Troi’s first-year “severe” look.
Data and Worf, successors to Spock’s logical and alien mystiques, in a scene cut from “Coming of Age.”
Fontana became the next in a long line of writers who grew upset with the extensive rewrites on this incarnation of Trek. She remained through October and was listed in the credits until her tenure ended completely after “The Big Goodbye” (113).
For the last top member of the old guard that had originally breathed life into TNG (aside from GR), departure was a health matter. Justman had signed on for a year, but unlike Milkis he had included a second-year pickup option in his contract. Midway through season one, though, he let it be known he wanted to reduce his work load. “I was still motivated, it was a good show, but I was just working myself into a dither; I was very tired and very cross,” he said later. And he soon grew angry: he demanded and received a front-page apology from Daily Variety—the first in the trade paper’s history—a day after it ran a story saying he’d been fired amid a “big shakeup at Star Trek.”
The studio agreed to his request to cut back to handling only casting, rewrites, and editing in a consulting-producer role for the last eight shows of the season, beginning with “Coming of Age” (119). With that, the staff was restructured. Berman received the title of co-executive producer, Maurice Hurley became the new writing producer, and David Livingston was promoted to line producer after having been hired by Justman as unit production manager for the pilot. Hurley, who had come aboard as a writer-producer at the start of weekly production with “The Naked Now” (103), left Universal to come to TNG after having worked on staff during the debut years of Miami Vice and The Equalizer.
Carrying the title of producer were writers Lewin, who stayed all season long, and Wright, who remained on staff from the pilot through “Skin of Evil” (122) in January 1988, when he left to become creative consultant on Paramount’s The War of the Worlds.
Johnny Dawkins was credited as story editor in “The Naked Now,” “Code of Honor,” “Where No One Has Gone Before,” and “Too Short a Season” (103, 104, 106, and 112). The title then went unused until the restructuring caused by Justman’s leaving, when Richard Manning and Hans Beimler took over the chore until the end of the season (and later returned to serve in a similar capacity during the show’s run). In the interim, Greg Strangis worked as creative consultant on “The Big Goodbye,” “Datalore,” and “Angel One” (113-115) before he, too, left to develop The War of the Worlds.
This revolving door for writers began to be blamed for the perceived lack of continuity on the series. Though most fans stayed patient, as reflected in the ratings, some criticized the lack of growth and interplay between the characters, as well as the thin or too crowded story lines.
After his departure a year later, Hurley talked about the story-writing system, which he had tried to change during his tenure. This system included a pattern of memo-writing among the story staff. “In the beginning there was a lot of [plot] clutter,” Hurley said. “Too many ideas being thrown into one script…. There was a tendency to do a real quick wrap-up. Too much in the bag, trying to fill the bag too full.”
“We were trying hard to put our house in order during the first season,” Berman recalled. “The writers were being rewritten by Gene, and there was a lot of tumult because people didn’t know where they stood.”
Why so many story problems? The most obvious reason was the sheer enormity of developing stories that were entertaining and thought-provoking while staying true to GR’s unique unifying vision of Trek. The most frustrating thing for writers was his ban on interpersonal conflicts among the crew, based on his belief that such petty and ego-driven problems would be a thing of the past by the twenty-fourth century.
“Yes, there was a lot of rewriting done and it bruised some egos,” Hurley would say later, chalking it up to typical first-year growing pains. “But I think it was really necessary.”2
Even Hurley professed his disbelief in what he called GR’s “wacky doodle” hope-filled future vision, but he acknowledged that viewpoint was what defined Trek. “You suspend your own feelings and your own beliefs and you get with his vision—or you get rewritten.”3 Ironically he would soon find himself clashing with more than one writer over just how to interpret that vision.
Actually, the original Star Trek had undergone exactly the same tortuous search for stability during its formative year—pages rewritten the day and even the hour before they were to shoot, and so on—but the older series spent its lifetime crying for attention while it remained largely unexamined under the microscope of fans and the Hollywood press that later magnified everything that was done—or rumored to have been done—on TNG.
