Picard is kidnapped and replaced with a double whose actions test the loyalty of the Enterprise crew. Meanwhile, the real captain is trapped with three other hostages in a bizarre cell and must devote his time not only to escaping but to keeping the peace among his cell mates.
The false Picard arouses suspicion when he orders a close look at a well-known yet dangerous pulsar without telling Riker, joins in the officers’ poker game, leads the crew in a drinking song, and seduces Dr. Crusher.
The mystery behind his kidnapping is revealed when one of the real Picard’s cell mates, disguised as a Starfleet cadet, mentions a classified mission only Picard’s crew knew about, leading him to finger her as the enemy in their midst. She transforms herself into an energy-being, and is joined by two others of her race. Their captives were being studied for their reactions to authority, like lab rats.
The captain and the aliens return to the Enterprise just as Riker is leading a “mutiny” against the impostor, who is then transformed into another one of the energy-beings. Picard then gives the energy-beings a taste of their own medicine by trapping them in an energy field. He releases them only after lecturing that their “research” amounts to kidnapping and is immoral.
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Another turn on the old “kidnapped for alien experiments” theme (also seen in the original-series episodes “The Cage,” “The Menagerie,” and “The Empath,” among others), this segment still provides its own little gems: the false Picard’s wooing and then dropping of a stunned Beverly, and his leading Ten-Forward in a drinking song and a round of ales. For the record, the song is “Heart of Oak,” first performed in 1770 with lyrics by David Garrick and music by Dr. William Boyce.
Haro’s costume is our first look at a modern Academy cadet uniform and only our second look at the Bolians (“Conspiracy”), whom we learn are from Bolius IX. Picard visited Esoqq’s anarchic world, Chalna, twelve years earlier while he was captain of the Stargazer ­ or a year before that ship was lost at Maxia. Tholl hails from the second planet of Mizar, known to astronomy buffs as Zeta Ursa Majoris, the larger of two optical binary stars in the second position inward on the Big Dipper’s handle. We also see that Picard’s quarters are located at Deck 9/3601.
Searching for survivors from a freighter that’s been missing for seven years, the Enterprise visits the matriarchal planet Angel I and gets a frosty reception from its female leaders. Riker especially seems out of place as Yar and Troi handle the diplomacy, but he finds a more personal way to gain leader Beata’s trust.
Survivors are found, but they refuse to return. They have taken wives from among outcasts on the planet who don’t like the status quo: dominant women and submissive men.
Back aboard Enterprise crises break out as a virus from a holodeck file ravages the ship and Starfleet wants a response to a reported Romulan incursion near the Neutral Zone.
The renegade women are discovered and sentenced to death along with their Federation mates as enemies of society. Riker wants to intercede and violate the Prime Directive by beaming the outcasts aboard, but with the epidemic in full swing, Dr. Crusher forbids it.
Finally both dilemmas are resolved: the doctor finds an antidote to the virus, and Riker persuades Beata to forgo the death penalty. She allows the group instead to be exiled to a remote part of the planet, and the Enterprise warps out to counter the reported Romulan activity.
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Heavy rewrites changed Patrick Barry’s original story ­ a direct, action-filled allegory on apartheid using the sexes instead of the races to make its point. In the original, Riker beams down with an otherwise all-female away team and stops the leader, “Victoria,” from striking him. Tasha immediately phaser-stuns Riker to prevent his on-the-spot execution by the natives. Data, with his machine nature, is held in higher esteem than Riker, who is thrown into jail with other slaves on the eve of a revolt led by the marooned human, Lucas Jones. Jones is killed after a verbal attack on Victoria, and his death inspires the rebels to strike at last as the Enterprise leaves. A recovered Picard, the only one taken ill in this version, is reassured by Number One that the members of his team were only witnesses to, and not instigators of, the uprising.
Except for a nice scene in which Troi and Tasha get to guffaw at Riker’s revealing outfit, the revised teleplay is a one-note morality tale with yet another shipboard disease as the subplot. Director Michael Rhodes, a four-time Emmy winner on the series Insights, came to his TNG assignment as part of a deal with the series The Bronx Zoo, also shot at Paramount. He recalls that he gave Wil Wheaton his first starring role, in a 1981 ABC After School Special.
Two notes of interest in this episode: Troi remarks that Angel I’s matriarchal oligarchy is “very much like” Betazed; and the Romulans are mentioned for the first time in TNG, as a reported threat in the Neutral Zone. And for students of stage design, Herman Zimmerman’s cleverly designed Stage 16 sets, which were used as Soong’s lab in the preceding episode, were re-dressed here and would be altered throughout the rest of the season to get even more mileage out of his budget.
