While surveying a cluster of systems for colonization, the Enterprise traces a distress signal to a small world, where they find crash debris and one survivor ­ a young Borg.
Fighting his impulse to let it die, Picard accedes to Dr. Crusher’s humanitarian desire to care for the Borg. The rest of the crew are skeptical, especially Guinan, who points out that others of his kind will follow and learn of their presence if they take the young Borg aboard.
But cut off from his race’s collective consciousness and influenced by the crew who help him survive and heal, the Borg known as “Third of Five” becomes more and more of an individual. He eventually acquires a name ­ Hugh ­ and starts to refer to himself as “I” instead of “we.”
His evolution affects the others, who had always viewed the Borg as an intractable, unrelenting foe. When even Guinan is thrown into doubt, Picard decides to visit Hugh himself. Assuming the role of Locutus, the captain is shocked to hear Hugh plead with him not to assimilate his “friends,” like Geordi.
The captain calls off a plan to plant a virus in Hugh to disable his race, figuring that the concept of the individual could be just as effective. Hugh himself opts to return to the crash site, and his newfound friend La Forge goes with him. Will Hugh’s new memory and sense of self remain intact? Hugh returns to his stoic Borg demeanor when others of his race arrive, but the glance he shoots Geordi at beam-up is telling: he’ll remember.
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The clamor for “another Borg show” had swelled ever since the third-season cliff-hanger “The Best of Both Worlds”), but the dilemma facing the production and writing team was obvious: when your all-out foe is so dangerous that you barely escape him once, what can you do for an encore? And how can you afford to film it?
Jeri Taylor, who provided uncredited help in polishing the script, commented that the story meant “we can never treat the Borg the same way again.” Guinan may never be the same again, either; aside from Q, the Borg were about the only thing that could shatter her aloofness and calm detachment. But one by one we saw her and all the regulars, including Picard, examine their own prejudices. “Just when you think it’s safe to hate the Borg,” Piller says, “we make you look him in the eye and ask if you could still kill him.”
When Riker is offered command of his own ship, the Enterprise heads for Starbase Montgomery to meet with the civilian strategist who will brief him on the assignment. That strategist turns out to be his father, Kyle, whom Riker hasn’t seen in fifteen years. Time has not softened the first officer’s hostility toward the older man, and he summarily rejects his father’s efforts at reconciliation.
As Dr. Pulaski ­ an old flame of Kyle’s ­ and Troi ponder why Number One is so bitter, Wesley, La Forge, and Data try to diagnose the reason for Worf’s increased tenseness.
When they discover that Worf is out of sorts because he missed a ritual marking the decade since his Age of Ascension, they surprise him by setting up a reenactment of the Klingon spiritual rite on the holodeck.
As Troi and Pulaski compare notes on “their men,” Riker’s continued rebuffs lead Kyle to challenge his son to an anbo-jyutsu match ­ a martial art the younger man never beat him at.
The two finally resolve their feelings for each other, and Number One stuns the bridge crew by revealing his intention to turn down the offered command post and remain aboard Enterprise.
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Here’s another case where a subplot ­ Worf’s Age of Ascension ceremony on the holodeck ­ almost overshadows the main story line, the return of Riker’s father. The segment is good in that it reveals Number One’s back story and brings Pulaski closer into the fold of characters, but it’s hard to compete with Klingon heritage for sheer interest.
Here Riker for the second time refuses a command post, this one on the Aries. We learn that his mother died when he was two and he left home at age fifteen. The almost forgotten Riker-Troi relationship gets a shot in the arm here as he confides to her his fears about advancement ­ and she and Pulaski compare notes about men.
The Tholians, a hot-planet race with a possible hive-mind culture who were introduced in an original-series episode called “The Tholian Web,” are mentioned here in connection with a conflict a dozen years earlier ­ an attack that almost killed Kyle Riker and introduced him to Pulaski. The Tholians would occasionally pop up in conversation later on, in “Peak Performance” and “Reunion”.
This show’s hoopla included a visit by the Entertainment Tonight cameras, who were following ET host and unabashed Trek fan John Tesh through the two hours of makeup necessary to turn him into one of Worf’s Ascension Chamber tormentors. Tesh, all six feet six of him, is the Klingon closest to the viewer on the left. Thanks to the “Klingon shortage” caused by the simultaneous shooting of Star Trek V, wardrobe was running low and two of the Klingons got to wear old Planet of the Apes boots!
