The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition

by Larry Nemecek

  Commander Nella Daren (Wendy Hughes) captures Captain Picard’s heart.

  Nella opts for a transfer, noting that they must remain apart to keep their love alive.

  A complete contrast from the Picard story just prior, this slice-of-life plot Michael Piller dubbed “Brief Encounter on the Enterprise” sparkles from the chemistry between Stewart and actress Wendy Hughes, most recently seen in Homicide: Life on the Streets. Ironically, Picard is seen wearing a shirt from “Captain’s Holiday” (167), but unlike Vash, this time around the captain is given a real peer and equal in Nella Daren—a quality that Jeri Taylor felt gave the match-up “True substance and genuine warmth” the actors could play from. “The script was a pleasure and we had really turned-on performances,” veteran TNG director Robert Weimer said. “If we’d had only moderate performances it would have fallen flat.”

  Taylor was pleased to be able to finally give freelancers Ronald Wilkerson and Jean Louise Matthias a chance to take their story to the teleplay stage, after their previous two sales (“Imaginary Friend”/222, “Schisms”/231) were handed to a staff writer to save time through rewrites. René Echevarria did only a polish job on their final draft, a task Brannon Braga swapped off after his last uneven experience with a love story on “Aquiel” (239).

  Because it was so much a part of the relationship’s growth, the music recorded and played for this episode received extra special attention. Series composer Dennis McCarthy had dubbed a tape of professionals playing the music needed, but Taylor knew that such a straight treatment wouldn’t work for the dramatic build and she called a Sunday huddle with him and producer Wendy Neuss. “The music had to reflect that she was making him feel comfortable and letting him kind of test these strange waters and being gentle with him, not overwhelming him with a ‘look at me—see how good I am!’ kind of attitude.” The final product portrays what Neuss called “a real synergy, a constant feeding back, growing, getting better at what they do.”

  But if recording the music was one thing, shooting it was another. Keeping his filming angles simple and conservative to reflect the tone of the story, Wiemer still worked in tricks to disguise the live musicians playing for actors Stewart and Hughes: the unbroken piano pan and the up-through-the-clear-table shot disguised the likes of pianist photo-double Natalie Martin, who also recorded the music for Nella’s instruments. Her husband Bryce has done the same for Picard’s Ressikan pennywhistle “flute” ever since its debut in “The Inner Light” (225). Stewart did much of his own flute fingering in the “teaching” scene, with inserts photo-doubled in his quarters by Noel Webb and by John Mayham in the Jefferies tube, where Wiemer used a wide-angle lens in the crammed junction; an enormously long dolly he filmed retreating down the crawlway until the duo was just a spot had to be cut short for time. Webb also hand-doubled for Data’s violin playing with Spiner’s face onscreen as he, Nella, and musician extra Jan Kelly “performed” Chopin’s “Trio in G Minor”—as a joke take, Neuss recalled, Webb’s unused hand reached in as Data’s “third” one to scratch the android’s nose!

  Picard’s love of fencing (“We’ll Always Have Paris”/124, “I, Borg”/223) and his early piano lessons (“The Perfect Mate”/221) are already known, as is Crusher’s interest in ribosomal replication (“The Enemy”/155, “Ethics”/216). Some of the weapons used are a variation on Kivas Fajo’s Varon-T (“The Most Toys”/170), and “Frere Jacques” harks back to “Disaster” (205).

  Echoing the show’s simplicity, Dan Curry and Ron Moore used a “low-tech” means of creating the Bersallis III firewalls by spilling liquid nitrogen onto black velvet draped over a big table and blown from behind by an air hose for the shimmering effect. It was later enhanced by computer before being painted into the background of the live-action “Planet Hell” trench. Look for the blooper of stars at rest outside Picard’s quarters during a time of warp drive: the FX staff caught it in time but decided it wasn’t worth the cost of a late fix.

  THE CHASE

  * * *

  Production No.: 246 Aired: Week of April 26, 1993

  Stardate: 46731.5 Code: cha

  Directed by Jonathan Frakes

  Teleplay by Joe Menosky

  Story by Joe Menosky & Ron D. Moore

  GUEST CAST

  Humanoid: Salome Jens

  Captain Nu’Daq: John Cothran, Jr.

