The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition

by Larry Nemecek

  Before leaving to go with them, she sadly hands over her Bajoran earring to Riker and lets him return, asking him to tell Picard her greatest regret is betraying the trust he put in her.

  The long-awaited return of Ro Laren, with Patrick Stewart in his fifth turn at directing and the second this season, was another late-season tale borne of desperation for Jeri Taylor and the writing staff—but even more so it depended on a near-miracle that actress Michelle Forbes, who’d spumed a DS9 transfer to keep busy in films, would even consider it. After having one premise after another turned down by Michael Piller in search of the best final shows possible, Taylor found herself pursuing the actress anyway just days away from prep—the design week before live filming—after coming up with a bare-bones Maquis idea to follow DS9’s two-parter (see notes, “Journey’s End”/272).

  “Her agent had said last year Please leave us alone!’” recalled Taylor. It came down to her agent and manager, saying, ‘You—Jeri—get on the phone with Michelle and tell her what the story is, and if you can sell it she might do it.’ So that was a phone call I really had a dry mouth about, because it was all on my shoulders. But I guess desperation and the clock ticking inspired me, because I just … spun gold out of straw—à woman torn, and her choices are …’—and I knew I had her.” Now all that had to happen was for René Echevarria, the only staffer with free time, to plunge directly from “Bloodlines” (274) into this teleplay, His first draft saw Ro pull off her trust-earning raid alone against a freighter, but just three days before filming Piller asked for a restructuring of Act III to its present form—both to make her task more credible and to get the regular cast more screen time.

  One scene Echevarria was sad to lose from the first draft was based on the elder Macias being Bajoran and not wearing his people’s traditional earring: after Ro’s successful “raid” he asks her if she’s ready to stop wearing hers because “you’re not Bajoran, you’re Maquis now.” The moment was meant to add even more poignancy to her final request that Riker take her earring to Picard, which already harks back to her memorable run-in with Number One in Ro’s very first time onscreen (“Ensign Ro”/203). Another rewrite change, he said, converted Macias’ death from a greatly disfiguring one caused by the “mutagenic” weapons described previously (“Chain of Command, Part I”/236); when the staff didn’t want Picard and Starfleet to be caught so “flat-footed,” the filmed version mentions only a rumor of “biogenie” arms in the area and Macias’ death is more routine. His name, though mispronounced from the namesake “mah-SEE-us,” was inspired by a Cuban freedom fighter in that nation’s War of Independence from Spain.

  On an undercover mission, Captain Picard gets a report from Ensign Ro.

  Along with yet another hair change, Ro herself—in her first real TNG role in two years (“The Next Phase”/224) after a brief turn last season (“Rascals”/233)—has jumped a whole rank to full lieutenant but is without the original Bajoran nosebridge piece she debuted and that Michael Westmore gradually phased out on DS9 due to the constant re-gluing needed, Her quarters are seen to be Deck 8/Room 4711; references to her father’s death and her court-martial are now new (“Ensign Ro”), For the record, Forbes has told more than one interviewer she’d consider turning up as Ro again on DS9 if the story and role were up to par.

  Nechayev and Evek, those denizens of the Demilitarized Zone, again lend continuity to the Maquis arc (“Journey’s End”/272), while the village extras—as with DS9’s “The Maquis”—include Klingons, Vulcans, and the Dorvan V Native Americans (“Journey’s End”) as subtle setup for the Voyager cast; the resigned lieutenant commander Ro speaks of from Tactical Training is a veiled reference to the new series’ character Chakotay, Ongoing set-swapping between the sister series has DS9 art director Randy Mcllvain’s council room from the two-parter redressed for use here; the village itself, with an added catwalk to provide yet more depth of action, is the fourth revamping of Richard James’ original Barkon IV community (“Thine Own Self”/268).

