Cmdr. William “Will” Thomas Riker: Jonathan Frakes
Lt. Cmdr. Data/B-4: 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
Shinzon: Tom Hardy
Viceroy: Ron Periman
Cmdr. Donatra: Dina Meyer
Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg
Adm. Kathryn Janeway: Kate Mulgrew
Helm Officer Branson: Michael Owen
Cmdr. Martin Madden: Steven Culp
Young Ensign: Nicholas Lanier
Reman Officer: Robertson Dean
Sen. Tal’Aura: Shannon Cochran
Cmdr. Suran: Jude Ciccolelle
Commander No. 1: David Ralphe
Commander No. 2: J. Patrick McCormack
Praetor Hiron: Alan Dale
Romulan Senator No. 1: John Berg
* * *
On Romulus, a debate rages in the senate. Romulus and Remus—the two worlds of the Romulan Empire—are forever divided. Now Shinzon, the leader of the Remans, has proposed a plan that could bring the Federation to its knees. It is summarily rejected, either because it is unworkable or more likely because it comes from the lesser Remans. The senate moves on to other business. On an unoccupied desk sits a box, which opens, filling the chamber with a green energy, and then is gone. The senators are curious, and just as suddenly as the light filled the room, every living thing in the room shrivels; within seconds there is nothing left alive.
“Duty,” intones Captain Jean-Luc Picard, his face solemn. The captain is standing before an assembly of guests and the crew of the Enterprise and many civilians. But this is a happy occasion, a gathering to celebrate the wedding of Will Riker and Deanna Troi. As best man, Picard is toasting the couple, while bemoaning his fate that everything around him is changing. Riker has been promoted to captain of the U.S.S. Titan, and Troi is joining him. Dr. Crusher is leaving to head up Starfleet Medical. The new first officer of the Enterprise, Lieutenant Commander Data, sings “Blue Skies,” as his gift to the couple.
The Enterprise is en route to Betazed for the Betazoid wedding ceremony when Worf reports that he is getting positronic signals. They are coming from Kolarus III, a planet very close to the Romulan Neutral Zone. Data points out that only Soong androids, like himself, give off positronic readings. Picard orders the ship diverted to investigate.
Kolarus III is an arid planet with a pre-industrial society. There are sweeping ion storms, and the positronic readings are spread over a large area. Data, Worf, and the captain will go to the surface. The Argo, a specially equipped shuttle with a wheeled vehicle, will aid in the search. On the surface they discover android body parts that look like a Soong android. The final piece they uncover is a head that looks like Data. Their activity has come to the attention of the native population, and the landing party barely manages to escape. Once back on the ship, they confirm that the parts are a Soong android, but one that is not as sophisticated as Data. The head informs the crew that he is B-4. Data, in an attempt to help B-4, downloads all of his memory engrams into B-4’s matrix. But B-4 remains as simple as he was when he was still in pieces. La Forge suggests that Data give his “brother” a chance to process all of the information that he has received.
Admiral Janeway orders Picard on a diplomatic mission to Romulus. The new praetor, a Reman called Shinzon, has requested a Federation envoy, and the Enterprise is the closest ship. En route Data briefs the rest of the command crew. He notes Shinzon’s record in the Dominion War and that his fellow Remans were used as cannon fodder.
The Enterprise has been waiting seventeen hours, their hails unanswered. Picard knows this is a very old strategy to put the crew on edge. Suddenly a huge starship uncloaks. It is larger and better armed than any Romulan warbird. The viceroy hails the ship and informs the crew where to transport. The inside of the warbird, the Scimitar, is stark, dark, and striking in its mass. From the shadows the new praetor addresses the crew. When he is finally drawn out of the shadows, even in the darkened space it is plain that Data’s readings are correct: Shinzon is human. He is strangely drawn to Troi, having never seen a human female before. But the captain interrupts him, asking what he wants. Shinzon is proposing to eliminate the Romulan Neutral Zone as the first step to unity. Shinzon can tell the captain is suspicious, and he orders the light level raised. Picard gasps when he sees the praetor: he knows who Shinzon is. Drawing a knife, Shinzon cuts himself, then hands the knife to Data while extending an invitation to the captain to dine with him.