Eventually, as an embryonic continuity eventually surfaced, the revolving door slowed down—or at least seemed to. Hannah Louise Shearer, teleplay writer on “When the Bough Breaks” (118), was named to the new position of executive story editor beginning with that episode. Two shows later, Tracy Tormé—a Saturday Night Live and SCTV veteran with TNG credits already on “The Big Goodbye” (113) and “Haven” (105)—was added in that same position. Shearer, whose background included producing Emergency!, Knight Rider, and Quincy and writing for Cagney and Lacey and MacGyver, served with Tormé through the rest of the season.
But delays due to last-minute rewrites took up only a part of each TNG episode’s production schedule. Each show requires about sixteen weeks from the commitment to develop a story idea to the time its post-production optical effects, music, and titles are added, and each in turn overlaps the others in various phases of evolution. On any one day, according to Berman, one show is being filmed live, writing or design work is in process on upcoming scripts, and segments already shot are being edited and having FX, sound, music, and titles added.
Andy Probert designed the underbelly of the Ferengi “Marauder” with its own (as-yet-unseen) shuttlecraft.
A TNG director usually has only seven days to shoot about fifty-five pages of script. That means shooting eight or nine pages a day. The design staff gets about two weeks’ notice on a script prior to shooting—or, as Zimmerman put it, “ten working days to do the thinking, drawing, construction, and get it ready to shoot.” For the producers during the first season, that meant days stretching from 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 or 10:00 P.M., while the actors and stage crews were at it from 6:00 A.M. until 6:00 to 10:00 P.M. or later.
Meanwhile, Legato realized that the original idea of a library of optical-effects shots wouldn’t save much time and money after all. “The plan was to take the library shots from ILM and add about five per show,” he explained. “That was probably a little naive…. Then the pilot needed two hundred and ten FX shots, the second show had seventy-five, the third eighty, and so on, so by the sixth or seventh show we found it was cheaper just to ‘trick’ [custom-shoot] each one out.”
Eventually, dropping the library concept allowed more movement in FX scenes, because elements freshly photographed—a ship, a planet, a nebula—didn’t have to be static to match one element that had been shot for an earlier show. “Since we’re filming [what amounts to] a feature a week, you need specific shots—a ship thrown into orbit, a Wizard of Oz head,” Legato explained. “If you want to do it right and do it effectively, you’ve got to shoot it and do exactly what you want done. It’s really less work and more powerful visually and dramatically.”
And less work would quickly become crucial, as the shorthanded visual-effects chief nearly drove himself to exhaustion by handling the studio work solo through the pilot and the first nine episodes. “It got to where they’d finish live shooting at ten P.M., I’d go from there to work in the lab until five A.M., and they’d be ready to start live shooting again in another hour.” Legato sighed. “We weren’t just doing the work—we were learning how to do the work.”
The last straw came when “The Last Outpost” (107) was moved up in the production schedule with 110 effects shots, right after the backbreaking visuals
required for “Where No One Has Gone Before” (106).
“The effects budgets were running $100,000 over and we had a meeting to discuss why,” Legato recalled. “I finally said, ‘Look, this is costing $2,000 an hour just for me to sit here.’ They said, ‘How do you figure that?’ and I told them that’s how much the overtime and lab cost with me sitting there and not out working. Finally an executive said, ‘Well it’s obvious you need more help!’ and that’s how we got Dan!”
Dan Curry, mirroring Legato’s role, would begin on the tenth hour-long show filmed, “Too Short a Season,” (112) and alternate episodes with him to split up the work load. For the second season, each was promoted to visual effects supervisor and given his own associate. Gary Hutzel was hired to work with Legato, and Ron B. Moore became Curry’s assistant.