  One of either series’ largest space battles, storyboarded and supervised by visual FX coordinator Joe Bauer, featured many of the newer ship miniatures; its Star Wars-like conflict of smaller craft attacking the larger Cardassian Galor-class warship was a virtual first for any Star Trek, which tended to keep its rare space skirmishes to the ship-on-ship variety, DS9 illustrator Jim Martin designed both the Maquis fighter first seen on the DS9 two-parter, built by Tony Meininger, and Ro’s fighter/transport debuting here as built by Greg Jein—with a cockpit window matching the regular “alien shuttle” interior set, Two Bajoran ships Meininger built for DS9’s second-season opening trilogy, Kira’s “attack ship” and a troop transport, are also in on the action here. The first-ever nighttime phaser fight also used more complex live interactive lighting from FX man Dick Brownfield’s flashbulb arrays and live squibs fired from a converted paint gun, designed to spark on impact.

  Trivia notes: Bajoran references include the belaklavion instrument Ro’s father played and the foods foraiga and hasperat—which propmaster Alan Sims revealed was simply Armenian flat bread coated with cream cheese, lettuce, dried tomatoes, and black olive bits, then rolled burrito-style and cut in half to reveal the colorful cross-section. Also, “Type VIII” phasers are here said to be large and ship-mounted, in contrast to the long-established hand, pistol, and rifle phasers dubbed types I-III, Old references include the Pakleds (“Samaritan Snare”/143, “Firstbom”/273), the Yridians (“Birthright, Part I”/242, “Suspicions”/248, “Gambit, Part I”/256), and biomimetic gel (“Force of Nature”/261, “Firstborn”/273). Lastly, until someone realized that its title and the finale’s both contained the same word, this episode was known as “The Good Fight.”

  ALL GOOD THINGS …

  * * *

  Production No.: 277 Aired: Week of May 23, 1994

  Stardate: 47988 Code: ag

  Directed by Winrich Kolbe

  Written by Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore

  GUEST CAST

  Q: John de Lancie

  Commander Tomalak: Andreas Katsulas

  Admiral Nakamura: Clyde Kusatsu

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Alyssa Ogawa: Pattl Yasutake

  Lieutenant Tasha Yar: Denise Crosby

  Chief Miles O’Brien: Colm Meaney

  Jessel: Pamela Kosh

  Lieutenant Gaines: Tim Kelleher

  Ensign Nell Chilton: Alison Brooks

  Ensign: Stephen Matthew Garvey

  Computer Voice: Majel Barrett

  * * *

  Picard is disturbed to realize, after several dizzying episodes, that he is slipping back and forth among three distinct time periods: the present; seven years in the past, when he first took command of the Enterprise; and twenty-five years into the future, when his crew has scattered or resigned from Starfleet.

  The captain opts to keep his past crew in the dark, leading them to question their new leader’s sanity, while those in the future think he’s crazy due to Irumodic syndrome, a rare mental degradation of aging. Picard, amidst more unpredictable time travels, realizes that the link with his maddening situation is an odd anomaly in the Neutral Zone—and as Q makes a sudden reappearance. The superbeing admits to being the cause of Picard’s time-shifting but insists that the captain, not he, is responsible for the impending doom of humanity. He even shows Picard how the first amino acids of life never connected under an anomaly-filled sky on primordial Earth.

  The anomaly is the key, but the captain and his various crews can’t figure out why it is larger in the past than in the present—or why it’s absent in the future. Scanning with a tachyon pulse leads nowhere until Picard realizes the rift is a fracture of time and “anti-time” that enlarges into the past, by scanning the same point in 3 eras. The rift is healed after the apparent destruction of all three Enterprises, but Q restores the present time by quietly telling Picard that his insight into the problem-solving was a mere glimpse of what humanity is truly capable of beyond mere space and scie
nce exploration.

  Worf decides to join his old comrades for one last mission.

  With “reality” restored, Picard tells his officers of the future he glimpsed—Riker and Worf estranged when neither married Troi and Dr. Crusher a captain and his ex-wife. In the end he joins in the others’ weekly poker game—to their surprise and delight.

  This highest-rated and most complex TNG effort ever had anything but a smooth ride, as one might expect from its scope, humor, mystery, and surprises-with writers Ron Moore and Brannon Braga still dealing with their year-old Generations screenplay, a crew already exhausted by the long, ambitious season, a blaze of national media scrutiny, and a cast mindful of both the onrushing movie and their pending unemployment for the first time in seven years.

