Originally, Echevarria had also wanted to include K’Ehleyr (“Emissary”/146, “Reunion”/181) as young Alexander’s climactic rescuer from K’mtar. Actress Suzi Plakson was interested in the reprise but declined on the timing, citing the beginning of hiatus after an exhausting year on her popular sitcom Love and War, a bedside photo had to make do. “The truth is, it was a blessing,” Echevarria noted, “There was enough exposition to explain at the end of the show as it is!”
The wide-ranging story more than holds its own, switching from Klingon pageantry—with the tale of Motor and Kahless once touched upon (“Rightful Heir”/249)—to the chase for the Duras sisters (“Redemption I-II”/200-201) on the eve of their feature debut in Generations. That subplot opened up when Piller wanted a tougher search for the sisters, and actor Shimerman agreed to do a DS9 scene for “a very reasonable price”; with Quark’s addition, the abandoned alien was switched from a Ferengi to a Dopterian, seen as their kin in DS9’s “The Forsaken,” The outing was the first for Brian Bonsall since his movie Blank Check, while Swetow had been Gul Jasad for DS9’s pilot.
Visual FX coordinator Michael “B” Backauskas, getting a supervisor’s credit with Ron B. Moore’s ongoing absence to work on the feature, had fun with the Klingons’ holodeck fight with stunt coordinator, Dennis Madalone as the frozen” assailant, Backauskas recalled how West and the crew were “sweating it” late one day before young Brian Bonsall’s time limit for work as a minor was running out; as it was, his parents acquiesced to go a few minutes over, and each of three angles needed was snared in one take without mishap, For VCR freeze-framers, watch the stilled fighter as K’mtar passes him: thanks to the interruption of the cutaway shot, the fighter had to be moved a few inches to the left for clearance after the planned pan-and-scan cheat (“Attached”/260) was abandoned for time. Also, live explosive “squibs” for the weaponry hits were eschewed in favor of optical add-ons (“Descent”/252, “Gambit, Part I”/256) to realistically tighten up the timing of the “speed-of-light” weapons.
Although the two actors playing the Klingon Kot’baval grunted their lines on stage, both were good enough singers to reloop and synchronize a new melody to their filmed mouthings when it was decided to make the Klingon opera more lyrical and composer Dennis McCarthy was called in. “We did some temporary tracks for the stage but we wound up doing the whole thing in post-production,” said producer Wendy Neuss. “It was one of our biggest jobs all year—figuring out what the on-camera instruments would sound like, breaking down all the syllables, figuring where the offstage line would be.”
Young Eric, given the surname “Burton” in the script, makes his third showing (“Liaisons”/254, “Masks”/269); his “Fullerene” water balloon, noted science adviser André Bormanis, comes from today’s same-named synthesized molecule of carbon atoms that forms a hollow shell, named for geodesic dome designer Buckminster Fuller; the metallicized wax prop was actually thrown from off-camera for Worf’s dunking by propmaster Alan Sims.
Thanks to TV magic, Worf’s quarter-human son continues to mushroom; he’s already age ten, though he was age three at K’Ehleyr’s death only two seasons ago! Here he is said to have never seen the Home World and is said to be the only male-related heir of Kurn (“Sins of the Father”/165, “Redemption”/200-201). Other Klingon references include leader Gowron (“Reunion”/181, “Redemption”/200, “Unification I”/208, “Rightful Heir”/249), the annually marked Rite of Ascension and painstiks (“The Icarus Factor”/140), and the first-ever mention of Klingon currency, darseks. Whether intended or not, the trusted family adviser “Gin’tak” is also the word for a spear (“Birthright, Part II”); the Koh’manara block (“Second Chances”/250), the curse patahk for “animal,” Qapla for “success,” and gik’tal (“Lower Decks”/267) for “to the death”—the latter sung by the Kahless character—are also not new.