  Romulan captain: Maurice Roeves

  Gul Ocett: Linda Thorson

  Professor Richard Galen: Norman Lloyd

  Computer Voice: Majel Barrett

  * * *

  Picard’s old archaeology professor, Richard Galen, comes calling with a rare gift and a tempting offer: an archaeological hunt on a theory that, if proven true, would have galaxy-wide impact.

  Galen is bitter and leaves the starship when Picard turns him down, but he regrets his tone only hours later as he lies dying, mortally wounded after his ship is raided.

  Puzzled over what Galen was up to, Picard retraces their stops at empty or long-dead planets until the answer is realized: the “clues” he’d collected are from prehistoric DNA samples which fit into an overall pattern—but for what?

  The missing pieces that would provide the answer arrive as a surprise: Cardassians and Klingons who are chasing Galen’s work too. When Picard convinces them all that they all must pool their clues or fail, they find that the patterns link up to indicate star systems. The last DNA clue site is decoded but, due to a suspected double-cross, the Cardassians are fed the wrong destination and they take the bait.

  At the site, the Enterprise crew discovers not only the last DNA needed and the nonplussed Cardassians, but a cloaked Romulan ship. While the others squabble, Picard and Crusher quietly add the sample and trigger the message: words from a long-dead race that had seeded the codes as a legacy across the various races’ home planets—not a weapon or energy source, but a tie of commonality for the old foes to ponder.

  Dubbed the most “Roddenberryesque” of TNG episodes by the staff, this background fan’s delight pays homage to the unified view of life that the Great Bird infused his universe with. But writer Ron Moore wryly said that the episode might as well have taken its name from the year-and-a-half pursuit of a workable script from Menosky’s original premise, concocted way back during the infamous Mexican staff retreat from Season 5. That idea, more in the manic comic mood of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, was constantly being rewritten, disapproved as “too cartoony” and shelved—until the desperation point of the season set in and premises became scarce. Jeri Taylor joked that she got yet another try at the show by letting Menosky take a crack at a draft while her boss was trying to lure the former staffer to work on DS9 during one of his infrequent visits; in one of Filler’s biggest about-faces, she recalled, he was so excited about the revised story he wanted to make it the season’s cliffhanger!

  Inspired by Carl Sagan’s “Contact” story about a clue to the nature of the universe being discovered in an long calculation of pi, Moore said Menosky suggested using the gene code and DNA as message conduit. What finally sold Berman and Piller on the idea was the addition of the emotional stakes for Picard with his mentor’s death: the original story opened with a Vulcan scientist not personally tied to anyone who sends a distress call that he’s been surrounded by Klingon, Romulan, and Ferengi ships. “Riker beams over into this cramped little tiny shuttle, where everyone’s yelling and trying to find things and the guy’s dead,” Moore recalled. “And then they zip away, and we’re off and running with Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It would have been a lot more comedic.”

  Frakes, in his second TNG outing behind the camera this year and sixth overall, strikes the right balance between mystery and science and keeps all of Trek’s familiar aliens recognizable yet individualistic. It was a historic tale he drew: the first time that Star Trek’s humanoids, Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians appear together in the same scene, much less the same episode. (The budget-trimmed Ferengi and the written-out Vulcan would have made the par
ty even bigger.) The Yridians, of course, were introduced in the guise of Jaglom Shrek just this season (“Birthright, Part I”/242); the wasplike ship debuting here was designed by Rick Sternbach and built by John Goodson, moonlighting from his ILM job. Among the other new looks are a sampling tube that connects directly to the tricorder and the first-ever view of a Cardassian female (in command, no less) and their transporter beam: free-form amber sparkles and arcs.

