Based upon material by Shawn Piller & Antonio Napoli
GUEST CAST
Cadet 3/C Wesley Crusher: Wil Wheaton
Fleet Admiral Alynna Nechayev: Natalija Nogulich
Anthwarta: Ned Romero
Lakanta: Tom Jackson
Lieutenant Jack Crusher: Jack Wert
Gul Evek: Ricahrd Poe
Wakasa: George Aguilar
Traveler: Erik Menyuk
The downside of a historic UFP-Cardassian peace treaty becomes obvious when Picard is forced to evacuate Federation colonies outside the newly redrawn border. The case of one colony due for relocation, Dorvan V, is even more poignant because of the enclave of American Indians who settled there after a decades-long search, once they elected to avoid the cultural assimilation of Earth.
As the plainspoken Indians talk but resist ­ Picard pleads with Admiral Nechayev and the UFP Council in vain for a waiver ­ The tension mounts when a Cardassian team arrives to survey the planet, unconcerned about the Indians’ refusal to leave.
Amid all this, a moody Wes Crusher arrives on leave from the Academy, unsure of his future but surprised to meet Lakanta, an Indian colonist who says he is destined to offer him help. When young Crusher encounters a vision of his father telling him to seek his own way, the cadet resigns from Starfleet before a stunned Picard, who’d been furious only a moment earlier after Wes warned the Indians of a planned surprise mass beam-up.
Lakanta later reveals himself to be the Traveler, the transdimensional being who offers to tutor Wes and thus fulfill his own prophecy of the young man’s unique destiny. Meanwhile, Picard, Gul Evek, and the Indians finally strike a workable yet uneasy deal: the colonists stay put, trading Federation for Cardassian supervision.
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With a glimpse of the new Star Trek: Voyager due the coming winter, winding down episode returns to the “family” theme to reveal the fate of Wesley Crusher ­ a story that was not only a year-old story by producer Ron Moore but a personal one as well, echoing his own departure from an expected Navy career when he realized his yen to be a writer. “There were things in my life pointing me in that direction that I wasn’t paying attention to, sort of like Wesley,” said Moore. “I just thought that everything about this character said he did not belong in Starfleet. . . . It always seemed he was just doing things that were expected of him.”
But the move did not sit well with everyone. “There was a lot of concern that this character, whom Gene created with his middle name, who was Gene Roddenberry ­ that it was doing him a disservice to have Wesley leave Starfleet,” recalled Jeri Taylor. Finally, when Michael Piller held out for a unique destiny for Wesley, the Traveler reprise was developed as a fulfillment of his own prediction of the youth’s Mozart-like giftedness (“Where No One Has Gone Before”, “Remember Me”). Even then, Moore dallied with having the Lakanta-to-Traveler transformation include a Boothby phase (“The First Duty”) until Piller decided it would cheat Picard to make his mentor Wesley’s as well.
Originally the cadet’s aimlessness was to lead him into TNG’s debut mention of the Maquis ­ pronounced “muh-KEE,” for the French World War II resistance cell ­ in a plot by Taylor that would eventually be picked up for DS9’s “The Maquis” two-parter and echoed on TNG (“Preemptive Strike”) as a well-laid setup for Voyager’s pilot background. Eventually the Maquis, and Wesley’s short-lived involvement with them, became the Native American colony after the credited pitch by Napoli and Piller’s son dovetailed with Taylor’s desire to establish here the implied home of Voyager’s complex American Indian character Chakotay. The name “Maquis” itself isn’t coined until the DS9 outing.
The rest of the story, Moore noted, involved finding the fine line of both fault and sympathy for all the depicted parties ­ including Picard, who had to have hard orders “without turning into Custer,” and the Indians, who had been told not to settle so close to the border. At first, direct reference was made to the Hopi Indians and Tribes and others ­ with Picard’s ancestor being Corporal Everett Picard, who had been with Kit Carson in 1875, destroying a Rio Grande village ­ but even with the series’ use of advisers the tribes involved asked not to be depicted for fear of misrepresentation, so the terms were generalized: kachina dolls becoming mansaras, the ceremonial kiva now a habak, and so on.
For the art department, that meant the added burden of creating a very visual culture from scratch with the original village set of “Thine Own Self” to build upon. “Nothing could have any [real-life] Indian indications, which immediately means that you can’t rent anything,” set decorator Jim Mees recalled. In fact, note that the tribal council’s chairs bear a striking resemblance to those of a Romulan Warbird wardroom repainted (“Face of the Enemy”). Bularian canapes, for the record, are actually just odd crackers with Cheez-Whiz and olives, and propmaster Alan Sims recalled that Wesley’s vision was to include an eagle until it was learned the only trainable one for rent, an endangered batalor eagle, was already booked. The show’s major optical was the freeze-frame of time for Wes and Lakanta/Traveler, which again used an anamorphic lens to pan-and-scan motion into an otherwise static shot (“Attached”, “Inheritance”) ­ The foreground man shooting a beam the two walk through was shot against blue-screen and matted in, while his target was part of the live shot; the blasted chunk of building was likewise added with computer effects.
