The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition
Page 11
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
* * *
Production No.: 124 Aired: Week of May 2, 1988
Stardate: 41697.9 Code: wa
Directed by Robert Becker
Written by Deborah Dean Davis and Hannah Louise Shearer
GUEST CAST
Jenice Manheim: Michelle Phillips
Dr. Paul Manheim: Rod Loomis
Gabrielle: Isabel Lorca
Lieutenant Dean: Dan Kern
Edouard: Jean-Paul Vignon
Francine: Kelly Ashmore
Transporter Chief Herbert: Lance Spellerberg
* * *
The romance that didn’t quite click: Jenice Manheim (Michelle Phillips) and Picard.
While the ship is traveling to Sarona VII for shore leave, a bizarre time loop distortion causes a literal déjà vu effect on the Enterprise. Soon after this, the ship receives a distress signal from Dr. Paul Manheim’s science outpost on Vandor IV.
They rescue Manheim and his wife, Jenice, who turns out to be an old love of Picard’s. But the nonlinear time experiments Manheim and his now-dead team were conducting not only ended in disaster on Vandor, but were responsible for the disturbance that the Enterprise experienced earlier. Those disturbances now threaten to spread and rip open the interdimensional fabric of space.
Manheim himself is dying, since his body can’t deal with the strain of partial interdimensional existence. On top of that, Picard’s unresolved feelings for Jenice—he stood her up in Paris to ship out with Starfleet twenty-two years ago—are left hanging by a therapeutic session on the holodeck. Even Dr. Crusher finds herself jealous of Jenice.
Finally, using Manheim’s directions, Data beams into the Vandor lab to reseal the center of the dimensional breach with a hunk of antimatter; although he finds himself in three time continuums at once, he sorts it all out and succeeds.
Manheim is instantly cured, and he and Jenice prepare to begin his work again. And this time, thanks to the Parisian holodeck program, Picard gives Jenice a proper goodbye.
If this story doesn’t quite come off as another Casablanca (the source for the episode’s title), it’s not surprising, Shearer and her friend Deborah Dean Davis, who originally pitched the idea, wrote the script on five days’ notice, aiming for an “utterly romantic” story, but she says the teleplay was “toned down 75 percent.”8
As late as the final draft, dated February 22, Jenice’s name was Laura, Riker was Picard’s fencing partner, Paul Manheim was much more of a loose cannon, Picard and Jenice actually spent a night together, and Troi confronted Beverly about her feelings for the captain, which she had not yet sorted out. The crew reversed the Manheim effect by first bypassing a multilevel laser-guided security system; Worf then held open a door to cool an overheated silolike power room while Riker scaled the tower to switch out a chip and Data input commands to the system below.
Completed just a week before filming began, the revised script suffered again when the Writers Guild strike of 1988 shut down production on the climactic scene—Data’s repair of the ripped time stream in Manheim’s lab—because the dialogue and special effects had not yet been tied down!
“We just ran out of script,” Legato recalled. “It was one of those ‘We’ll fix it when we get there’ things, and suddenly we were there, and the writer was out on the picket lines. The director had never worked with effects before; I had to do it. I ran over to Rick Beman’s trailer and said, ‘We’re out of script!’ We spent forty minutes. We got the writer on the phone and Rick would say, ‘Well, if you weren’t on strike, the character might say this’ and the writer’d say yes or no. I had to make up [the direction] on the spot; I came out with handwritten notes. I figured out how to shoot the three Datas in different time streams with a whip-pan instead of an effects shot.”
Shearer and others complained that a lack of chemistry between Jenice and Jean-Luc diluted the story’s romantic feel, but Michelle Phillips, who played Jenice, felt the problem lay in the story’s conception; while her character wanted to see Picard again, and was quite willing to tease him, she was also fully committed to her husband and had been for a long time.
Phillips, an original-Trek fan who was one of the Mamas and the Papas, a 1960s group, began her acting career in 1970, Her roles include the miniseries Aspen, the film Bloodlines, and one season on Knots Landing. Rod Loomis, who acted in his first play while in the army, is best known for playing a confused Dr. Sigmund Freud in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Lance Spellerberg appeared a year later as the same transporter chief, Ensign Herbert, in “The Icarus Factor” (140).