The crew enjoys Data’s performance.
Dr. Crusher, using the sample Shinzon provided, confirms that he is a clone of Captain Picard. Furious, Picard wants to know who stole a piece of him. Troi assures the captain that he is unique, that no clone can truly be the same as the original. That night in their cabin the newlyweds—Riker and Troi—are in bed together, but suddenly it is not her husband with her but Shinzon. He is inside her mind, and then just as suddenly the monstrous Reman viceroy is there. Using all her strength, Troi is able to mentally push the pair away.
Over dinner on Romulus, Shinzon has explained the Romulan plan for him to replace Picard, explaining that when the project was halted he was only a child. The Romulans then sent him to the dilithium mines on Remus. The cruelty of the Romulan guards stood in stark contrast to a Reman who protected him—his viceroy. Picard tries to reach out to his other self but Shinzon manages to keep his distance. Alone with his viceroy, Shinzon is reminded of their mission.
Back on the Enterprise, the captain receives several disturbing reports. First there was unauthorized access to the computers, and as the Warbird Scimitar decloaked, thalaron was detected. The radiation from thalaron is so deadly that it would take only microseconds to kill living matter. Picard orders the crew to find some way to stop it.
Aboard the Reman ship, the viceroy tells Shinzon he has no more time. Shinzon strides onto his bridge and gives the order for transport. B-4 appears. The praetor orders a download of the information B-4 has accessed from the Enterprise’s computers.
While Troi is explaining to the captain what has happened to her, he is transported off his vessel. He is now a captive of the Remans. Shinzon tells Picard that he only needs a sample of his blood, and B-4 performs that duty. The praetor tells Picard that he found B-4 and used him to lure the Enterprise and get information. He plans to destroy the Federation, so the Remans will rule without sway. He then tells Picard that he will not be alive to see this happen. The Soong android returns to the brig and says he is taking the prisoner to the praetor. He leads Picard out. As they enter an empty corridor, it is clear that it is Data who has freed the captain, and he has fed the Remans false information. They make their way to a shuttlebay and manage, after some effort, to steal a small two-man ship. With the Remans in pursuit, the only way out is through the corridors of the ship. Bursting through the Scimitar’s cloak, the Enterprise manages to transport her two officers aboard before jumping to warp.
The Romulan senate—not used to having to pay any heed to the Remans—are fuming that the praetor has taken no action. Shinzon assures them that the Enterprise’s escape is immaterial. His plan will succeed, and when he returns the senate will show proper respect. The Romulans, who supported this coup, realize that they may have made a mistake. It now could be they who inhabit the mines.
Crusher has discovered why the praetor wanted Picard. The cloning procedure used to create Shinzon was flawed. He is dying. Shinzon’s only chance to survive is to completely drain Picard of all his blood. Picard knows that Shinzon will be coming for him. La Forge reports to Picard that, considering the size of the weapon and the mass of the Scimitar, the target is Earth. However, he still has not found a way to penetrate the cloak. Grimly, the crew prepares for battle. They head into the Bassen Rift en route to join the Fleet. When Data reports they will be “blind” inside the rift,
Picard orders evasive maneuvers, but it is too late. The Reman ship’s first shots take out the warp drive. The Enterprise is savagely and successfully fired upon. In the pitch of battle, Shinzon asks to speak with Picard. In his strangely peaceful ready room, a holographic Shinzon orders Picard to surrender. The captain counters with information about himself, trying to reach the praetor. Again, Shinzon rebuffs him.
Shinzon sets about to destroy the Enterprise. Suddenly, they detect two Romulan ships decloaking. The Romulan commander, Donatra, however, offers their assistance to the Enterprise. The Scimitar engages the ships in a heated space battle. Donatra’s ship is disabled, and the Enterprise is severely damaged. The counselor thinks she may have a way to find the cloaked Scimitar. Troi uses the mental link against the viceroy. Using all of her mental abilities, Troi is able to locate the cloaked Scimitar. Enterprise brings down the cloak, but loses its shields. Headed by the viceroy, a Reman boarding party is ordered to bring Picard to Shinzon. A security team led by Riker and Worf pursues the Remans.