An odd mystery unfolds when La Forge, while replaying the personal logs of the missing lieutenant Aquiel Uhnari and befriending her dog ­ finds himself fall in love with her as he probes into the mysterious abandonment of her two-man relay station on the Klingon-UFP border.
With DNA residue found at the station, suspects yielded by her logs range all the way from the Klingon Morag, who had occasionally harrassed her, to her own crewmate, Keith Rocha ­ until unexpectedly, the Klingon’s superior delivers both Morag and Aquiel to the Enterprise, where she returns La Forge’s affection.
Morag and Aquiel then become suspects in Rocha’s disappearance, especially when the station crew’s ongoing fights, Aquiel’s quick temper, and her log tampering are revealed.
Despite La Forge’s support, clues are pointing to Uhnari’s guilt when the DNA residue shocks Crusher by suddenly assuming the shape of her hand. Picard’s staff realizes that a coalescent creature is at work and had taken the form of Rocha, then Aquiel’s dog ­ and La Forge barely escapes the creature when it wants to kill him and take his form.
Her name cleared but her career tainted, Uhnari can only bid La Forge a fond farewell and hope the two can meet again.
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This story, generally felt to be one of the few disappointments of the season, originally began as yet another try at providing Geordi a recurring romance while tying into Piller’s suggestion of a mystery in the manner of the classic movie Laura ­ falling in love with someone who first appears to be dead and then turns up alive. “We now portray the twenty-fourth century as being full of single people,” Taylor observed. “We lost the O’Briens [to DS9] and everybody else is footloose and fancy free. It seems to me that’s not the only comment we should be making ­ that marriage and serious relationships DO survive into the twenty-fourth century. But how to tell a love story with an SF spin on it?”
Moore said the problem was that no one was ever satisfied with the person “whodunit.” Aquiel was initially to have been the killer, but when the plot seemed to be veering toward a Basic Instinct clone, both the Klingon and the dead Keith Rocha ­ named by Moore for another one of his high-school friends ­ were in turn considered for the murderer and then dropped as seeming too obvious. “At one point,” he recalled, “we finally said ‘Why not the dog?’ He had always been in the script; we had meant to leave him with Geordi from that time on.”
Taylor praised actress Renee Jones but felt she had too much of a burden to live up to, and the chemistry with Geordi never clicked. “Star Trek sometimes does to actors what it does to writers ­ people who are very effective in one kind of thing feel very exposed,” she said. “So I don’t think this was quite her cup of tea.” Despite TNG’s ongoing tough luck with mysteries (“The Royale”, “A Matter of Perspective”), Taylor vowed to keep plugging away (see “Suspicions”). Even FX supervisor Ronald B. Moore commented he was not completely satisfied with the creature, a computer-generated effect subcontracted out that was delivered as promised but not in time to do any of the touch-ups to add the texture and motion he felt was needed.
To make the relay station, RS-47 was Letter on a redress of the module from the cryo capsule of “The Neutral Zone”, and carries it on its shuttle as well. We also learn that Geordi drinks iced coffee, and keeps a Phaser II in his quarters; that stored phasers are all set to Level 1; and there’s been no Klingon raid on the UFP in “Seven years” ­ a fact Moore created to show that things can still be shaky in the Alliance. Also, Geordi learned Haliian and many other languages during his “Starfleet brat” childhood (“Imaginary Friend”), and the Enterprise’s computer voice is also used on the station. Somewhat strangely: Dr. Crusher beams in meters away and on a different level from the rest of the away team during its first visit; Worf touches hot metal only seconds after he’s cut through it with a phaser; Geordi has the same long artwork on his wall as Data has; and actress Jones has a minor blooper when she refers to Starbase “12” instead of 212.
Despite its faults, a sense of humor still reigned in “Aquiel”: Moore said it was all he and Braga could do to not push for their preferred episode title of “Murder, My Pet!” And until the plot change made it moot, a planned closing scene had Data in Geordi’s quarters, commenting with a matter-of-fact “Spot doesn’t do that” as his friend ticked off his various newly discovered problems like chewed boots and soiled carpet. Finally, after Maura trots over to drool on his own boots, the android gets to deliver the punch line: “Geordi, I think I am a cat person!” Maura (played by Friday, a terrier mix) was also Commissioner Robert Scorpio’s dog for four years on General Hospital.