About that time Legato also at last persuaded the producers to let him head a second-unit camera crew to film the special live-action shots needed for FX interfacing—like those before the blue screen in which live action will be mated with background paintings or visuals, and close-up inserts of computer displays and hands on controls. “If a director shoots something and doesn’t understand how the visual effects tie in, you have to go back and repair that, and it costs more anyway,” he noted.
Practically all the animated computer displays are matted in because the screens are usually not bright enough to be seen. Some live action is done on set, though—as when a finger traces a path shown by the display. Created by Okuda with Macintosh animation software, the sequences, like other second-unit shooting, use actors’ photo doubles to save time and money.
Because of what they had to accomplish every week, TNG’s visual-effects staff soon became pioneers in video special effects equipment and techniques for the entire industry. For example, Hutzel developed an inexpensive and quicker method of filming revolving planets by using slides of them projected on a dome, providing five or six finished sequences in an hour.
Regardless of how it stacks up against the original show in other areas, TNG wins hands down in series continuity. While Star Trek did a miraculous job for its day in keeping its back story intact, that effort simply pales next to the effort put forth by Sternbach, Okuda, and Probert (before he left at year’s end to join Disney’s Imagineering subsidiary) in matters of historical and technological consistency. They began injecting and describing what might be called preemptive backgrounding, or the anticipation of background needs, before the demand for it cropped up in a particular script. Okuda and Sternbach would later be rewarded for their efforts and officially given the added title of technical consultants with early script input.
By year’s end, TNG would finish with a 10.6 rating—or about 9.4 million households watching from 210 local stations—and rank first among eighteen-to forty-nine-year-olds, the prime demographic group sought by advertisers. Beyond the United States and Canada, in eight European and Asian countries where first-run airing was initially restricted, TNG picked up a direct $2 million in videocassette sales by its first summer hiatus.
Though comparisons to the old show persisted, by season’s end TNG had developed an identity all its own. TV Guide writer Gary D. Christenson compared the differences between the two Treks with the differences in his generation of Americans: “Star Trek depicted us in reckless youth, with a starship captain who tamed space as vigorously as we laid claim to the future…. Star Trek: The Next Generation reveals the child grown—a little more polished, but also more complacent. And if there’s a bit of gray and a wrinkle or two, so much the better.”4
THE NAKED NOW
* * *
Production No.: 103 Aired: Week of October 5, 1987
Stardate: 41209.2 Code:nn
Directed by Paul Lynch
Teleplay by J. Michael Bingham
Story by John D.F. Black and J. Michael Bingham
GUEST CAST
Chief Engineer Sarah MacDougal: Brooke Bundy
Assistant Engineer Jim Shimoda: Benjamin W.S. Lum
Transporter Chief: Michael Rider
Kissing crewman: Kenny Koch
Conn: David Rehan
Engineering crewman: Skip Stellrecht
* * *
A hauntingly familiar disease is unleashed aboard the Enterprise after it makes contact with the Tsiolkovsky, a now-dead research ship that had been investigating a nearby star’s collapse. Those afflicted act intoxicated and mentally unstable.
As Dr. Crusher races to find a cure, the disease’s symptoms ring a bell with Riker, who goes looking through decades of records with Data until they realize that the original Enterprise encountered much the same disease.
But the old cure doesn’t work, and before Dr. Crusher can discover why, her afflicted son helps disable computer control, putting the ship at the mercy of the nearby collapsing star. Eventually almost the entire crew—including the doctor, Picard, Yar, and Data—come down with the virus.
Finally Data and Chief Engineer MacDougal hold off illness long enough to subdue Wesley; the android then uses his speed and dexterity to restore the computer memory in a desperate race against time to get the ship functioning in time to avoid a head-on collision from a chunk of the former star.
After a working cure is finally discovered, the crew ruefully gets on with life.
The Tsiolkovsky virus: a close call for Picard and Crusher.