Trivia fans will note the mention of biomimetic gel (“Force of Nature”/261), bilitrium (DS9’s “Past Prologue”), the Corvallens (“Face of the Enemy”/240, “Inheritance”/262), the inept Pakleds (“Samaritan Snare”/143), another Yridian (“Birthright, Part I”/242, “Gambit, Part I”/256, and DS9) and his wasplike ship (“The Chase”/246), and the flashy explosive magnesite—which dates back all the way to 1967’s “Friday’s Child,” Echevarria not only created the U.S.S. Kearsage here after the historic Civil War ship but named the Vodrey Nebula after the fan who wrote in to suggest it. Finally, we learn that Riker is the only one at Quark’s to ever win “triple-down Dabo” and was due gold-pressed latinum, the first TNG mention of either, while Lursa’s offspring is not referred to again [Generations] but may yet be lurking out there for future sequels!
BLOODLINES
* * *
Production No.: 274 Aired: Week of May 2, 1994
Stardate: 47829.1 Code: bl
Directed by Les Landau
Written by Nicholas Sagan
GUEST CAST
DaiMon Bok: Lee Arenberg
Jason Vigo: Ken Olandt
Birta: Peter Slutsker
Lieutenant Sandra Rhodes: Amy Pietz
Tol: Michelan Sisti
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
* * *
DaiMon Bok blames Picard for his son’s death in the first UFP-Ferengi meeting, and emerges from prison to taunt the captain again—this time with news that he would kill the son that Picard never knew he had.
After the young man is hunted down, DNA tests prove that Jason Vigo is Picard’s son, the apparent result of a long-ago brief fling with the now-dead sister of a Stargazer officer. Living a hard, troubled life after his mother’s death, Jason approaches his newfound “father” warily and awkwardly. Bok then appears via a new long-distance subspace transporter to tease Picard all the more.
Bok eventually uses the device to kidnap Jason and threaten his life, but not before the young man’s sudden attack of a genetic disease reveals Bok’s ruse. Suffering from a syndrome that neither Picard nor his mother could have passed on to him, Jason is found to have had his DNA resequenced to match Picard’s. Armed with that fact, the captain uses the risky subspace transporter, races to free the boy, and reveals Bok’s profitless insanity to his mercenary crew, who depose him.
After Jason is cured, he and his would-be father acknowledge the bond they developed and agree to visit in the future, both having grown from the experience.
DaiMon Bok threatens the boy who may be Picard’s son.
This story traces its roots directly back to a set visit during “Masks” (269), Brent Spiner and Patrick Stewart were asked about any hanging character threads that could be turned into stories. When Stewart recalled the unsatisfied vengeance of DaiMon Bok (“The Battle”/110), Taylor tossed the brief idea at writer Sagan, asking him (“Attached”/260) to flesh out his pitch about a “created” Picard son.
Sagan’s first take emerged as the aired version after an uncredited polish by René Echevarria but for a time it had been sent in another direction to avoid duplicating Trek novelist Peter David’s script idea in development, about a woman who brings aboard Geordi’s unknown son, Though intriguing, that intense emotional conflict never jelled to Michael Piller’s liking, and Sagan’s original plot was restored, His name of “Cristof” for the boy was changed by Echevarria to “Daniel,” which then became “Jason” at Stewart’s request to avoid using his own son’s name (“The Inner Light”/225), Before the Bok angle is apparent, the tale of the unknown and somewhat hardened son is reminiscent of Kirk and David Marcus in the second and third Trek movies; as personal reference Sagan recalled drawing on his once-icy relationship with his own famous father.
Both writers were sad to lose the sentiment of the original ending, in which Jason and Picard confide mutually that they wish their newfound kinship were real—a moment likely muted to make way for Picard’s “end-of-the-family” moroseness in the coming feature (Generations), While praising the freelancer’s work and the sympathetic explanation Taylor created
for Miranda Vigo’s actions, Echevarria was also delighted that no one flagged Picard’s self-deprecating line about his hairline—including Stewart, who loved it. Sadly, a funny line was cut when Picard realizes Ferengi like Bok can “buy” their way out of prison and Birta shrugs it off: “He paid his debt to society.”
Oddly, the Ferengi actors’ fraternity is well represented here, but with a twist. Arenberg, who has played Prak (“Force of Nature”/261) and Gral (DS9’s “The Nagus”), replaced the original Bok, Frank Corsentino, who later played Lwaxana Troi’s suitor Tog (“Ménage à Troi”). Slutsker had appeared with him as Nibor before playing the tragic Dr. Reyga (“Suspicions”/248). Other Ferengi touches here include the reported debate on the Rules of Aquisition, the first TNG mention of that ubiquitous code created on DS9 and the first indication that they are amendable. Also we learn that the Maxia battlesite was in Ferengi space.