Returning here is Wert as Jack Crusher (“Family”, “Violations”), with the untold details of his demise now left up to future TNG movies. Moore said the ongoing use of Nechayev and Evek (“Preemptive Strike” and DS9’s “The Maquis”) was a reflection of both continuity and the actors’ work and the border setting of those stories; Nechayev’s won a promotion of sorts, going from a vice-admiral to fleet admiral here. Initially he wrote the admiral as resisting Picard’s overtures of detente in this episode, but later agreed with Piller that Picard actually could get through to her; her threat to temporarily remove him is not the first (“Chain of Command, Part I”). Picard in a scene cut for time mentions that he almost washed out in his sophomore Academy year, after his father’s death, with Moore implying it was the incident Boothby once alluded to (“The First Duty”). Other cut scenes had Picard waking an oversleeping Wes, who’d turned away in “irritation” from Boothby, and the Indians criticizing artificial weather modification (“True Q”, “Force of Nature”, “Journey’s End”).
For continuity’s sake, Troi’s knowledge of the Pueblo Revolt fits with her interest in Westerns (“A Fistful of Datas”), while Evek’s sadness at his lost sons ties in with his people’s high regard for children and family (“Chain of Command, Part II”, DS9’s “Tribunal”). Rementioned are the Academy’s Admiral Brand (“The First Duty”), the Federation Council, Dr. Vassbinder (see notes, “Timescape”), the latest Cardassisan ship, the Vetar, and Picard’s father (“Tapestry”), described as a great oral historian with family roots back to Charlemagne.
“Cochrane” is finally mentioned verbally as the unit of warp field stress for the first time Cardassian communicators are seen, mounted on their wrists. Also, Beverly apparently includes Wes’s repeated year when she calls him a fourth-year cadet since he wears three pips, but Picard notes that he only left “three years ago”; perhaps Starfleet Academy offers a summer school. And the Katowa-led exodus of Indians from Earth occurred about 2170, or just after the Romulan War (from 1966’s “Balance of Terror”) and the Federation founding (“The Outcast”).
The pastoral planet of Rubicun III beckons after the Enterprise delivers a party of colonists to the nearby Strnad system. Rubicun’s healthy people ­ the Edo ­ and their ways of love and open sensual pleasure make this planet seem like the perfect R-and-R stop.
But trouble looms in paradise after Wesley inadvertently chases a ball into one of the Edo’s always shifting forbidden zones, drawing the planet’s simple punishment for every crime ­ death. Dr. Crusher is furious, but Picard feels helpless under the Prime Directive.
As the captain pleads for Wesley’s life, a machinelike being begins to orbit the planet and sends a probe to scan Data’s brain. Proclaiming itself the Edo’s god, the being demands that the Enterprise people leave its “children” alone ­ and take the Strnad colonists back, too.
The Edo are shocked that the once-friendly visitors protest their law; one Edo is even given the chance to see her “god,” much to the machine-being’s displeasure.
Finally Picard agrees to take the boy from his Edo captors by force. He confronts the Edo, who cave in but bitterly taunt the crew with their own law.
But “God” won’t let the crew beam back. Picard argues that when laws are absolute there can be no real justice, and this convinces “Him” to let them go on their way.
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John D.F. Black put his pseudonym, Ralph Wills, on this script, which as aired bears only slight resemblance to the story on terrorism he originally pitched. His first treatment featured the colony of Llarof where random “punishment zones,” originally designed to fight anarchy, are now enforced for any offense and, it turns out, against only those not deemed immune from the law. An Enterprise guard, protecting two children on shore leave who happen upon a crime scene, is shot dead by an overzealous local cop, who in turn is killed on the spot by his dutifully law-abiding partner.
In Black’s first draft Picard refuses to back the first of the timid rebels who want a change, but he finds a loophole just as the rebels’ army wins out and reestablishes order. Black’s second draft saw the rebel leader Reneg put on trial and executed for treason, with Picard musing that the people have the right to decide their own justice without interference. Later major rewrites by Worley Thorne and Gene Roddenberry would add the “Edolord” and the culture’s preoccupation with sex.
“Justice” was the first episode to feature location shooting since the brief holodeck scene in “Farpoint”. The Edo exteriors were shot at the Tillman Water Reclamation plant in Van Nuys, a north Los Angeles suburb (see “The First Duty”), and Wesley’s fall was filmed at the Huntington Library in Pasadena.
Director James L. Conway, an original-series fan who had directed everything from Sunn Classics’ pseudo-documentaries to Westerns to horror movies to industrial films, had just completed a MacGyver at Paramount when he was chosen to direct for TNG. Brad Zerbst became the first actor to play a recurring med tech or nurse in sickbay; his unnamed part lasted through two more shows, “Heart of Glory” and “Skin of Evil”. And a character trademark, Worf’s curt one-liner, began here with his observation on the friendly, mostly nude Edo: “Nice planet!”