This episode, filmed in six straight days through a Saturday to refine the new work schedule, sparked the first fan outcries that many TNG plots were being lifted from original-series stories. In this case, however, that was exactly what GR wanted: a story, like “The Naked Time” of 1966, in which the wants and needs of new characters could be quickly revealed to a new audience. Black, listed here as coauthor, wrote the original; J. Michael Bingham is Fontana’s pseudonym. “It was an homage, not a copy,” Berman said of the episode, “We even mentioned the old Enterprise and its remedy, which doesn’t help our crew … after all.”
This era’s story roots go back to the opening thirteen pages of an unfinished teleplay GR began called “Revelations.” The same opening points are included, except that Geordi makes a move on Tasha, who is the next to get the Tsiolkovsky virus even though she brushes him off. Fontana initially turned out a teleplay with a harder edge; Data turns down Tasha’s advances but becomes a “perfect little boy” so as to become human a là Pinocchio; Troi bemoans an empath’s lack of mental privacy among hundreds of humans; Riker fears a lonely captain’s career; and Picard worries over the families he has aboard his ship.
Brooke Bundy’s onetime appearance as Chief Engineer MacDougal began a season-long parade of characters in that position. Rider began a three-show stint as the first regular yet unnamed transporter chief, then a security guard; the Picard-Crusher tension would go unresolved until Season 6 (“Attached”/ 260).
Beginning an Okuda tradition, a bridge dedication plaque identifies the Tsiolkovsky as an Oberth-class vessel (the miniature a minor re-dress of the U.S.S. Grissom in Star Trek III), launched from a descendant of today’s Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome; little did anyone know then how dated the USSR reference would soon be! A copy of the plaque was sent to the Kaluga Museum in the hometown of the starship’s namesake, space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
CODE OF HONOR
* * *
Production No.: 104 Aired: Week of October 12, 1987
Stardate: 41235.25 Code:ch
Directed by Russ Mayberry
Written by Katharyn Powers & Michael Baron
GUEST CAST
Lutan: Jessie Lawrence Ferguson
Yareena: Karole Selmon
Hagon: James Louis Watkins
Transporter Chief: Michael Rider
* * *
A plague on Styris IV sends the Enterprise to the only known source for an organic vaccine, Ligon II.
Negotiations go smoothly for the vaccine until the planet’s chief, Lutan, suddenly kidnaps Yar after being impressed by both her beauty and her strength. To get her bac
k, Picard must abide by the Prime Directive and the Ligonians’ strict patience and code of honor—and Yar must combat Lutan’s current “First One” wife, who now feels her honor challenged, in a fight to the death.
Picard tries every diplomatic trick in the book, but he is finally left to hope that Yar can score a hit in the poison-tipped glavin combat. She does, and the fighters are beamed aboard, where Dr. Crusher concocts an antidote to the Ligonian poison.
Not only is honor served and Yar rescued, but wife Yareena’s “death” satisfies tradition. Alive in reality, though, Yareena transfers her land and property rights to Lutan’s lieutenant Hagon when she claims him as her new husband, in effect dethroning the chief. But Lutan takes it all in stride with Ligonian pride and calls the orderly transfer far more “civilized” than the Enterprise crew’s society.
Amused but wiser, the crew warps out to help fight the plague.
Writer Kotharyn Powers, an original-series fan and a veteran of series such as Kung Fu, Logan’s Run, and Fantastic Journey, had known D. C. Fontana for some time when she got invited to pitch story ideas for the new show. She and writing partner Michael Baron initially tried to base the Ligonian “honor is all” culture on that of the Japanese Samurai, using a reptilian race called the Tellisians.
Yar fights to the “death” against Yareena (Karole Selmon).
Not everyone was pleased with the results, though. Tracy Tormé, an eventual writing staffer, later said he was embarrassed by the show’s “1940s tribal Africa” view of blacks and by the fight’s uncanny resemblance to the win-or-die battle between Kirk and Spock in “Amok Time” in 1967.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 6