The bridge has only its forcefields holding back the vacuum of space, but Picard is determined to stop the Scimitar. The captain uses every last bit of the Enterprise’s power reserve to ram the Reman ship. The two ships are now locked in a deadly standoff. Commander Riker, in the enclosed confines of a Jefferies tube, finds and kills the viceroy—a small victory, since the Scimitar is starting to pull free. Picard knows there is only one thing left: destroy Enterprise. This last desperate measure fails: the autodestruct is offline. The thalaron weapon has begun deploying. Horrified, Picard learns that they now have only minutes to try to stop it. The captain orders Data to get the ship as far away as possible and then transports to the Scimitar. The commander then orders Troi to take command. At the edge of the wounded ship, La Forge lowers a forcefield and Data launches himself toward the Scimitar.
The viceroy (Ron Perlman) reminds Shinzon (Tom Hardy) of his greater goal.
The command crew remembers Data.
Picard has gained entry to their bridge. Firing his phaser rifle, he manages to kill the Remans on the Scimitar bridge and follow Shinzon. The pair become locked in deadly hand-to-hand combat. Picard turns a piece of the Reman ship into a spear and impales Shinzon. The clone forces himself along the point of the spear and with his last breath tries to strangle Picard. However, Data has found his captain. He forces Shinzon away and slaps an emergency transport unit onto Picard, who dematerializes. Data then fires on the thalaron activation matrix, and the room explodes. Now safely on the bridge, Picard and his crew see the explosion and hope that Data will materialize but he does not. A Romulan offer of help snaps the crew back to the matter at hand.
The command crew of the Enterprise is gathered together one last time to remember their fallen friend. Severely damaged, the Enterprise has returned home for repairs. Picard feels the need to tell B-4 about Data, but the android does not understand.
Filming started with eight days on Kolarus III—otherwise known as the desert midway between Edwards Air Force Base and El Mirage dry lakebed. Logan had postulated that Starfleet would have wheeled vehicles to use where storms or gravitational fluxes negated antigrav craft. Illustrator John Eaves designed the vehicle, which has a molded fiberglass shell over a stripped-down custom chassis. Action vehicles coordinator Rich Mingus’s firm supplied the five offroad vehicles, working closely with stunt coordinator Doug Coleman. Despite speeds of up to eighty miles an hour with untethered stuntmen across the rocks and bushes of the desert, there were no injuries.
The blue skies of California would be replaced with an alien gouache by producer Mark Forker’s crew at Digital Domain. Recent effects work on the Oscar winners Titanic and Lord of the Rings helped land the contract for nearly all effects work on the feature. B-4’s animatronic body parts were built and operated by Steve Johnson’s crew of Edge FX. Forker’s team created the overlay of Spiner’s face on the B-4 dummy head, using traditional effects rather than digital ones.
Late in 2001, the Paramount lot was busy. For returning line producer Marty Hornstein it meant sets had to be built and struck quickly to make room for the next set. There was no time for anyone to take notice that the wedding’s Alaska pavilion—and later the Romulan Senate—were standing on Stage 32, formerly Desilu’s Stage 9, one of the stages of Star Trek. In an echo of a Star Trek Generations incident, thieves stole the Enterprise’s captain’s chair only two days before shooting was wrapped, causing a scramble to quickly replace it.
Filming wrapped on May 8, 2002, with Data’s jump out the corridor and other green-screen elements for visual effects—only a day over schedule. It was the last item of an ambitious agenda for live effects coordinator Terry Frazee, on board for the fourth consecutive Trek film and working with the Digital Domain crew.
There were new ships created for this feature, once again rendered by Eaves. But now they were handed over to Doug Drexler, who would model and colorize them in CG. They were then passed on to Berman and post-producer Peter Lauritson, who would sign off on the final choices before giving them to Digital Domain.
Invoking captain’s privilege, Picard commands the Argo.
