The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition

by Larry Nemecek

  We see another bathtub on the Enterprise (“Genesis”/271), though Dwyer noted Roddenberry’s original dictum about water storage problems leading to the use of sonic showers (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, “Naked Now”/103, “The Game”/206). Also, the Amargosa star was located within the same-named diaspora (“Schisms”/131). Hayes was previously mentioned (“Genesis”/171) as was Forkas III, Worf’s bat’telh tournament site (“Parallels”/163). The never-depicted Breen (“The Loss”/84, “Interface”/155) used disruptors on a par with the Klingons and Romulans (“Hero Worship”/111), here labeled up to Type III. And the Bozeman appeared to have been returned to active duty, judging by a graphic that mentions Captain Bateson (“Cause and Effect”/118).

  Other fun graphics include the journalists from “FNN” (Federation News Network), “SFB” (Starfleet Broadcasting), and “EBC” (Earth Broadcasting Co.); the various photon-tube probes labeled as Mark B, Mark IV, Mark V—and Mark VI, as with Spock’s “casket” tube from Star Trek II and Star Trek III.

  Finally, ILM’s visuals provided some of Star Trek’s most extensive all-computer opticals; no miniature was ever built for the Lakul, for instance, and it and the entire energy ribbon/Enterprise-B sequence were all computer-generated images (CGI). So were the 1701-D’s warp effect, the stellar collapses, and the Veridian III planet itself. (Though the model for the planet was digitally wrapped with a very organic basic element: a square-yard sheet of copper etched with various acids for several days and then retinted after scanning.)

  Dr. Soran threatens Captain Picard on Veridian III.

  Meanwhile, tradition held for the observatory model, built by model shop foreman John Good-son, as well as the revised Excelsior-class 1701-B with add-on pieces per Zimmerman’s design. While the Klingon Bird of Prey was used intact, the crew rebuilt the spindly 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture spacedock, heavily damaged after years of storage, and flattened it to better fit the Excelsior-style shape. They also covered its old orange paint job with a new gray one.

  Because of the ship-sep filming required, the ILM’s original six-foot 1701-D model was hauled out for the first time since the Borg attack (“The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”/175). Stripped down to its frame, it was heavily rewired and noticeably resurfaced to stand up to the level of detail that movie lighting reveals. A special 12-foot saucer was built for the crash sequence on a 40-by-80 foot planet-surface model, enchanced by bluescreened trees and distance matte paintings, with its extreme lip close-ups shot using an 18-inch-wide edge piece.

  After the crash, members of Knoll’s ILM team got on camera as the uniformed crew evacuating on the saucer top. This involved a matte-in shot for bluescreen in their parking lot, with the matted-in “Farragut rescue shuttles” culled from TNG’s model as well as the bubble-domed Star Trek III spacedock vehicle and the executive shuttle from Star Trek VI, the basis of the Jenolen (“Relics”/130).

  “A Few Missions Longer”

  For any feature-film franchise, the box office books tell the tale, and though no plans were immediately spelled out before Generations’ release, the short term all but assured the continuation of the TNG films. The feature capped an incredible year for Gene Roddenberry’s onetime “failure”—but all booms come to an end. Or do they? “People ask, ‘Can you make too many trips to the well?’” Rick Berman said in May 1994. “I think the answer is yes, you can. But I think we’ve been very careful that the most recent trip, Voyager, won’t be that one-too-many-trips. We try to keep all these series different and that’s not only good for the writers, it’s good for the producers. It’s good for everybody to skew a little differently on each of the series. And as long as we can keep them interesting to us and keep them challenging to us, I think they’ll work with the audience.”

  So the familiar stars’ trailers along Avenue P outside Stages 8 and 9 departed for the first time in seven years—an eternity in the entertainment world—though they’d soon be replaced by those of another Star Trek incarnation. In late May, with live filming wrapped and the future vague, the 1701-D’s bridge was smashed apart by wrecking crews, with no fanfare, with no audience. But the “bones” of Ten-Forward and the sickbay/engineering/corridor complex would be retained and refurbished for Voyager, ensuring that “Hollywood’s oldest standing sets”—and a chunk of one of its most enduring and successful stories—will be around a few missions longer.

  STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT

  In February 1995, word arrived from the studio to ready a new Star Trek feature for a 1996 holiday release. “We were standing outside on the Hart Building steps,” Moore recalls. “Rick had just come back from that studio meeting, and Brannon and I were on our way out and Rick stopped us and he said, ‘I really want you guys to think about it—you don’t have to—I want to do a time-travel piece.’ Brannon and I added, ‘We want to do something with the Borg.’ And right on the spot, we said maybe we can do both, the Borg and time travel.”

  Why the Borg? Moore felt that the Borg deserved the scope a feature-film budget would allow. “The Borg were really liked by the fans, and we liked them. They were fearsome. They were unstoppable. Perfect foils for a feature story.”

  Immediately it became clear that the time-travel element could play out as the Borg try to prevent humanity from ever reaching space. But when? Berman suggested the Renaissance: the Borg would prevent the dawning of modern European civilization.

  In a story draft called Star Trek: Renaissance, the Borg are tracked by our crew to a castle basement and their colonizing hive. Moore explains, “And you would have sword fights and phaser fights mixed together, in fifteenth-century Europe.” The Data story would have him signing on as the apprentice to Leonardo da Vinci. Of Renaissance Moore said, “It risked becoming really campy and over-the-top.”

  “The one image that I brought to the table,” recalled Braga, “is the image of the Vulcans coming out of the ship. I wanted to see the birth of Star Trek. We ended up coming back to that moment. That, to me, is what made the time-travel story fresh. We get to see what happened, when humans shook hands with their first aliens.”

  As Star Trek: Resurrection took form it told the story of time travel, provided an encounter with the Borg, and centered around the discovery of warp drive by Dr. Zefram Cochrane. Taking cues from several TNG stories, it was decided to place Cochrane in the mid-twenty-first century, in a non-urban site. Montana fit with continuity, and happens to be Braga’s home state. This first script has the Borg attacking Cochrane’s lab, which leaves the scientist comatose; that forces Picard to assume Cochrane’s place and launch the warp ship Phoenix. A local photographer and X-ray tech named Ruby becomes the key to rebuilding a destroyed warp component. Dr. Crusher battles to save Cochrane, while admiration blossoms into romance between Ruby and Picard. However, it is Riker who leads the defense of the Enterprise against the Borg.

  Riker and Picard know only the Enterprise can stop the Borg.

  To underline the ever-increasing horror of how fast the Borg were assimilating the Enterprise and its crew, the writers added a new insidious step to the process. Borg drones would inject a captured crew member, instantly making them part of the collective. However, early attempts to keep the collective faceless proved frustrating. “It always sounded better in concept than it was in trying to execute it dramatically,” Moore recalled. After struggling to represent the Borg as a true collective, the writers knew they needed a single Borg character—the hive needed a queen—to serve as the focal point for dramatic interaction.

  Taking an objective look, the trio knew their story required work. “The things that worked through both drafts were the Borg action stuff, Cochrane, the Vulcan landing, Data and the queen,” Braga recalled. “It just didn’t make sense to us,” Moore said, “that Picard, the one guy who has a history with the Borg, never meets them. He was on the surface during this whole thing while the Borg are upstairs fighting Riker, et al.” A simple swap of the two heroes was called for; Picard’s story moved to th
e ship, and the planet-based story was trimmed and told with a different tone. “Let’s get simple. Bring Cochrane into the story,” Moore explained. “Let’s make him an interesting fellow, and it could say something about the birth of the Federation. The future that Gene Roddenberry envisioned is born out of this very flawed man, who is not larger than life but an ordinary flawed human being.”

  The idea of Borg set against period costumes was moved to the holodeck in what was dubbed “the cocktail party.” At Rick Berman’s suggestion, it became a Dixon Hill scenario. All these changes coalesced in the second draft, which still carried the title Star Trek: Resurrection. This would be the script that the production team—headed by Marty Hornstein and Peter Lauritson—would use for a budget.