Vigo, of course, was the only Stargazer bridge crewman Picard called by name during the “ghost” sequence of “The Battle,” and a cut line from Sagan’s script actually made Miranda the weapons officer’s sister; he must have been a longtime officer. She and Picard’s involvement “twenty-four years ago” works out to be four years after he stood up Jenice (“Well Always Have Paris”/124), or nine years before the Maxia incident, Miranda’s birth “fifty years ago”—or in 2320, reckoned by the “2364” date of Season 1’s “Neutral Zone” (126)—would have been seven years before Picard’s Academy “Class of ‘27” graduation and made her twenty-six and he about forty-one. Her New Gaul birthplace is apparently not to be confused with New Paris (from 1966’s “The Galileo Seven”) or New France (DS9’s “The Forsaken”), although the prior Bok-Picard confrontation was unknowingly changed in a late draft to Xendi Kabu instead of Xendi Sabu.
Sagan, another Trek baseball fan, named security officer “Garvey” after one of his favorites, Steve, while Jason’s rare disease was dually named for Larry Forrester, the original writer of “The Battle,” and Trent Reznor of the alternative rock band Nine-Inch Nails, a favorite. The other guard’s name, Lieutenant Sandra Rhodes, honored an Air Force officer and Trek fan whose family wrote Taylor and asked about the homage. Picard again here speaks wistfully of his and his father’s estrangement (“Family”/178, “Tapestry”/241) and exceeds the warp five limit (“Force of Nature”) for the first time without express approval—though it is a life-or-death matter. His Saurian brandy harks back to The Original Series (and “In Theory”/199), and—according to Echevarria—the Gorlan prayer stick among Picard’s relics was not intended to be related to the Gorla Colony mentioned in 1967’s “Mirror, Mirror,” but it could be.
The show’s few visual effects include David Stipes and Joe Bauer’s “Princess Leia” hologram of Bok and the “battling transporters” effect; the Ferengi probe was fashioned by Dan Curry from an underground sprinkler sleeve.
EMERGENCE
* * *
Production No.: 275 Aired: Week of May 9, 1994
Stardate: 47869.2 Code: eg
Directed by Cliff Bole
Teleplay by Joe Menosky
Story by Brannon Braga
GUEST CAST
Conductor: David Huddleston
Hitman: Vinny Argiro
Engineer: Thomas Kopache
Hayseed: Arlee Reed
* * *
A runaway train appears suddenly in Data’s The Tempest program … the Enterprise suddenly goes into warp for no reason … and Picard is convinced he’s lost control of his ship, especially after sensors show it would have exploded had the warp jump not occurred.
Amazingly, Data and La Forge discover a network of self-erected nodes cross-connecting ship’s functions, much like a lifeform’s neural web. On the holodeck, the crew finds a train program running with a conductor, engineer, and characters from various existing programs—a hayseed, flapper girls, a hit man, a knight—that they realize represent different ship’s functions.
But when the characters all stop Data from shutting down the power grid within the program, he realizes that the ship is fostering its own embryonic intelligence. A molecular-like form is discovered “growing” in Cargo Bay 5, nurtured by the ship’s arrival at a white dwarf star to “feed” it vertion particles via a tractor beam.
The whole process shuts down when the vertions are exhausted, and the crew must step in to help when ship begins a trip that will exhaust their life support. The colorful train “passengers” are finally convinced to try a nearby nebula as an artificial vertion source, but they disappear when the new lifeform departs into space fully matured.
An actual Orient Express parlor car graced this wildly imaginative romp through the unconscious by Joe Menosky and Branon Braga, the series’ lone joint effort by both its offbeat writers, It was “even weirder,” in Jeri Taylor’s words, before staff writer Naren Shankar pulled it back to a more produceable level in an uncredited polish. “Again, I thought Menosky mighta had a couple of mushrooms when he wrote the first script,” laughed director Cliff Bole, preparing his record twenty-fifth and final TNG outing. “We all read it and thought, ‘Jeeesus, you can’t shoot this in thirty-five days!’ I mean, marvelous crazy ideas, but it had to be down-scaled,”
Looking to include one more holodeck story, Braga said the staff discarded a final Dixon Hill adventure in development as “too familiar” in favor of this idea for the “ultimate holodeck show” he’d stewed on but only put into written form at the last minute. With Braga and Ron Moore busy on the finale, Jeri Taylor leaned again on Menosky, still writing from Italy, who took Braga’s idea of the ship achieving sentience and added the concept of the new lifeform’s birth—almost a small-scale version of the Ilia/Decker/V’Ger creation from the first Trek feature.
