troi’s amphibian sounds combined human noise and gill sound, while a monster specialist from her regular looping group did Worf’s growls. “I knew we’d scored the show well,” she added, “when the Barclay spider appears and my boss Peter Lauritson jumped out of his seat at the screening, even though he knew it was coming!” The actors all came in to try a few tracks making own noises, she revealed, but none were usable: “We tried them on the dubbing stage but there was too much extended laughter.”
Among the FX-laden visuals was supervisor Ron B, Moore’s last project before he left to work on the upcoming movie: the shuttle’s approach of the looping, powered-down Enterprise, a long approach view, and a reverse shot outward from the bay, With the starship partly seen upside down, the shot also teases Rick Berman’s visual dictum maintaining “upright” spaceships—and, surprisingly, required the first “new” shuttle flyby ever shot. The bay doors are seen closed and we know that shuttles can override them (“Coming of Age”/119), but both Moore and McFadden were disappointed that time ran out on finishing elements planned and filmed to show an exterior view of the door opening.
Worf’s torpedo demonstration used numerous stock asteroid shots (including “Galaxy’s Child”/190) with a new one of potato-sized foam chunks blown up on high-speed film, noted FX associate Michael “B,” Baukaskas; the flammable explosions—illogical but visually satisfying, as visual FX producer Dan Curry had requested—were revamped gasoline-based elements salvaged by Curry from the TV Buck Rogers FX shop when it shut down, The departing shuttle’s shadow cast over the saucer is dramatic but inaccurate, Caught too late to fix: the stunned, deevolved Riker retains a glow longer than usual.
Worf’s climactic “electrocution”—in a Jefferies tube with a floor of rubber, requiring the hatch unit—was erroneously filmed lighted from above before anyone realized the arcing would make it bottom-lit; the fix was made digitally, Showing cross-team cooperation, the arc animation was based on an element from videotape Joe Bauer shot of a Tesla coil at Los Angeles’ Griffin Observatory; Peter Koczera and Joannie Jacobs at CIS did the animation as a warm-up to their feature work, although DM’s Adam Howard diffused the arcs into the trademark Star Trek look, Finally, the first version of Worf’s of the live venom spray was deemed unsuitable by Rick Berman, so FX associate Eddie Williams solved the minor last-minute crisis with a of couple hours’ work using a tractor-beam element stretched and tinted green-yellow, with added moisture beads.
On the trivial side, Dr, Selar is paged again (“The Schizoid Man”/131, “Remember Me”/179, “Tapestry”/241, “Sub Rosa”/266, “All Good Things …”/277-78); T-cells had played a plot point before (“Identity Crisis”/192); Troi taking her first depicted bridge watch (“Thine Own Self”/268); Lieutenant Hoyes is seen later (Generations): a Level I security alert may succeed the term “full alert” (“The Hunted”/159, “Power Play”/215); and Barclay wants to shut down nineteen decks’ power for just a torpedo guidance check. We learn that an “Alpha 4-7” clearance is required for secure channel usage; Data’s computer is independent of the ship’s; Worf doesn’t go for the standard hard Klingon bed (“Unification I”/208); the “Tarellian death syndrome” is for real (see note at “Liaisons”/254). Among many rooms here the arboretum (“Data’s Day”/185, “Imaginary Friend”/222, “Dark Page”/259) is in Deck 17’s Section 21-Alpha, Riker’s quarters are Deck 08/Room 0912, Troi’s are Ox/0910, Sickbay is 12/1631 with Crusher’s office at 12/1629.
Sporting her new junior lieutenant’s pips, Ogawa apparently opted to keep her last name after marrying Andrew Powell (“Lower Decks”/267), but her quick pregnancy would not end happily (“All Good Things …/277-278); from original Trek comes the Symbalene blood bum—a fast-acting plague, suggested by Naren Shankar—and the K-3 cell count from 1967’s “Immunity Syndrome” and “Operation—Annihilate!” “Dr. Hacopian” was Braga’s chiropractor, Riker date Rebecca White was named for a friend of Rick Berman’s wife, and the unspecified shuttlecraft was to have been named the Hypatia, after the female mathematician who was martyred at the sack of the Library of Alexandria.
JOURNEY’S END
* * *
Production No.: 272 Aired: Week of March 28, 1994
Stardate: 47751.2 Code: je
Directed by Corey Allen
Written by Ronald D. Moore
Based upon material by Shown Piller & Antonio Napoli
GUEST CAST
Cadet 3/C Wesley Crusher: Wil Wheaton
Fleet Admiral Alynna Nechayev: Natalija Nogulich
Anthwarta: Ned Romero
Lakanta: Tom Jackson
Lieutenant Jack Crusher: Jack Wert
Gul Evek: Ricahrd Poe
Wakasa: George Aguilar
Traveler: Erik Menyuk
* * *
The downside of a historic UFP-Cardassian peace treaty becomes obvious when Picard is forced to evacuate Federation colonies outside the newly redrawn border. The case of one colony due for relocation, Dorvan V, is even more poignant because of the enclave of American Indians who settled there after a decades-long search, once they elected to avoid the cultural assimilation of Earth.