The matte painting of twenty-fourth-century Paris seen in the holodeck nicely combines the old Eiffel Tower with a new antigrav craft flying by; it would later be used outside the Federation president’s office in ST VI. Eduoard’s Okudagram menu included joke items such as Croissants D’ilithium, Targ Klingon à la Mode, and Tribbles dans les Blankettes.
CONSPIRACY
* * *
Production No.: 125 Aired: Week of May 9, 1988
Stardate: 41775.5 Code: co
Directed by Cliff Bole
Teleplay by Tracy Tormé
Story by Robert Sabaroff
GUEST CAST
Admiral Savar: Henry Darrow
Admiral Quinn: Ward Costello
Lieutenant Commander Dexter Remmick: Robert Schenkkan
Admiral Aaron: Ray Reinhardt
Captain Walker Keel: Jonathan Farwell
Captain Rixx: Michael Berryman
Captain Tryla Scott: Ursaline Bryant
* * *
Picard realizes alien invaders have also possessed Captain Scott (Ursaline Bryant).
Picard is disturbed when his old friend Walker Keel summons him to a secret meeting with two other captains on a deserted planetoid, but he warily agrees. The subject? The trio’s suspicion, much like Admiral Quinn’s on Relva VII, that a conspiracy is spreading within Starfleet. Picard is skeptical until Keel’s ship explodes and Data finds a disturbing pattern among command orders. Picard makes a decision: the Enterprise will return to Starfleet Command on Earth to check the suspicions firsthand.
Three top admirals, including Quinn, greet the ship with surprise and invite Picard and Riker down for dinner to discuss their concerns. But something does not feel right.
Then all hell breaks loose: the crew discovers that Quinn, aboard the Enterprise for a visit, is controlled by a tiny intelligent parasite, whose presence is revealed only by a quill-like protrusion from the host’s neck.
Picard walks into a trap set by the other two admirals and Remmick, Quinn’s former aide, but a fake “quill” on Riker helps him foil the ambush. Soon the admirals are dead, along with Remmick, who housed the mother creature.
Quinn is cured and Starfleet saved, but the aliens’ source and purpose remain a mystery.
This, the first moody episode of the series and one of its darkest ever, almost didn’t come to be, The idea began as a one-sentence idea from Gene Roddenberry called “Assassins,” which Robert Sabaroff fleshed out to a thirty-page treatment. Unfortunately it was deemed too expensive to produce, and Tormé got the assignment of starting the process all over again. Tormé said some on staff thought his treatment too dark, too bizarre; the assignment was going to someone else until GR read and loved it.9
Planned to push the limits as a hard-edged thriller, the story was originally inspired by Seven Days in May, and the conspirators were not aliens but members of a faction within Starfleet—all Picard’s friends—who rebel against the Prime Directive and Federation-wide complacency following the Klingon detente. Ironically, although GR ruled against painting Starfleet in such dark colors, just such a conspiracy within the service later became a major plot point in the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
The mail brought some cries against the gory scenes of death and worm-eating, but Tormé took issue with Variety for labeling it TNG’s “most notorious” episode so far. Remmick’s �
�hosting” of the mother alien and his exploding head were added later in post-production; originally, Picard and Riker were to meet up with the full-grown mother creature.
Henry Darrow, the first to play a speaking Starfleet Vulcan character and deliver the legendary neck pinch in TNG, has a long résumé that includes roles in the daytime soap Santa Barbara and the part of Manolita on the 1960s series High Chaparral. Jonathan Farwell, whose character introduced Jack Crusher to Beverly, was another longtime Trek fan and veteran guest star. He appeared in The King and I opposite Yul Brynner and on The Young and the Restless.
The Probert-designed Ambassador-class starship was first mentioned here as Keel’s ship, the Horatio already having been designated as the Enterprise-C’s class (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”/ 163). The FX shots of Earth and spacedock and the matte painting of Starfleet Command were all from the Trek movies; the banquet room’s heavy doors with inset etched-glass ovals would be used on the standing set for Ten-Forward, which was built during hiatus.