Longtime character actor Mitchell Ryan who plays Kyle Riker, may be best known as the villain in Lethal Weapon. Lance Spellerberg appeared as Chief Herbert once before (“We’ll Always Have Paris”). And, as with the Iconian artifact in “Contagion”, Sternbach filled the anbo-jyutsu mats and gymnasium set pieces with a myriad of anime references in Japanese.
La Forge is disturbed to hear from former shipmate Susanna Leitjen that they are the only two members remaining from an away team sent to Tarchannen III five years ago.
The others are disappearing and apparently headed for the planet, initially investigated after a small colony disappeared there without a trace. On the surface, three shuttles but no life signs are found.
Leitjen tells La Forge she senses the others nonetheless. She then becomes unstable and has to be beamed to sickbay. Finding that Leitjen’s blood chemistry has been altered, Dr. Crusher guesses the others have undergone the same process and have somehow been transformed into another species. Leitjen worries that the same thing will happen to her and La Forge. After she makes a dash to get off the ship, Geordi finds her skin broken out in blotches and her middle fingers fused together.
La Forge, working harder than ever, finds a shadow not noticed before on the team’s original log tapes, indicating another entity nearby. Then he too falls ill and leaves the ship, evolving faster than any of the others.
Meantime, Dr. Crusher finds and removes a parasite from Leitjen that had been rewriting her DNA. They beam down to the planet’s surface, where La Forge has been almost completely transformed; he is invisible except by ultraviolet light. Only his old friend’s coaxing brings him back in time to remove the parasite.
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Rescued from the slush pile of spec scripts, this story by fan writer Timothy de Haas originally concerned two non-regular crew members. The glowing transformed aliens gave Westmore, Blackman, and a company called Wildfire a chance to pioneer a remarkable optical effect using ultraviolet light. “MTV is using that a lot now,” David Livingston said of the ultraviolet effect. “We didn’t do it just to be glitzy ­ we did it because it tied in dramatically with the story.”
Originally, Brannon Braga recalled, the script linked Geordi and Susanna romantically, but the word came down to give the engineer a break with his “failed love” record, which began in “Booby Trap” and continued in “Galaxy’s Child”. Braga said his first draft was more “horrific” with many more aliens on the surface, but Geordi wasn’t transformed; keying the mood more to terror, of a type he described as “restrained and psychoanalytical,” and involving Geordi in the emotional trauma of the change made the show click.
A nice continuity touch here is the use of the older-style uniforms, phasers, and tricorders for the visual log from the Victory’s away team five years earlier ­ note the opening stardate, 40164.7 ­ with Geordi as a command-division lieutenant (j.g.) when he came from the Victory (“Elementary, Dear Data”). The shuttlepod Cousteau from the Aries carries its ship’s number, NCC-45167; it was the first ship command offered to Riker, in “The Icarus Factor”.
After debuting in the sciences division (“Where No One Has Gone Before”) and dying in the guise of security noncom Ramos (“Heart of Glory”), stunt coordinator Dennis Madalone here became Transporter Chief Hedrick; he’s listed as a transporter technician, but he wears an ensign’s pip. Likewise, Yasutake’s recurring character finally gained a last name, Ogawa, here after Beverly had already called her by her first name, Alyssa in “Clues”.
Extra Randy Pflug models the humanoid shape that Geordi creates from the cast shadow, while among those wearing the ultraviolet suits were Mark and Brian, two L.A. disc jockeys who had become NBC variety show hosts.
Story by Ronald Wilderson, Jean Matthias, and Richard Fliegel
GUEST CAST
Clara Sutter: Noley Thornton
Isabella: Shay Astar
Ensign Daniel Sutter: Jeff Allin
Alexander: Brian Bonsall
Nurse Alyssa Ogawa: Patti Yasutake
Ensign Felton: Sheila Franklin
Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg
Troi tries to assure an officer that the “imaginary friend” created by his little daughter, Clara, is a normal reaction to a childhood of constant change. But as the Enterprise prepares to explore the FGC-47 nebula, Clara’s friend Isabella materializes. Soon she is getting Clara into all sorts of trouble, leading her into areas of the ship that are off limits to children, like Main Engineering and Ten-Forward.