As the plainspoken Indians talk but resist—Picard pleads with Admiral Nechayev and the UFP Council in vain for a waiver—The tension mounts when a Cardassian team arrives to survey the planet, unconcerned about the Indians’ refusal to leave.
Amid all this, a moody Wes Crusher arrives on leave from the Academy, unsure of his future but surprised to meet Lakanta, an Indian colonist who says he is destined to offer him help. When young Crusher encounters a vision of his father telling him to seek his own way, the cadet resigns from Starfleet before a stunned Picard, who’d been furious only a moment earlier after Wes w
arned the Indians of a planned surprise mass beam-up.
Lakanta later reveals himself to be the Traveler, the transdimensional being who offers to tutor Wes and thus fulfill his own prophecy of the young man’s unique destiny. Meanwhile, Picard, Gul Evek, and the Indians finally strike a workable yet uneasy deal: the colonists stay put, trading Federation for Cardassian supervision.
With a glimpse of the new Star Trek: Voyager due the coming winter, winding down episode returns to the family” theme to reveal the fate of Wesley Crusher—a story that was not only a year-old story by producer Ron Moore but a personal one as well, echoing his own departure from an expected Navy career when he realized his yen to be a writer. “There were things in my life pointing me in that direction that I wasn’t paying attention to, sort of like Wesley.” said Moore, “I just thought that everything about this character said he did not belong in Starfleet…. It always seemed he was just doing things that were expected of him,”
But the move did not sit well with everyone, “There was a lot of concern that this character, whom Gene created with his middle name, who was Gene Roddenberry—that it was doing him a disservice to have Wesley leave Starfleet,” recalled Jeri Taylor. Finally, when Michael Piller held out for a unique destiny for Wesley, the Traveler reprise was developed as a fulfillment of his own prediction of the youth’s Mozart-like giftedness (“Where No One Has Gone Before”/106, “Remember Me”/179), Even then, Moore dallied with having the Lakanta-to-Traveler transformation include a Boothby phase (“The First Duty”) until Piller decided it would cheat Picard to make his mentor Wesley’s as well.
Originally the cadet’s aimlessness was to lead him into TNG’s debut mention of the Maquis—pronounced “muh-KEE,” for the French World War II resistance cell—in a plot by Taylor that would eventually be picked up for DS9’s “The Maquis” two-parter and echoed on TNG (“Preemptive Strike”/276) as a well-laid setup for Voyager’s pilot background. Eventually the Maquis, and Wesley’s short-lived involvement with them, became the Native American colony after the credited pitch by Napoli and Filler’s son dovetailed with Taylor’s desire to establish here the implied home of Voyager’s complex American Indian character Chakotay. The name “Maquis” itself isn’t coined until the DS9 outing.
The rest of the story, Moore noted, involved finding the fine line of both fault and sympathy for all the depicted parties—including Picard, who had to have hard orders “without turning into Ouster,” and the Indians, who had been told not to settle so close to the border. At first, direct reference was made to the Hopi Indians and Tribes and others—with Picard’s ancestor being Corporal Everett Picard, who had been with Kit Carson in 1875, destroying a Rio Grande village—but even with the series’ use of advisers the tribes involved asked not to be depicted for fear of misrepresentation, so the terms were generalized: kachina dolls becoming mansaras, the ceremonial kiva now a habak, and so on.
Captain Picard has been ordered to remove Indians from their homeland.
For the art department, that meant the added burden of creating a very visual culture from scratch with the original village set of “Thine Own Self” (268) to build upon, “Nothing could have any [real-life] Indian indications, which immediately means that you can’t rent anything.” set decorator Jim Mees recalled, In fact, note that the tribal council’s chairs bear a striking resemblance to those of a Romulan Warbird wardroom repainted (“Face of the Enemy”/240), Bularian canapés, for the record, are actually just odd crackers with Cheez-Whiz and olives, and propmaster Alan Sims recalled that Wesley’s vision was to include an eagle until it was learned the only trainable one for rent, an endangered batalor eagle, was already booked, The show’s major optical was the freeze-frame of time for Wes and Lakanta/Traveler, which again used an anamorphic lens to pan-and-scan motion into an otherwise static shot (“Attached”/260, “Inheritance”/262)—The foreground man shooting a beam the two walk through was shot against blue-screen and matted in, while his target was part of the live shot; the blasted chunk of building was likewise added with computer effects.