The cast, which includes script coordinator Lolita Fatjo’s husband, Arlee Daniel—previously seen as an alien terrorist (“Starship Mine”/244)—and the familiar face of character actor David Huddleston, also includes Patrick Stewart’s longtime standin Dennis Tracy as the “man in the gray-flannel suit,” The taxi driver is longtime TNG stunt man Nick Dimitri (“A Fistful of Datas”/234), here driving for the “Sunshine Radio System”—phone Circle 7232—in location shots on Paramount’s own New York Street, largely unaltered for this show.
Richard James’ ambitious Art Deco designs for a scratch-built car were about to be reined in to save money when a shop carpenter mentioned he’d worked on the train car used for Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola, The car, rented and delivered to the studio’s Stage 6 on a flatbed trailer, saved enough to still allow extensive refurbishing of its Edwardian interior to the desired 1920s look. “That train was marvelous,” Bole said, “If we’d built that there would have been another 120 grand that would have been subtracted from everything else,” Stock footage from the classic Murder on the Orient Express in Paramount’s vaults added an odd period mystique to the show, but Bole had to beg Rick Berman to get a close-up of the wheels braking and ignore the point-of-view logic that no one would be in the holodeck to see them, “The sparks coming and all that—I had to have it!” he said, “Sometimes for drama’s sake you gotta break the rules, so I got away with it once.”
Worf and Deanna on the malfunctioning holodeck.
Series visual FX coordinator Phil Barberio, this episode’s fill-in supervisor for Ron B. Moore, opted to take Rick Stembach’s openspaced design for the “helix” directly to computer creation to avoid a miniature’s matting and mounting problems. Amblin Imaging, the Steven Spielberg auxiliary that handles the FX for SeaQuest DSV, brought it to live on a Video Toaster, The MacPherson Nebula was taken from never-used elements Dan Curry shot years ago of lasers bouncing off plastics.
The show features the last Shakespeare theatrics of the series (“Hide and Q”/111, “The Defector”/158, “Devil’s Due”/187)-shot here on a darkened comer of the late season’s much-used village set (see “Journey’s End”/272)—and the only TNG mention of vertions, another artificial kind of matter in t
he vein of verterons and tetryons.
PREEMPTIVE STRIKE
* * *
Production No.: 276 Aired: Week of May 16, 1994
Stardate: 47941.7 Code: ps
Directed by Patrick Stewart
Teleplay by René Echevarria
Story by Naren Shankar
GUEST CAST
Ensign Ro Laren: Michelle Forbes
Macias: John Franklin-Robbins
Fleet Admiral Alynna Nechayev: Natalija Nogulich
Santos: William Thomas, Jr.
Kalita: Shannon Cochran
Gul Evek: Richard Poe
* * *
Fresh from a year away at Advanced Tactical Training, newly promoted Lieutenant Ro Laren finds herself at the center of the growing Maquis crisis when Starfleet asks her to infiltrate the rebel colonists.
Gaining access to the Maquis in the guise of a Cardassian-killing Bajoran fugitive, Ro soon learns that the group suspects the alien empire of smuggling biogenic weapons into the Zone to use against the outsiders there. She gains the local cell’s full confidence by staging a daring raid against the Enterprise for medical supplies—brought off with Picard’s acquiescence, of course—but finds herself more and more sympathetic to the Maquis’s plight.
Picard, the troubled officer’s longtime supporter, is concerned to hear of Ro’s new selfdoubts about loyalty and sends Riker along with her on the next mission: a trap to lure Maquis in for capture. But when her elderly Maquis mentor Macias is killed in a surprise Cardassian raid at their base, Ro’s mind is made up: during the mission she holds Riker hostage long enough to reveal the Starfleet ambush to her comrades.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 54