  More than ever, we learn why archaeology is important to Picard (“Contagion”/137, “Qpid”/194, “Rascals”/233, “Chain of Command, Part II”/237, “Gambit”/256-257, “Bloodlines”/274) and hear again his regrets about his father (“Tapestry”/241, “Bloodlines”), while Beverly is seen right at home in Picard’s quarters for their morning tea (“Qpid,” “Perfect Mate”/221, “Lessons”/245, “The Chase”/246, “Attached”/260). At this point, seventeen aboard the Enterprise are said to come from non-UFP worlds; a short, funny scene cut for time would have established Bolius IX (“Allegiance”/166) as one of them, with barber Molt (“Ensign Ro”/ 203, “Unification I”/208, but spelled with two t’s here) among those whose DNA is sampled by Beverly. As hinted at previously (“Starship Mine”/244), we learn that the ship’s constant and rapid use of high warp drive is not usual. Galen mentions both the Satarran (“Conundrum”/214) and, though its connection to DS9 is unspecified, a “Deep Space 4,” the first record of a sister station; he indicates it on a map as somewhere beyond the Romulan Empire on the edge of explored space.

  Cardassians and Romulans confront each other in the Vilmoran system.

  As a nod to really long-term Star Trek background fans, Moore said he’d considered but intentionally didn’t specify that the DNA-coding aliens here were the Preservers, the unseen race from 1969’s “The Paradise Syndrome” said to be seeding humanoids around the galaxy, so as to keep the suspense. “But this could be them and be internally consistent,” he added. At least Salome Jens is no galactic stranger; she later turned up as one of Odo’s shapeshifter species on DS9’s “The Search.”

  FRAME OF MIND

  * * *

  Production No.: 247 Aired: Week of May 3, 1993

  Stardate: 46778.1 Code: fr

  Directed by James L. Conway

  Written by Brannon Braga

  GUEST CAST

  Dr. Syrus: David Selburg

  Administrator (“Lt.”) Suna: Andrew Prine

  Mavek: Gary Werntz

  Inmate Jaya: Susanna Thompson

  Wounded crew member: Alan Dean Moore

  * * *

  With a few days’ rest before leading an undercover mission to rescue Federation hostages on the newly anarchic Tilonus IV, Riker takes on the demanding role of a mental-health patient turned prisoner in the play “Frame of Mind.”

  Haunted by the face of a strange alien lieutenant, Riker finds reality and theater shifting back and forth in a series of baffling segues as he finds himself first on the stage set and then in a real asylum, where his doctor—played by Data in the play—tells him to shed his “starship” fantasy. Haunted by doubt, and a recurring bleeding temple when he’s on the starship, Riker is finally convinced that his Starfleet career is an illusion, the alien he saw is the clinic administrator, and that he will soon stand trial for murder.

  Worf and Data retrieve him, but aboard ship he still refuses to believe he’s a starfleet officer. Finally, when his temple continues to bleed despite Dr. Crusher’s care, Riker senses he can’t trust any of these “realities,” and he mentally breaks through each one in turn to finally wake up on a lab table, a probe attached to his temple.

  Eluding the Tilonians for an emergency beam-out, he realizes that the memories of his starship and the play were the only thing that kept him “sane” while he had been drugged by his captors.

  After a drought of Riker stories in Season 6, Frakes won praise this time for his intense yet controlled performance on a roller coaster of a part in what Braga mused was his best work to date, using his favorite “underused” character: “Riker’s a friendly character, he’s the one human you can do humor with, you can do action—and here you can jerk him around and drive him crazy!”

  Considering the late-season time crunch, it’s amazing that this desperation premise to fill the slot when another story fell through works at all. Braga came up with the barest idea—“What if Riker wakes up in an insane asylum?”—and, due to the time crunch, took it right from a brief memo barely approved by a skeptical Piller and Berman into the most torturous yet creative break session this staff had ever seen. “We didn’t have time to do a story, so we went ahead and ‘broke’ this … which is the most risky thing in the world to do,” Jeri Taylor said. “… They’re painstaking, they take days, and if you lose it you’re doomed!” Finally, after three days in the same room, they let Piller in to hear the story and, hearing it fresh without a story outline, he was instantly hooked on what had emerged.

  In an interesting twist, Braga noted that another challenge was to write the compelling last scene to the same-named play within the play—or, in other words, “write a famous play without ever having been famous!” The writer also said he’d had second thoughts about his frequent use of the word “crazy” in light of current mental-health trends but decided to shrug it off. “People use this word, it’s a good word, and I decided to use it,” he said. “When you get too ‘politically correct’ it shows, and what’s ‘PC’ today won’t be five years from now. Star Trek is a show that transcends time, and we try not to date it.”