Meanwhile, the Enterprise has become surrounded by strands of an inexplicable nature that are draining the ship’s power. At the same time, Clara and Worf’s son Alexander are becoming fast friends ­ until Isabella sabotages their relationship. Clara’s playmate now turns even more frightening, telling the little girl that she and all of the others aboard are about to die.
Summoned by Clara’s father to help, Troi tries to prove to Clara that her imaginary playmate can’t hurt her ­ and is promptly stunned by Isabella. Picard realizes there is a connection between the energy drain his ship is experiencing and Clara’s playmate, a fact soon confirmed by Isabella. She says her kind will feed off the ship’s energy, rejecting Picard’s offer of alternative sources. She says the ship deserves to be destroyed because of the way her friend Clara is treated. But ultimately she relents in the face of Clara’s pleas.
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As reflected in the credits, this was another script turned out after several tries by free-lancers. Braga chose to develop it in place of one of the year’s abortive Q stories, and by the time it was finished, his original “negative attitude” toward the tale had turned around as much as the concept of the alien. Curious and benign in earlier drafts, Isabella took on more menacing Bad Seed-style traits in the finished script.
Guinan was not intended to be part of this show, but Whoopi Goldberg became available and was written in just days before filming. Originally her cloud-watching scene with Data was written for Beverly and Deanna and, later, for Guinan and Deanna. The Samarian coral fish she spies is likely from the same planet as the Samarian Sunset drink that Data prepared for Troi in “Conundrum”) after losing a bet. Guinan also talks of her own imaginary friend, a Tarcassian razor beast.
For the first time we hear about Geordi’s parents. Both were Starfleet officers; his father was an exobiologist, and his mother a command officer, apparently once assigned to a Neutral Zone outpost.
Data takes one more step on the road to understanding humanity when a shipmate, Jenna D’Sora, begins to view him as more than a friend.
The two had grown close while studying a dark-matter nebula, the Enterprise’s latest assignment. After getting mixed advice from his friends when she comes on to him, Data decides to pursue the relationship and creates a special program to provide a guide to love. He and Jenna have their ups and downs, and eventually his true nature gets through to her: his seemingly artificial behavior is, of course, artificial.
Meanwhile, a Class M planet in the nebula suddenly winks out and then reappears. Data theorizes that the nebula causes pockets of deformed matter that phase out anything they contact, and with his ship’s vital areas endangered, Picard orders the Enterprise out of the nebula.
But the starship is too large to sense and dodge the pockets, so the captain pilots a scout shuttlepod himself to relay back course directions. His craft is nearly lost, but the ship breaks clear at last.
That crisis over, Jenna tells Data she now realizes she went from one unemotional boyfriend to another who was even more so and now she wants to break the pattern. He agrees and erases his special program without a second thought.
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Following up on Jonathan Frakes’s lead, Patrick Stewart became the second cast member to direct an episode. The story chosen for Stewart’s debut was a no-fail Data show by Ronald D. Moore and Joe Menosky that confronted questions about the android and love that TNG had backed away from in “The Ensigns of Command”.
Television SF watchers will recognize Michele Scarabelli as Sam Francisco’s wife Susan on Alien Nation. A name for Pamela Winslow’s character had been mentioned during the Paxan affair in “Clues”. Among the uncredited extras were Ritt Henn as the alien bassoonist, Phil Mallory as the French horn player, Gary Baxley as engineer Ensign Thorne, and Georgina Shore as the ill-fated Lieutenant (j.g.) Van Mayter.
Introduced earlier in “Data’s Day”, the android’s cat finally gets a name here ­ Spot. And the O’Briens turn out to be a musical family: Keiko plays the clarinet, and Miles is a cellist, as we learned in “The Ensigns of Command”. Meanwhile, Data is seen to have learned to play the oboe and the flute as well as the violin. Longer-term Trek references include a mention of Saurian brandy, often referred to in original-Trek stories like “The Enemy Within.” Also mentioned is milk from a targ, the Klingon boar that can be either a pet or a food source. Transparent aluminum, the subject of some necessary historical meddling by Scotty and McCoy in Star Trek IV, is spoken of here, too.