“Aquiel” also marked the beginning of an in-house joke in the manner of original Star Trek’s “Jefferies tubes” (“The Hunted”): the “Mees panel,” a script note referring to set decorator Jim Mees’ ongoing complaints about the cost ­ about $1,000 ­ of detailing the interior of an opened wall console. “Ron Moore and I have had a long-standing running joke,” he explained. “Every show he ever wrote they always ended up going into a panel and fixing something. And I said to him: ‘Ron, do you know we’re not on a real ship here? Do you know that if they pull that metal thing off there isn’t anything there? It costs money to do it, it takes time to design these things!’ So they now call them the Mees panels, because I’ve bitched and moaned so much!”
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Arsenal of Freedom, The”@2Next Generation episode #21
Production No.: 121
Aired: Week of April 11, 1988
Stardate: 41798.2
Directed by Les Landau
Teleplay by Richard Manning and Hans Beimler
Story by Maurice Hurley and Robert Lewin
GUEST CAST
The Peddler: Vincent Schiavelli
Captain Paul Rice: Marco Rodriguez
Chief Engineer Lieutenant Logan: Vyto Ruginis
Ensign Lian T’Su: Julia Nickson
Lieutenant (j.g.) Orfil Solis: George de la Pena
The Enterprise is sent to the planet Minos to search for the missing USS Drake. The famed world of arms merchants hails the ship with a commercial for weapons, but surprisingly the sensors show no sentient life on the planet.
On Minos, Riker meets the Drake’s captain, an old friend, but quickly realizes he is dealing with a holographic projection. It transforms itself into a small flying fighter drone that encases Riker in a stasis field. The drone is destroyed, but increasingly smarter ones appear.
While fleeing them, Picard and Dr. Crusher fall into a cavern; she’s hurt and they can’t get out. Above them, Data, Riker, and Yar fight off the drones, but one of them goes into orbit to attack the Enterprise. Left in command there, La Forge must contend with not only a green helm crew but also a pompous engineer who wants command. After separating the ship, he leaves orbit to devise a defense.
In the cavern, Picard stumbles onto the core of the mess ­ an automated “ultimate defense” system, which he realizes was probably responsible for killing the Minosians as well. La Forge pulls a tricky atmospheric tactic to destroy the attacking probe, just as Picard discovers the attack is an automated demonstration and ends it.
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This episode was originally conceived as a Picard-Crusher love story, but Lewin recalled that Gene Roddenberry changed his mind and opted instead for this extremely ambitious action-adventure yarn/morality tale about arms merchants. Les Landau, an assistant director who became the first of many production staffers allowed to direct, suggested that it be Beverly Crusher and not Picard who is hurt in the fall into the pit, putting the captain in a “fish out of water” situation.
This fast-moving hour for once made good use of the entire ensemble, and gave Geordi his first shot at command. We also learned a little about Beverly’s background, and for the last time until the fourth-season opener we saw the expensive ship-separation sequence.
The cave set was built not on Stage 16 with the aboveground exteriors but on the cargo bay set, where Stewart recalled he and McFadden had to deal with flea-infested sand. Riker also gets in a good joke, telling the image of Captain Rice that he’s from the USS Lollipop ­ ”it’s a good ship.”
In beaming down to meet with the Kes, a society whose bid to join the Federation is the first by a nonunified world, Picard and Dr. Crusher are intercepted and taken hostage by the Prytt ­ the Kes’s isolated and xenophobic neighbors on Kesprytt ­ to discourage their suspected Kes-UFP union against them.
As Riker and Worf discuss their options with Mauric, the Kes begin to show a few paranoid signs of their own. Picard and Crusher escape with the help of a Kes agent but find they have been rigged with devices that open up uncontrollable telepathy between the two.
During their escape and flight toward the Kes-Prytt border, Picard and Crusher discover they become sick if they try to separate and regain some privacy. That closeness leads them to find that not only are they strongly attracted to each other, but that Picard was once in love with her yet repressed it because of Jack and his death.
Prytt guards cause a detour that delays their beam-up, leading Mauric to turn the tables and accuse Riker of a UFP-Prytt conspiracy. Riker beams Loric up against her will for a face-off, but the unending roadblock leaves him telling the Kes that their membership bid will be denied and that Prytt will be invaded by Starfleet investigators unless the two are returned.
Back aboard finally, Picard asks Crusher about their newfound feelings but she prefers to just stay friends ­ at least for now.