  A fellow inmate (Susanna Thompson) tries to convince Commander Riker he is insane.

  Berman recalled that James Conway had been a well-received director way back in Season 1 (“Justice”/109, “The Neutral Zone”/126), but had simply been too busy in the nineteenth century as executive producer on The Guns of Paradise, among other projects, to “return” to the future before this skillfully handled outing. FX supervisor Ron B. Moore praised the cast, recalling how the five-minute scene with Riker and his mates as holograms was shot all in one take with just a little rehearsal and no slips—and then repeated perfectly for a second angle. The initial look of Riker’s “immolation” was thought too similar to the Time Trax effect, so a simple fade-out was used; the “shards of glass” shatter was done by Joe Walter.

  Like Barclay (“The Nth Degree”/193), the first known student in Beverly’s new backstory of amateur theater, Riker too shows the miracles her coaching can do (“A Fistful of Datas”/234); for the performance she wears her off-the-shoulder dress from “Allegiance” (166). Through the makeup, two familiar TNG faces can be seen here: David Selburg was lit-historian Whalen in “The Big Goodbye” (113), while Susanna Thompson had earlier played Varel, the female Romulan officer of a disabled science ship (“The Next Phase”/224). Her inmate here mentions several “real” starships, the old Yorktown (from 1967’s “Obsession”) and the Yosemite (“Realm of Fear”/228). Another TNG vet, stunt coordinator Dennis Madalone (seen without makeup in “Identity Crisis”/ 192, among others), steps out once again as an extra as Mavek’s assistant guard. And pattern enhancers have been used before (“Power Play”/215, “Time’s Arrow”/226, “Ship in a Bottle”/238, then “inheritance”/262).

  SUSPICIONS

  * * *

  Production No.: 248 Aired: Week of May 10, 1993

  Stardate: 46830.1 Code: su

  Directed by Cliff Bole

  Written by Joe Menosky and Naren Shankar

  GUEST CAST

  Nurse Alyssa Ogawa: Patti Yasutake

  Kurak: Tricia O’Neil

  Dr. Reyga: Peter Slutsker

  Dr. Jo’Bril: James Horan

  Dr. Christopher: John S. Ragin

  Dr. T’Pan: Joan Stuart Morris

  Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg

  Computer Voice: Majel Barrett

  * * *

  Dr. Crusher’s foray into “science diplomacy” is cut short when the Takaran scientist Jo’Bril, one of those responding to her call to witness n
ew shield technology developed by the Ferengi scientist Dr. Reyga, is killed while testing it.

  Dr. Reyga vows to prove himself when Dr. Crusher stops the tests of the “metaphasic shield,” designed to protect a vessel even within a sun’s corona, but soon he is found dead of an apparent suicide. Crusher suspects foul play, especially after a Klingon scientist admits she threatened Reyga when the Ferengi accused her of sabotage in the first test.

  Crusher wants to do an autopsy to gather clues, but Takahan customs—and thus the prime directive as well—forbid it. She proceeds anyway, finds nothing, and is relieved of duty to await court-martial after Reyga’s family and government protest her act.

  With Guinan’s reassuring advice to pursue her gut feelings, and with nothing left to lose, Crusher presses on. When Data guesses that a shield disruptor might leave tetryon traces, Nurse Ogawa risks her career to help Crusher find that tetryons were indeed present in Jo’Bril’s body.

  But it is not proof, and Crusher desperately tries one more route: testing the shield herself to see if only sabotage ruined the first test. It works, but Jo’Bril—actually alive thanks to the death-like self-stasis ability of his race—has stowed aboard to steal it for use as a weapon. During a fight Crusher gets the upper hand, Jo’Bril is killed—and Reyga’s work is vindicated.

  Dr. Crusher confers with Klingon scientist Dr. Kurak (Tricia O’Neil).

  Like Marina Sirtis earlier, Gates McFadden finally gets the chance to step out in a nontraditional role with a story the staff dubbed “Beverly as Quincy,” after Jack Klugman’s great series about a crime-solving medical examiner (and one of Jeri Taylor’s past producer credits). But if “Frame of Mind” had the longest single break session in recent TNG years, this tale started had the most break sessions—five through both seasons, by Shankar’s tally, with three rewrites once in script form.