Dr. Juliana O’Donnell Soong Tainer: Fionnula Flanagan
Dr. Pran Tainer: William Lithgow
With the Enterprise on hand to help reheat the cooling core magma of Atrea IV, one of the married scientist team coordinating the project tells Data she was once married to Dr. Soong, his creator ­ and thinks of herself as his mother.
With no memory of her or a mention of her by Soong, Data takes a while to warm to Juliana Tainer, who had left the inventor after he became too immersed in his work. Data’s memories of her and other early life events were erased when Soong and Tainer fled the Crystalline Entity on Omicron Theta, his creation place, and the colonists’ logs were substituted. When pressed, she tearfully admits that she was against Data’s creation and wanted him dismantled when they left, all because of fears he’d be like evil Lore.
Data finally accepts her as his mother but begins to sense other odd things about her. When her husband is injured in a plasma cave and Data joins her there, the instability forces them to jump from a cliff and her arm is severed, confirming his guess that she is an android.
Playing data from a chip found in her brain, Data sees Soong explain what happened: His wife really died after Omicron Theta, but he built his best-ever android to house her mind without her ever knowing the difference. Abiding by his wishes, Data opts to tell Juliana not of her true nature but of Soong’s regrettedly unspoken love for her.
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This simple yet beautifully mounted tale of yet another crewmember’s “family” began as one more held-over pitch that got a second look during Season 7. As one of writer Echevarria’s favorites, he acknowledged it was a real “insider’s show” but was pleased with both its emotional tone and the chance to smooth out some rough spots from Data’s backstory as it had evolved (“Datalore”, “Brothers”, “Silicon Avatar”, “Descent, Part II”). Also noteworthy is the much-praised performance by Flanagan, who’d already appeared on DS9’s first-season “Dax.”
Professional writer Dan Koepel’s premise came in early enough that Echevarria was able to plan the idea of Soong’s emotion chip having further memories ­ those wiped from his “childhood.” The writer’s first teleplay draft, differed in that Soong created the Juliana android so human-seeming merely out of his own drive, not due to his love for her, and it wasn’t as clear on her “Sophie’s Choice” guilt over dismantling Data rather than face another Lore.
Cut here was a scene in which Troi counseled Data to talk to his mother a reference to a hiccuping program that Soong could never make work. Only the bare-bones remains of another story line survived the cut too: Juliana’s husband Pran is distrustful of androids like Data ­ a concept designed to raise the tension involved in his final decision. The cooling core “tech” was worked out by science adviser Andre Bormanis, who came up with the ship-based “chain reaction” method of reheating the plasma after the staff opted for the more visual symptom of earthquake shocks over rising radiation.
New background abounds here: Soong’s jungle planet, unnamed in “Brothers,” is here dubbed Terlina III; three failed androids preceded Lore; he apparently wore the same lab jacket all his adult life; Data had a childhood memory that was “wiped” and replaced with the colonists’ logs, perhaps the reason for his “late” development; an isolinear chip can hold a smaller chip as an interface; and, in an Okudagram “Commercial Transport Database Achive” also filled with in-house joke entries, the Soongs stayed at Mavala IV four days when wed in 2328; one witness was a Corvallen (seen in “Face of the Enemy”). Other revisted references include the pattern enhancers (“Power Play”, “Time’s Arrow”, “Ship in a Bottle”, “Frame of Mind”); magnesite ore (1967’s “Friday’s Child”); and phaser-bore drilling (“Pen Pals”, “A Matter of Time”).
Light on special visual FX, the show featured a Dan Curry matte painting for the phaser bore hole that Data looked up through. The pan-and-scan “cheat” was used again (“Attached”) to animate the split screen by following Brent Spiner as Soong back and forth around a stationary stand-in, with the crew directing the actor from a monitor, until Spiner/Data could be shot separately and matted in. As with the other violin scenes, the bowstrings are muted with wax so no sound covers the dialogue before music is looped later.
The hard luck extended to other areas as well, in small ways: “DaiMon” Prak has no Ferengi forehead military tattoo, while Mike Okuda said the Hekarras Corridor wall graphic title was misspelled and all but the last two incorrect letters were wiped out, leaving only “RS Corridor.” Visually, though, the “space rift” was a success as FX supervisor Ron B. Moore augmented the standard liquid nitrogen/black velvet anomaly with added cans of dry ice dropped into boiling water. The distortion wave was the firestorm element again (“Lessons”), “stretched” and recolored.