  The first order of business was the creation of a new starship. That job was entrusted to production designer Herman Zimmerman. “The script says, ‘The new Enterprise sleekly comes out of the nebula.’ And that’s about the only thing we had to go from,” illustrator John Eaves explained. For Eaves, a longtime fan, it was a dream assignment. He combined the script’s description with the mandate that this new Enterprise be larger than her predecessor and created a sleek, faster-looking ship with an oval saucer. “The Enterprise-E has only twenty-four decks, so it is smaller mass-wise than the ‘D’ but it’s longer,” he pointed out.

  Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard) sees what the Borg are capable of.

  The new bridge reflected another description from the script: a single captain’s chair, with all stations facing toward it. A slightly larger and much less spartan ready room was also created. Elements were carried over from the series: the Shakespeare volume and the captain’s Mintakan tapestry draped over his ready-room chair (“Who Watches the Watchers?”/152).

  However, the single set that carried over most of its grace notes from the series was the observation lounge. Its windows were the same ones that were used on the television show. Zimmerman returned to a look of the earlier seasons of the show, and placed a display of Enterprise vessels on the inner wall. Now the models were gold, three-dimensional, and encased in glass. Main engineering got a massive, three-story set, with corridors, a lobby, and the biggest warp core to date. Sickbay was a redress of Voyager’s set, saving time and money. Worf’s appearance on the Defiant bridge was filmed on the Deep Space Nine standing set.

  The choice of director was one with “family” connections. Having tossed his hat in the ring with other directors, Jonathan Frakes won the assignment. “Not having directed a major motion picture before, I’m told I got the job about a month later than would have been ideal,” Frakes commented. He named TNG and Voyager veteran Jerry Fleck as his first assistant director, Matt Leonetti as director of photography, and Jack Wheeler as film editor. Among the returning feature vets were set decorator John Dwyer, art director Ron Wilkinson, sound mixer Tom Causey, and live effects master Terry Frazee. Doubling up with their television work were casting directors Junie Lowry-Johnson and Ron Surma, construction coordinator Tom Arp, and script coordinator Lolita Fatjo. ILM would again tackle the bulk of visual effects under producer John Knoll. While some of the opticals went to local FX houses, this was headed by series visual effects coordinator David Takemura.

  Bob Blackman, longtime costume designer for the series, would redesign the Starfleet uniform. To ease Blackman’s workload—he had two television series and now a feature—non-Starfleet design was given to Deborah Everton. “I think I met them on a Thursday and that Monday I was at work!” Everton recalled. The burden for upgrading the Borg would fall jointly to her and veteran makeup designer Michael Westmore. The old pasty-white skin and salvaged costumes were largely unchanged since Season 2 (“Q Who?”/142). “I wanted it to look like they were Borgified from the inside out rather than the outside in,” Everton said. The queen was their most difficult challenge. She had to be unique among Borg, but still retain human qualities. “It was very difficult,” notes Westmore. “We didn’t want somebody to come along and say, ‘Oh, that looks like Alien.’”

  Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell), inventor of warp drive.

  With the April 8 start date rapidly closing in, Berman and Frakes turned at last to casting. For Zefram Cochrane, Frakes chose James Cromwell. “In spite of having been nominated for an Academy Award, he actually came in and read for the part,” Frakes said. “He nailed it. He left Berman and me with our jaws in our laps.” For Lily Sloane, the choice was easy, Frakes recalled: “The first time we got through the script, I think everyone’s first words were ‘Alfre Woodard.’” Oscar nominated for Cross Creek, Woodard also had Emmys for guest-starring on Hill Street Blues and the LA Law pilot. Frakes revealed that the hardest to cast was the Borg queen. A London-trained South African native, Alice Krige, of Chariots of Fire and Dream West, would go on to create one of the Star Trek features’ great villains.

  Finally, the third-draft script added three surprises to the cast. A cameo by Dwight Schultz as Barclay, Robert Picardo as the Enterprise-E’s Emergency Medical Hologram, and Voyager castmate Ethan Phillips in human guise as the maitre d’ of the Dixon Hill holoprogram.

