Worf and his shipmates are disturbed to find that his foster brother Nikolai, a cultural observer on primitive Boraal II, has sheltered the natives in caves to protect them from the planet’s suddenly dissipating atmosphere ­ an obvious Prime Directive violation.
Like Nikolai, Worf assumes Boraalan guise to blend in and assess the social damage. Picard insists on true noninterference under the Prime Directive, which would mean the Boraalans would perish along with their world.
But Nikolai won’t back down, and he secretly creates a duplicate of the Boraalan caves in the holodeck. He transports them, planning to keep them safe until a new home planet can be found and the natives transported there, thinking only that the “storms” of their world have at last dissipated.
Picard and Worf are furious but feel forced to go along now, especially since Nikolai reveals he has fathered a Boraalan child and plans to stay with the people. In addition, one Boraalan, Vorin, is overwhelmed when he accidentally wanders out into the Enterprise; when he can’t choose between staying or returning once he knows the truth, he kills himself.
Boraal’s plasmonic storms harm the holodeck system so much it almost collapses, but before it does a new planet is chosen and reached, and the Boraalans transplanted. The brothers, despite their differences, finally come to value their cooperation and part on warmer terms. But for Picard and the others, the experience has left the pros and cons of the Prime Directive just as unresolved as ever.
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Yet another celebrity fan, actor Paul Sorvino, appears in this story, which not only continued the season’s “family” theme but re-aired the old Prime Directive debate (“Pen Pals”, “Who Watches the Watchers?”, et al.). Director Singer, working his sixth and last TNG outing, was concerned going in about working with well-known Sorvino and ensuring the Boraalan society was believable, but while those fears proved groundless he soon found his chief worry would be Mother Nature: surrounded by wildfires on location November 2 in the familiar Bronson Caves area of Griffith Park.
“We were simply told ‘Finish, get out. No time to talk, get out’ “ he recalled. “The fire people said ‘We can’t protect you ­ there’s only one way in and one way out and you’re a sitting duck and the fires are out of control.’ “ He and line producer Merri D. Howard praised the crew for getting shut down and out in about forty minutes ­ and was thankful the area didn’t burn after all, saving the extra expense of scouting a matching area. “It was exceptional ­ within two hours we were filming back here,” Howard added. The schedule was reshuffled, only a half-day was lost, and the second time out proved more efficient with familiarity.
It was tough matching the outdoor camp on location, with the “fake” holodeck scene on stage, and then in the “real” nighttime scene shot onstage ­ a nightmare made even worse with the rescheduling due to the fire. “We had to go back in there, undress what we’d spent the whole day on before, put it up on the stage, and then undress it and bring it back to the park,” set decorator Jim Mees recalled. “And it’s a hundred degrees, and people are digging holes and building a stairway with seventy steps; my boys have not had a fun year!” Good thing the “village” included only fifteen actors and extras.
As for the story, Taylor had nixed as “strained credibility” Steingasser’s premise about fooling primitives with a holodeck home mockup ­ until Echevarria had successfully married it to Stape’s idea about finally seeing Worf’s once-mentioned foster brother (“Heart of Glory”). “I do that with Michael,” Taylor said of a writer’s persistence. “He’ll say no and I’ll say, well, I’m gonna wait and maybe I can try this again ­ and I’m glad the boys do the same thing, because I am not the be-all and the end-all of knowing what will work.” Still, the unanswered questions about the Prime Directive’s application don’t reflect well on the crew and Starfleet, Shankar noted; Echevarria wondered if the premise could even serve as a model for future such cases but recalled that Piller wanted to keep the status quo and the hard choices it forced: whether better to watch a planet die or incur the later suicide of those who could not handle the “change.”
Though recalling that he was a bit more “temperamental” than TV actors, Taylor noted the nice serendipity of Sorvino asking to be on the series just as the teddy-bear-sized role of Nikolai came up ­ making him a believable echo of his “father,” played by Theodore Bikel (“Family”). Nikolai’s comment that Worf had “changed a lot in four years” implies they must have met at that time, possibly at Earth during the starship’s post-Borg refit (“Family”); in any case, actor Dorn got to go without his Klingon makeup for the first time, donning only a Boraalan nose.
On the trivia side, the Enterprise observes the warp five limit (“Force of Nature”); stellar cartography is seen again (“Lessons”, “Liaisons”, Generations); Dr. Crusher still hasn’t got the hang of Pulaski’s “memory wipe” (“Pen Pals”, “Who Watches the Watchers?”); and mention of “Holodeck 5” on Deck 10 implies that more than the first four on Deck 11 are now available, as with Holodeck 7 (“The Perfect Mate”). On location, a last-minute request for food on a spit for the Boraalans’ camp was solved thanks to the day’s catered set meal; prop man Alan Sims took the leftover chicken fillets, wrapped them on a stick, and charred the whole thing to look like rabbit!
Shankar was disappointed that budget limits prevented more FX shots from heightening the crisis of the failing holodeck, but FX supervisor Ron B. Moore did save time and money by using retouched old grid elements (shot at numerous angles for “Schisms”) for all the “signs of La Forge” save one ­ the grid in the water, which was done with a “live” grid under the small pond.