  The studio had asked for a two-hour series-ender by December. When thoughts began turning to a plot, Michael Piller pulled elements from a “time-slipping” story by Braga (with Worf and Alexander) and followed Moore’s suggestion to “bookend” the series by revisiting the “Encounter at Farpoint” courtroom with Q, while suggesting the three-era crew format with Picard as the conduit—an intentional homage to Slaughterhouse Five, an early personal influence. Jeri Taylor decided the movie duo would get enough of a break to do the finale’s writing chores.

  In a February 7 memo to the co-writers, Piller hit on two themes for the finale: the idea of family” in each time period—as symbol of “the cast, the crew, the fans, the writing staff … all the families of Star Trek: The Next Generation”—and the realization that every moment is precious, affecting all those before or after (a theme he also explored in the DS9 pilot “Emissary”), “You can revisit it, you can remember it, laugh about it, hold reunions, go to conventions, show reruns forever, but you can never live that moment again,” he wrote, leading to Picard’s self-learned Q lesson that “if man is to evolve to the next level he must leam to explore the moment.”

  But Moore and Braga couldn’t start until “Genesis” and “Journey’s End” (271, 272) were put to bed. So, thanks to the due date being moved up a slot ahead of “Preemptive Strike” because of the finale’s scope and complexity, the writers found themselves with only six days to finish a draft. “A two-hour show—they should have had a month to write it!” moaned Taylor, Originally, a fourth timeline was part of the mix: a revisit of “The Best of Both Worlds” (174-175).

  Still, the finished product had a long way to go and became perhaps the mother of all TNG under-the-gun writing jobs. Director Rick Kolbe, here working his sixteenth and final TNG outing, recalled that “I don’t think we ever had a production meeting with a full script. It always was ‘Well we have Part I and an outline for Part II, we have Part Il and an outline for Part I, we have everything but Act 10’ … it was difficult.”

  “Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Braga said of the writing process, “We were running out of time; we couldn’t get the story approved—and this was to be expected, since there was a great deal of scrutiny on everyone’s part and rightfully so. But things were heating up with the movie, we had to rebreak the finale three times, we had to rewrite the whole script twice; Ron’s dog got sick; we had a computer failure and lost an act…. There was a two-week period there where we wrote like three hundred pages! By the time it was over, I got some sort of carpaltunnel syndrome between my thumb and wrist from hitting the space bar,”

  Cast and crew alike fell in love with that first draft, a “Valentine to the characters” as Braga put it, but Piller caused a ruckus with a major restructuring of Part II that tightened up the story while losing several character moments—including Picard’s future crew “stealing” the mothballed Enterprise from a museum! The late rewrite led to unhappy actors and a weekend meeting requested by Patrick Stewart, when many of the character moments were restored amid the new framework.

  Q tells Picard the human race will be destroyed.

  “I knew there were problems, structural problems in Part II,” Kolbe said. “But I think we might have gone a little too far in solving those … and it lost the charm and the freshness of the original.” For his part, Piller agreed that the rewrite brought more technobabble” to Part II and that the restored scenes helped “warm it up a little,” but said his initial concerns about the weak, slow-developing second half still stand. “I won’t argue at all with the fact that we lost some cute things, but it wasn’t good storytelling,” he said, noting especially the ship-stealing sequence. “The problem was, the future Picard needed a ship, and he got one by going to Beverly…. And just because the writers wanted to go and hijack the Enterprise because it would be neat—‘OK, you’ve got the ship, now go get another one, too’—didn’t make it good storytelling.”

  But getting a shootable script was just the beginning, recalled Kolbe—who had hoped for more than five days to prep his long-sought Q show. Aiming to make this finale TNG’s best-ever segment, he came to feel the project was taking a backseat to various unrelated distractions: the actors’ ongoing contract negotiations for the movie, their anxiety about job hunting, and a revision to the already complex production schedule so Gates McFadden could leave long enough to shoot a new series pilot in Oregon—a change that led to an extra seventeenth shooting day only at Kolbe’s insistence. “For a time I felt like I was the only guy doing anything, and it came to blows about halfway through—we had a big argument,” Kolbe said. “And I said, You gotta focus on this show! … and then everybody—producers, cast, crew—just came together; it was amazing!” Adding to the frenzy was a virtual media circus tromping by the set daily to record the series’ final days—promoted by the studio with the curious theme “Journey’s End,” a confusing overlap of titles (272)—and led to a couple of run-ins with camera crews by an exhausted Stewart, who never liked to be filmed while rehearsing anyway.