It was decided early on that the Scimitar would be massive. “Rick and Peter definitely had a vision of what they wanted to see,” noted Eaves. With its distinctive spiderlike rigging, the Scimitar has an awe-inspiring 4,430-foot span, and its length is 2,920 feet. The decision was made to update the Romulan warbird. Eaves went back to the ST III Klingon bird-of-prey. He kept the hawklike head of the older warbird and some of the hollowed-out design, making it look leaner, and meaner. The new warbird has a 2,980-foot span and measures 1,980 feet long, dwarfing the Enterprise-E at 2,250 feet long and 800 feet wide. Berman asked that the Scorpion fighter be a sleek fuselage with small wings. Eaves used an F-18 airplane as inspiration, reversing the cockpit canopy for the Scorpion’s dome. When an iridescent color did not work, deep purple was tried, and finally it became off-black. A CG version of the fighter was created for the corridor flight, while the set had custom Recaro seats, and the canopy-projected graphics were done on stage.
Digital Domain decided that they would also use models. One scene handled by models was the collision sequence. A twenty-foot-wide front half of the Enterprise saucer section and a somewhat larger section of the Scimitar were created. The models had to reflect the battle that the two ships had just been in: phaser hits on the hulls and shield dimpling. “Building intact, pristine ships is one endeavor, but building damaged, ruined ships is at least twice as hard!” Forker laughed.
Central to the story was the thalaron bomb and its effects. The visual had to capture the horror that had been laid out in the script. The weapon was conceptualized by Drexler, but the look of its aftereffect on its victims was another matter. “We didn’t want to go near the horror-film ‘melting flesh’ look, or anything we’ve seen recently,” Forker explained. They created a “microwaved” look for an inside-out effect on its victims.
Overall, the film’s five hundred effects shots were a record for a Star Trek feature. However, Berman noted, “Our stories have to rely very heavily on the characters and the story, and the visual effects are almost an afterthought, because there’s just no way we can compete with other films that have [effects] budgets that are literally double ours.”
Trek vet Wendy Drapanas supervised this feature, with Mike Okuda as a consultant. Monica Fedrick and she created the Reman language and characters. Video artists Tom Mahoney and Shawn Baden transformed them into video. (They noted that the Scimitar’s shuttlebay code reveals that Remans see yellow as “yes” and purple as “no.”) Rick Sternbach had two primary design tasks: updating the Romulan crest and making a Romulan version of the Neutral Zone map for the Senate chamber.
The Enterprise sickbay retained the custom biobeds from First Contact, but added new plasmascreen LCD monitors for live video playback. Data’s observation-lounge briefing includes scenes from Trek history, including the original Romulan bird-of-prey. Pro
ps also got a close look from the director, who sought upgrades to the type-2 phaser. They now open, exposing the workings. The San Francisco nightscape scene outside Janeway’s window was built for the last show of Voyager. On her desk—thanks to art production assistant Ron Nomura—is her cherished coffee cup. The curved-stock Romulan rifles designed but unused for “Unification” are finally seen.
Under the Romulan makeup as Commander Donatra was Dina Meyer—Private Dizzy Flores, Starship Troopers. Her colleague Commander Number 2 was J. Patrick McCormack, Admiral Bennett (“Doctor Bashir, I Presume” DS9), and Prax (“Counterpoint” VGR). Another Trek veteran is Shannon Cochran as Senator Tal’Aura; she was Kalita (“Preemptive Strike”/276, “Defiant” DS9) and Sirella (“You Are Cordially Invited …” DS9). The replacement helmsman seen midway through the battle is X-Men director Bryan Singer.
The first rough assembly of the movie yielded about forty minutes of edits to help pacing, cut a humorous tag on the bridge that would have shown a new captain’s chair with automatic seat belts, and Picard’s new first officer being the target of Riker’s last practical joke on the Enterprise. Lost from the wedding reception: a Data-Picard toast, a Picard-Crusher exchange over war, Worf’s explanation to the doctor that he was “not suited for the life of a diplomat,” and a brief exchange with Wesley Crusher. On shipboard, B-4’s first public appearance and Worf comparing an “invigorating” Klingon honeymoon to the newlyweds’ plans to sail Betazed’s Opal Sea were cut. Early drafts of the script had Worf saved from injuries by a Romulan doctor; now we hear a single line where he gives the Romulans his grudging respect. Also lost was a scene where a highly reluctant Klingon is convinced by La Forge to adopt Data’s cat, Spot.
As Data works to override the shuttlebay lockout, the captain holds off the Remans.
Picard knows that Shinzon must be stopped, at any cost.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 63