Though the story left room for a sequel, the parasites have never been seen again.
THE NEUTRAL ZONE
* * *
Production No.: 126 Aired: Week of May 16, 1988
Stardate: 41986.0 Code: nz
Directed by James L. Conway
Television story and teleplay by Maurice Hurley
From a story by Deborah McIntyre & Mona Glee
GUEST CAST
Commander Tebok: Marc Alaimo
Sub-Commander Thei: Anthony James
L. Q. “Sonny” Clemonds: Leon Rippy
Clare Raymond: Gracie Harrison
Ralph Offenhouse: Peter Mark Richman
* * *
As the Enterprise awaits Picard’s return from a special briefing, Data can’t resist investigating a three-hundred-year-old capsule that floats by. Three humans are found frozen inside the capsule. They are the only survivors of the fad of cryogenic preservation for the terminally ill.
But the last thing Picard needs is a sideshow of relics; his return brings news of disappearing outposts and the suspicion that at long last the Romulans are returning to activity along the Neutral Zone.
The first glimpse of Romulans in fifty-three years: Tebok (Marc Alaimo, left) and Thei (Anthony James).
The revived humans have their own problems: a broker demands access to his money, a homemaker misses her kids, a bored country singer wants to party. Picard relies on Troi and Data to help solve their problems while he deals with another challenge: a cloaked Romulan ship, the UFP’s first contact with its old foes in fifty-three years. A tense exchange yields the information that outposts are disappearing on the Romulan side of the Neutral Zone as well. The two sides agree to exchange information in the future, but the Romulans leave no doubt they mean to be reckoned with again.
With tensions eased somewhat, the Enterprise heads back, arranging a long ferry ride to Earth so its three new passengers will have enough time to get used to their new home century.
Hurley recalled putting this script together in a day and a half, a rushed and possibly unrefined casualty of the continuing Writers Guild strike. Originally, the rendezvous with the Romulans had been discussed as the first of a multi-part story that would have united the two governments against the newly discovered Borg, who were developed as a replacement for the disappointing Ferengi. The strike nixed that idea, though, and the Borg had to wait (Q Who/142). References to the pattern of their destruction, however, remained in the script, The subplot of the revived twentieth-century Americans—criticized by some as too reminiscent of the original Trek’s “Space Seed”—came from a fan story by Deborah McIntyre and Mona Glee.
Peter Mark Richman once starred in the series Cain’s Hundred and has racked up more than five hundred television guest roles, from The Twilight Zone and Perry Mason to Bonanza and Mission: Impossible and even to Three’s Company, where he played Suzanne Somers’s father. Leon Rippy appeared in both parts of North and South with Jonathan Frakes and in Steven Spielberg’s The Cola Purple as the storekeeper with eventual TNG cast member Whoopi Goldberg.
Sharp-eyed fans may notice a longer-than-usual shot of a skant-wearing female sciences officer departing a turbolift. That’s Susan Sackett, a writer and Gene Roddenberry’s personal assistant since 1974, She got the walk-on after winning a bet over losing weight. A TNG staff member until GR’s death in late 1991, she would later contribute two episodes with writing partner Fred Bronson (“Ménage à Troi’”/172, “The Game’/206).
In this episode Data makes history of another kind when he mentions the current Earth year as 2364—yet another sign that after more than twenty years, the many loose ends of Trek’s background were being tied down once and for all, We also learn from Data here, ironically, that television had “died out” by 2040.
Finally, fans knew the Romulans’ boast—“We’re back!”—was no idle threat when their new vessel, eventually dubbed a Warbird, turned up here. Probert’s size-comparison sketch comparing it to the 1701-D is dated March 25, 1988, and the miniature, which Greg Jein built, was released a year later by AMT as a plastic kit, along with the Ferengi and Klingon Bird of Prey vessels. The ships boast the new Romulan crest: a stylized bird of prey clutching the twin homeworlds of Romulus and Remus, one in each claw.
All the models were enhanced by Legato’s first use of a moving camera on TNG for visual-effects sequences, allowing objects to move in relation to one another as the crews began getting away from the lock-off static shots needed in compositing the old stock-library elements.