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The long-hinted-at spark between Picard and Dr. Crusher is finally explored in this story from twenty-three-year-old Nick Sagan, son of well-known physicist Carl Sagan and a summa cum laude graduate of UCLA’s film school. He won Gates McFadden’s praise for “turning her season around.” After an uneventful session with DS9’s staff, the newest of TNG’s favored freelancers recalled that his idea of Picard and Crusher kidnapped by a cult group and physically shackled together as in The 39 Steps was the last premise of twelve he’d pitched a year earlier; the telepathic link was added from an uncredited writer’s premise. “He was one of the most comfortable freelancers we’ve ever had,” Taylor said of Sagan, whose optioned screenplay for Orson Scott Card’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning Ender’s Game novel first impressed her.
Sagan, a longtime fan inspired to writing by role-play games and Patrick McGoohan’s visionary The Prisoner series, welcomed the chance to finish Crusher’s oft-interrupted tease “Jean-Luc, there’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you” in times of peril (see “Remember Me”) and other close calls (“The Naked Now”, “Allegiance”, “Qpid”). Mauric’s B-story aboard ship was originally more “an oblique cross between Get Smart and James Bond” in tone, Sagan recalled, but it was deemed too “over the top” and in Ron Moore’s polish draft the gags were dropped ­ such as Riker being put on hold for twenty-fourth-century “elevator music” and an irritated Worf smashing a “sound-altering device” that makes such a racket that no one can hear himself think. Also cut was the fact that the link was drawing Jean-Luc and Beverly into an addiction to each other’s brain waves and eventually a hive mind. Earlier, Sagan added, a shared kiss and a hint of possibly more by the duo around their campfire didn’t survive the story break stage: Berman and Piller didn’t want such a drastic change with the movies on the horizon.
Taylor recalled the fan buzz about the episode and spoke to the mail that poured in when the two leads didn’t draw closer at the show’s end. “Where do you go from there? It starts to become a soap opera, and Picard would be sealed off from other stories,” she explained, praising the Stewart-McFadden chemistry. “Also it seems perfectly legitimate to me, emotionally, that two people who have gone that long without ever coming together ­ there must be a reason for that.” Of course, fan demand for a Beverly/Jean-Luc tryst would soon get tweaked and then some in the show’s final (“All Good Things”).
Sagan’s place names came from an original entry of a signboard of more famous mythical places, such as Oz and Narnia, from his Ender’s Game screenplay. A two-day return to the Bronson Caves area of Griffin Park near the Hollywood sign (“Darmok”, “Ensign Ro”, “Homeward”) provided the landscape; in fact, a gag photo was snapped with Stewart and McFadden in the foreground of the Tinseltown landmark. Science adviser Bormanis noted the Prytt mind-control devices should have been attached on the side of the head near the higher-reasoning center of the temporal lobe, but plot demanded that they be hidden on the back of the neck. We also learn that “associative membership” in the Federation is available, and that Ogawa had a late association with another crewman before being engaged to Andrew Powell (“Lower Decks”).
Trivially, Crusher’s fear of heights was revealed once before (“Chain of Command, Part I”), as was her grandmother’s story (“The Arsenal of Freedom”), with more to come (“Sub Rosa”); her pet phrase “Penny for your thoughts” is not new (“The Perfect Mate”). But this story raises a mystery: since Picard didn’t know Beverly until after Walker Keel had introduced her (“Conspiracy”) to Jack, her remark that the trio spent more and more time together implies she was with Jack on the Stargazer, at least initially ­ unless it returned to base often, but that seems unlikely.
Though visual FX were not a big part of the story, they took a lot of time ­ including six hours of expensive blue-screen shooting for the fireball cave, which injected motion into the otherwise static lockdown of split-screen work with the “pan-and-scan” technique used when adapting a movie’s anamorphic frame to the squarer television image. After director of photography Jonathan West was filmed walking through the cave with a bright photobulb for reference, the actors were shot running their action as live FX men Dick Brownfield and Will Thoms blew their hair with fans to match the fireball’s close pass; the crew men were then erased from the shot. The fireball elements, rented from unused stock shot FX modeler Tony Doublin, were then composited with the live elements, with other details ­ shifting light intensity and the images getting sharper when closer to camera ­ added digitally after that. Rare (for TNG) was the visible forcefield at the Kes border, complete with a costly and time-consuming nonstatic pan, after Stipes’ coordinator Joe Bauer noted that the fugitives had no reason to recognize an unfamiliar planet’s invisible forcefields. An unused DS9 element shot by Gary Hutzel provided the forcefield “hole.”