  Weeks earlier, Resurrection had been abandoned as a title when Fox announced it as the name of their fourth Alien film. For a while the feature was called Star Trek: Borg and even Star Trek: Generations II. It was not until May 3 that the script appeared with its final title: Star Trek: First Contact.

  STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT

  * * *

  Stardate: 50893.5 Code: ST:FC

  Opened November 22, 1996

  Directed by Jonathan Frakes

  Story by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore

  Screenplay by Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore

  CAST

  Capt. Jean-Luc Picard: Patrick Stewart

  Cmdr. William “Will” Thomas Riker: Jonathan Frakes

  Lt. Cmdr. Data: Brent Spiner

  Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge: LeVar Burton

  Lt. Cmdr. Worf: Michael Dorn

  Cmdr. Beverly Crusher, M.D.: Gates McFadden

  Cmdr. Deanna Troi: Marina Sirtis

  Lily Sloane: Alfre Woodard

  Dr. Zefram Cochrane: James Cromwell

  Borg Queen: Alice Krige

  Security Officer (Lt. Daniels): Michael Horton

  Lt. Hawk: Neal McDonough

  Lt. (j.g.) Eiger: Mamie McPhail

  Holographic Doctor: Robert Picardo

  Lt. Reginald Barclay: Dwight Schultz

  Defiant Conn Officer: Adam Scott

  Admiral Hayes: Jack Shearer

  Paul Porter: Eric Steinberg

  Borgified Security Officer (Ens. Lynch): Scotty Strozier

  Lt. Alyssa Ogawa, R.N.: Patti Yasutake

  Guards: Victor Bevine, David Cowgill, Scott Haven, Annette Helde

  Eddie the Holo-Bartender: C. J. Bau

  Holo-Ruby: Hillary Hayes

  Holo-Singer: Julie Morgan

  Holo-Henchman: Ronald R. Rondell

  Holo-Nicky the Nose: Don Stark

  Vulcan: Cully Fredricksen

  Townsperson: Tamara Lee Krinsky

  Borg: Don Fischer, J. R. Horsting, Heinrich James, Andrew Palmer, Jon David Weigand, Dan Woren, Robert L. Zachar

  (Holo-Maitre d’: Ethan Phillips)

  * * *

  Jean-Luc Picard finds himself a captive of the ruthless life-form called the Borg. Even as the voice of the collective fills his head, a lone figure whispers to him. Picard realizes that he is dreaming of his nightmarish assimilation by the Borg, six years ago. He goes to the sink in his ready room to splash some water on his face. Looking in the mirror, he is horrified to see Borg implants rupture through his skin. A noise sounds, and Picard—now truly awake—realizes it is the com sounding. Starfleet informs him that the Borg have broken through. The Enterprise is being sent to patrol the Romulan border. His command staff wonders why one of the fastest, most powerful ships in the Fleet is being sent to the Neutral Zone. Picard assures them that it is not the Enterprise-E that Starfleet f
inds fault with; they do not trust her captain.

  In stunned silence, the bridge crew listens to the Starfleet com traffic. The Fleet is losing. Unable to sit idly by, the crew of Enterprise violates orders and comes to aid the Fleet. They are able to save the crew of the Defiant under the command of Lieutenant Commander Worf. Picard assumes command of the attack. He knows where to attack the Borg cube, and orders the entire Fleet to fire on one spot. In the fireball that consumes the cube, a spherical Borg ship is ejected. It is heading for Earth. Picard orders the Enterprise to follow. The Borg ship opens a temporal vortex, and Enterprise follows. As the sphere disappears, the horrified crew scans Earth below. There is no human life on it, it is all Borg. Somehow the Borg have altered the timeline. Enterprise must undo the damage. The starship emerges over Earth and finds the Borg firing at Montana. Data is able to provide the captain with the year and the date. The Borg are trying to stop Zefram Cochrane from making his first warp flight, and they are trying to prevent first contact—two of the key events that led to the formation of Starfleet and the Federation.