Notes
1 Dave McDonnell, Starlog, No. 133, August 1988, p. 24.
2 Mark Dawidziak, Cinefantastique, March 1989, p. 26.
3 Eduard Gross, Starlog, No. 152, March 1990, p. 29.
4 TV Guide, July 23, 1988, p. 40.
5 For a visual evolution of the Ferengi through Probert’s sketches, see OFCM, No. 60, February-March 1988, p. 7.
6 Gross, Starlog, No. 135, October 1988, p. 45.
7 Gross, p. 48.
8 Mark Altman, Cinefantastique, March 1989, p. 61.
9 Altman, p. 61.
PRODUCTION STAFF CREDITS—FIRST SEASON
* * *
(In usual roll order; numbers in parentheses refer to episode numbers.)
Main Title Theme: + Jerry Goldsmith and *Alexander Courage
Music: Ron Jones (103, all even-numbered episodes, 106-126, except 112); Dennis McCarthy (101-102, all odd-numbered episodes, 105-125); George Romanis (112); *Fred Steiner (104)
Director of Photography: Edward R. Brown, A.S.C.
Production Designer: Herman Zimmerman
Editor: Tom Benko (101-102, 107, 110, 113, 116, 119, 122, 125); David Berlatsky (105); J. P. Farrell (103, 106, 109, 112, 115, 118, 121, 124); William Hoy (108, 111, 114, 117, 120, 123, 126); Randy Roberts (104)
Unit Production Manager: David Livingston (101-118); Kelly A. Manners (119); Bruce A. Simon (120); Sam Freedle (121-126)
First Assistant Director: Les Landau (101-102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 116, 118, 124, 126); *Charles Washburn (103, 105, 107, 109, 114); Babu (T.R.) Subramaniam (111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 122, 125); Bruce A. Simon (120, 123)
Second Assistant Director: Babu Subramaniam (101-110); Brenda Kalosh (109-114); Bruce A. Simon (111-118); Larry M. Davis (115-122); Bob Kinwald (119-122); Robert J. Metoyer (123-126); Adele G. Simmons (123-26)
Costumes: *William Ware Theiss, Executive Consultant (EMMY WINNER: “The Big Goodbye” [113])
Art Director: Sandy Veneziano (101-109, 120-126)
Assistant Art Director: Gregory Pickrell (110-118)
Visual Effects Coordinator: Robert Legato (101-111, 113, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126); Dan Curry (112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125)
Post-Production Supervisor: Brooke Breton
Set Decorator: *John Dwyer
Makeup Supervisor: Michael Westmore
Makeup Artist: + Werner Keppler (EMMY WINNER: “Conspiracy” [125])
Hair D
esigner: Richard Sabre
Hair Stylist: Joy Zapata (101-105); Carolyn Ferguson (106-126)
Production Assistant: + Susan Sackett
Consulting Senior Illustrator: + Andrew Probert
Illustrator: + Rick Sternbach
Scenic Artist: + Michael Okuda
Set Designer: Richard McKenzie (101-122); Louis Mann (123-126)
Script Supervisor: Cosmo Genovese
Special Effects: * + Dick Brownfield
Costume Supervisor: Janet Stout (101-106); Elaine Scheiderman (107-115); Ed Sunley (117-126)
Key Costumer: Phil Signorelli (114-116); Richard Butz (117, 120, 122, 124); David McGough (118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 126)
Camera Operator: Lowell Peterson (101-102)
Property Master: Joe Longo (101 and all even-numbered episodes); Alan Sims (all odd-numbered episodes except 101)
Chief Lighting Technician: Richard Cronn
First Company Grip: Brian Mills
Sound Mixer: Alan Bernard, C.A.S. (all except 114); Dean Gilmore (114)
Music Editor: John LaSalandra, S.M.E. (101-114); Gerry Sackman (115-124)
Supervising Sound Editor: Bill Wistrom (101-118, 120-121, 123-125)
Sound Editor: James Wolvington; Mace Matiosian; and Wilson Dyer (105, 112-126) EMMY WINNERS (with crew): “11001001” [116])
Casting Executive: Helen Mossler
Casting Associate: Elisa Goodman (120-126)
Production Coordinator: Diane Overdiek