The warp five cruising limit debuts here, designed with an “emergency clause” so it doesn’t cramp future storytelling. The Fleming honors Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, while “biomimetic gel” (again in “Bloodlines”) was an item science adviser Andre Bormanis “created” from real news: a man-made material developed by scientists at Cambridge that creates small tubules than can mimic certain cellular-level biological activities and structures. We learn that warp drive is now three hundred years old, matching the dating of 1967’s “Metamorphosis” despite the fact that the modern warp coil wasn’t involved, since it wasn’t developed until a century later (“A Matter of Time”). Also, the Ferengi Marauder, last seen in Season 2 (“Peak Performance”), is of the Dekora class with a crew of 450 and is seen to fire missiles from its rear arc but it is not clear how the Grand Nagus (DS9’s “The Nagus” and “Rules of Aquisition”) fits in with the “Ferengi Council.” A cut line refers to Riker once surfing on Risa’s Kattala Beach.
Other Trek bits return: verterons (“The Pegasus”); the ship’s log recorder and delta rays, going back to original Trek’s second pilot and “The Menagerie”; weather-modification systems (“True Q”, “Sub Rosa”, “Journey’s End”); a glimpse of pinkish-white dilithium; the Intrepid, Sergey Rozhenko’s ship (“Family”), which rescued Worf from Khitomer (“Sins of the Father”). Finally, though Spot’s gender has changed (“Phantasms”), Geordi is the latest to discover that her disposition hasn’t (“Timescape”, “Phantasms”, “Genesis”) ­ but her feline supplement (see “Phantasms”), now up to version 221, seems to have clicked.
While traveling between missions, the Enterprise encounters an unassuming-looking probe. It begins transmitting a nucleonic beam that manages to penetrate the shields and then lock directly onto Picard. The captain collapses to the deck, unconscious.
As Dr. Crusher works over him, the captain awakens to what seems to him a dream: he is on the drought-stricken planet Kataan, where he is an iron weaver named Kamin married to a young woman named Eline.
The days pass into years for him, and Picard finally accepts his new life as reality. Eline bears two children by him, the drought continues to get worse, and despite the support of his friend Batai, people laugh at his high-tech plans to provide relief.
Back on the Enterprise bridge, though, only a few minutes have passed, though Picard still lies unconscious. Growing more concerned for his captain’s safety, Riker orders Data to break the beam. Its disruption nearly kills Picard, and it must be restored as the crew waits in frustration.
Meanwhile, the aging “Kamin” watches his children grow, his wife and friend die, and his planet dry up. Finally the truth is revealed: the Kataan sun is going nova, but without the means to evacuate, the planetary leaders have decided to gain immortality by launching records of their world in a probe and thus revealing their story to some future historian. The probe, Picard realizes, is the very same one the Enterprise encountered what now seems to him like years ago. And he is the historian the Kataan were looking for.
To his bridge crew’s relief, Picard awakes to the staggering realization that he has lived over thirty years in less than half an hour.
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Combining the warmth of “Family” with a science fiction plot twist worthy of “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, this story proved to be one of the simplest and at the same time most mind-boggling episodes TNG would ever attempt. Here Picard experiences all the things Starfleet could never give him: a wife and children, stability, and a home.
The warm cinematography, designed to subtly imply the oncoming supernova of the Kataan sun, almost rivals that of “Family.” What’s amazing here, though, is that the exterior scenes of the Ressick community were all filmed on Stage 16 indoors; Marvin Rush’s lighting can be credited for the beautiful illusion. There is one brief moment of location shooting, however, a pickup scene filmed after principal photography had closed: Picard’s hiking scene, augmented by a matte-painting vista, was shot in nearby Bronson Canyon, also seen in “Darmok” and in “Ensign Ro”.
Some appropriate casting was employed in this episode: Stewart’s own son, Daniel, played the young Batai, Picard’s Kataanian son, after several auditions for the show. Another piece of trivia: Margot Rose’s resume includes her role as one of two prostitutes in the film 48 HRS.: her partner was Denise Crosby.