  “I was at times anxious as to whether I would get through that last period of work, and I’m not being melodramatic,” he said, noting his Christmas break spent onstage in London and his directing the previous episode. “This was followed then immediately by the final two hours, and I was in every single scene of the show…. Towards the end I just got so tired….; I was just trying to do the best job I could. And at the same time there were a lot of people with other needs and demands and I found it all just a bit distracting.”

  Fatigue was a concern for everyone, Kolbe added: “I was about as dead as you can be, which is not something I like to do, especially on a two-hour show…. It was the end of the season, everybody was basically tired and worn out, and tempers were short,” But he gave credit to the stage crew, who not only supported his beyond-the-norm camera shots but gave a lift during the most hectic times—such as the last day of all, when eleven takes were needed to film Q’s entrance on the floating camera crane while a second crane helped film it. Shooting’s end for the whole cast together in their final scene—the poker game—was an emotional affair shot the Thursday before, which Kolbe recalled was slowed down by another brand of visitors-the Paramount brass. “I had the feeling that Sumner Redstone himself was in there,” joked the director, referring to the chief of Viacom who had recently bought out Paramount, Ironically, with the Stage 16 courtroom not yet struck, the last first-unit shooting on April 5, 1994—the primordial Earth sequence—took place on DS9’s Stage 18 cave set in the same soundstage where another famous Paramount swan song was filmed: Gloria Swanson’s Nora Desmond uttering “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr, DeMiIIe” from Sunset Boulevard.

  The script that finally made it to film featured one big break from past Treks: a “future” that could be revealed on the pretense that no one wanted it to happen, “Since the feature’s not anything like this, we had to get out of that by the end of the show,” Moore noted. “Rick [Berman] felt very strongly about that—we have to keep our options open,” But by doing so the door was open for all kinds of fun tweaking the known characters and background in two alternate timelines—“lt was all about just playing with the audience’s expectat
ions,” Moore said-and there was much throwaway that only a true fan could love: the Klingons’ vengeful defeat of the Romulans (“Redemption”/200-201), with the subsequent end to the UFP’s cloaking ban (“The Pegasus”/264); and the addition of a third nacelle to the future Enterprise, heretofore a design taboo, and its ability to go warp thirteen.

  The characters themselves were affected even more, although some setup scenes were among those cut. One at least referred to in the aired version—Worf asking Riker’s permission to date Deanna—was a straight rehash of the Klingon’s earlier bungled try (“Eye of the Beholder”/270); in it Riker gives his consent, then thinks a moment before surprising both Worf and himself by withdrawing it. Another omitted scene saw Alexander tell his father he knew he’d just been with Troi because “you’re always in a good mood after you see her” and in effect give his permission for them to go on; the future Worf was initially a Council member on the Home World. Still another scene, dropped even before the break session as “too contrived,” Moore said, would have had Lwaxana Troi in the future bring the news via “long-range transporter” (“Bloodlines”/274) of Deanna’s recent death—providing a shock to her old friends and a first step in the Worf-Riker thaw. Oddly enough, though the season-long Worf-Troi plot finally veers into “reality” here with their holodeck date, the subject is not dealt with at all in the upcoming Generations.

  Another lost first-draft scene, setting up Geordi’s surprise career as a novelist, saw him in the present confiding that he’d probably always be in Starfleet and disagreeing with Data over great literature, preferring holodeck versions to the original prose—a sly poke at today’s nonliterate videophiles. For Geordi, the eternally disappointed dater, his passing reference to his wife “Leah” is a subtle sign that he and Leah Brahms somehow did get together (“Booby Trap”/154, “Galaxy’s Child”/190)—though Moore revealed that the first thought was to have him wed Aquiel (“Aquiel”/239). “And everybody said, ‘You really want to summon those bad vibes, the way that show turned out?’” he recalled. “And we said, ‘Maaaaybe not!’”