Returning here is Wert as Jack Crusher (“Family”/178, “Violations”/212), with the untold details of his demise now left up to future TNG movies. Moore said the ongoing use of Nechayev and Evek (“Preemptive Strike”/276 and DS9’s “The Maquis”) was a reflection of both continuity and the actors’ work and the border setting of those stories; Nechayev’s won a promotion of sorts, going from a vice-admiral to fleet admiral here. Initially he wrote the admiral as resisting Picard’s overtures of detente in this episode, but later agreed with Piller that Picard actually could get through to her; her threat to temporarily remove him is not the first (“Chain of Command, Part I”/236), Picard in a scene cut for time mentions that he almost washed out in his sophomore Academy year, after his father’s death, with Moore implying it was the incident Boothby once alluded to (“The First Duty”), Other cut scenes had Picard waking an oversleeping Wes, who’d turned away in “irritation” from Boothby, and the Indians criticizing artificial weather modification (“True Q”/232, “Force of Nature”/261, “Journey’s End”/272).
For continuity’s sake, Troi’s knowledge of the Pueblo Revolt fits with her interest in Westerns (“A Fistful of Datas”/234), while Evek’s sadness at his lost sons ties in with his people’s high regard for children and family (“Chain of Command, Part II”/237, DS9’s “Tribunal”), Rementioned are the Academy’s Admiral Brand (“The First Duty”), the Federation Council, Dr. Vassbinder (see notes, “Timescape”/251), the latest Cardassisan ship, the Vetar, and Picard’s father (“Tapestry”/241), described as a great oral historian with family roots back to Charlemagne.
“Cochrane” is finally mentioned verbally as the unit of warp field stress for the first time Cardassian communicators are seen, mounted on their wrists. Also, Beverly apparently includes Wes’s repeated year when she calls him a fourth-year cadet since he wears three pips, but Picard notes that he only left “three years ago”; perhaps Starfleet Academy offers a summer school. And the Katowa-led exodus of Indians from Earth occurred about 2170, or just after the Romulan War (from 1966’s “Balance of Terror”) and the Federation founding (“The Outcast”/217).
FIRSTBORN
* * *
Production No.: 273 Aired: Week of April 25, 1994
Stardate: 47779.4 Code: fb
Directed by Jonathan West
Teleplay by René Echevarria
Story by Mark Kalbfeld
GUEST CAST
K’Mtar/Alexander at 50: James Sloyan
Alexander Rozhenko: Brian Bonsall
B’tor: Gwynyth Walsh
Lursa: Barbara March
Yog the Yridian: Joel Swetow
Gorta: Colin Mitchell
Quark: Armin Shimerman
“Kahless” Singer: Michael Danek
“Motor” Singer: John Kenton Shull
Eric Burton: Rickey D’Shon Collins
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
* * *
When Alexander shows little interest in warrior training, Worf takes him to a Klingon outpost’s colorful local celebration of their people’s Kot’baval festival, marking the Kahless-Molor battle.
But the day almost turns tragic when the two are nearly killed by apparent assailants from the rival Duras family, anxious to kill Worf’s only heir. Only the mystery appearance of K’mtar, a trusted family friend sent to avert such a surprise, saves the day.
Initially K’mtar helps the thankful father in piquing Alexander’s interest in the warrior ethic, but Worf is angered and the boy driven away when K’mtar berates his lack of a killer instinct.
The starship meantime helps track the Duras sisters to accuse them of the incident directly, but the assailant’s knife is traced to a child of B’etor’s that she only just learned she was carrying. Going to confront K’mtar, Worf is shocked to see the man poised to kill Alexander in his sleep.
Finally, K’mtar reveals the odd truth that he is Alexande
r from forty years in the future, time-traveling traveling back to change the upbringing that allowed him to become a pacifist diplomat duped into allowing Worf’s eventual assassination on the Klingon Council floor. Worf, realizing he must change his own attitude, helps “K’mtar” realize that he can only die honorably if he allows Alexander to become his own person.
Alexander participates in a mock Klingen battle ritual.
Helmed by “rookie” director Jonathan West, the series’ two-year director of photography, this season’s Klingon show returns to the family theme for Alexander’s only appearance of the year. Kalbfeld’s premise concerned only a Federation-marked Romulan ship from a supposedly peaceful future that turned out to be a Trojan horse whose time-travel and future Riker” were both a hoax.
But the idea of a “future fix” hung on, and once Piller again nixed Joe Menosky’s idea of an Alexander accidentally yet permanently aged thirty years in a time portal—“I think it’s a hideous thing to steal somebody’s youth from them,” he said—the eventual Back to the Future-like plot evolved. It also reverberates with “Yesteryear,” Dorothy Fontana’s highly regarded 1973 animated Star Trek in which Spock restores a damaged timeline by saving himself as a child.
Jeri Taylor had been impressed with actor Sloyan ever since she screened “The Defector” (158) in her crash-course on Star Trek but had to fight for him as her first choice for K’mtar, over Rick Berman and Michael Piller’s initial objection that he had portrayed Odo’s Bajoran mentor on DS9 only weeks before, “I finally went to Michael and said, look—we can take a lesser actor in this part or we can cast the actor who should be cast,’” she recalled, arguing that the Klingon makeup would help “hide” him, It was during this show that Patrick Stewart was able to miss four days of shooting to host the February 5 Saturday Night Live.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 53