As Wesley prepares to take more Academy tests at Starbase 515, Picard suddenly elects to join him for the long shuttle ride after a heated argument with Pulaski.
Aboard Enterprise, Riker underestimates the slow-witted Pakleds, who kidnap La Forge after Number One allows Geordi to beam over to give the obese scavengers a hand with their ship.
During the shuttle ride Picard finally opens up enough to explain his reason for making the trip ­ surgery to replace a defective cardiac unit ­ and leaves Wesley spellbound with the tale of the shore leave brawl as a young officer that nearly got him killed.
Meanwhile, the Pakleds demand that Enterprise release all of its computer information to them. As the crew considers a show of force to rescue Geordi, Riker learns Picard is near death after surgery.
Anxious to reach their captain, the crew members trick the Pakleds with the “crimson force field” ­ a ruse ­ and rescue Geordi.
Picard awakens in post-op to learn of his close call ­ and to find that an amused Pulaski is the specialist who pulled him through.
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Created by TNG’s late-season producer McCullough, the Pakleds, with their sniffly, slow-minded ways ­ an allusion to fans, or to materialistic Americans? ­ have to be among the most humorously bizarre aliens ever created for Trek. Geordi gets a chance in the spotlight in this episode, and the “crimson force field” harks back to the corbomite trick twice used by Kirk in the 1960’s.
Christopher Collins had turned up in the TNG universe once before, as Kargan, captain of Riker’s Klingon exchange ship in “A Matter of Honor”, while Lycia Naff here reprised her short-lived role as Sonya, as in “Q Who”.
Listen carefully to the tale Picard tells Wesley about his early exploits and you’ll hear the alien ruffians called Nasicaans ­ a rare verbal anime reference. Also heard are references to the Jarada from “The Big Goodbye”, to a recreation facility named for twentieth-century astronomy artist Chesley Bonestell, and to Epsilon 9 as the site of a new pulsar cluster, though no direct connection is made to the same-named communications relay station in the first Trek movie. Picard also mentions that the Klingon-UFP alliance is only twenty or so years old.
For this episode the art staff almost got a chance to bring to life the designed but as yet unbuilt captain’s yacht, but budget constraints led to the use instead of an executive shuttle for Picard and Wesley’s trip. A rare slipup: Wes tells the control booth that he is departing Shuttle Bay 2 in Shuttle Number 2 when he’s actually in the Sakharov (Shuttle Number 1) in Shuttle Bay 3, as indicated on the bay floor.
Dr. Noonian Soong may have been Data’s “father,” but the brilliant
Dr. Ira Graves turns out to be Soong’s mentor and Data’s “grandfather.”
Graves is dying of a terminal illness when the Enterprise answers his young female aide’s call for help on their secluded research world.
Once he arrives on the planet, Data becomes close to Graves, leading the genius to reveal his last breakthrough: a device capable of transferring a human personality into a computer.
Graves dies, and his assistant, Kareen Brianon, is evacuated. But Data begins to act irrational, even accusing Picard of lusting after the beautiful Kareen. A diagnostic check of Data reveals nothing, but Troi performs a psych test that shows two competing personalities fighting to control Data: his own and Graves’s.
Meanwhile Kareen is shocked when Graves-Data tells her of the transference, his love for her, and his plans to make her immortal by transferring her consciousness into another android body ­ which she refuses to consider.
That triggers his violent denial of the wrongness of his plans. After unintentionally crushing her hand, he hides in Engineering, rendering La Forge and an aide unconscious before Picard discovers him.
Graves knocks Picard out for arguing for the release of Data’s body, but when the captain comes to, he finds the cyberneticist has reconsidered ­ and put himself into the Enterprise computer as simple data.
The role of Kareen was the first that onetime Chicagoan Barbara Alyn Woods auditioned for when she arrived in Los Angeles ­ a departure from the “bimbos and wild girls” that, in her words, she had played in films like Circuitry Man and on series like Hooperman and Crime Story.
~1:[3,#b],4:[2,#i]@1“Shades of Gray”@2Next Generation episode #48
Production No.: 148
Aired: Week of July 17, 1989
Stardate: 42976.1
Directed by Rob Bowman
Written by Maurice Hurley, Richard Manning, and Hans Beimler
Story by Maurice Hurley
GUEST CAST
O’Brien: Colm Meaney
A painful thorn in the leg snagged during a planetary survey turns deadly for Riker when it is found to carry an organism that attacks his central nervous system.
When Riker falls into a coma and his vital signs plummet, Pulaski realizes that the invading microbe cannot be separated from the nerves it has wound itself around.
The chief medical officer is finally able to stabilize its spread, but not until it has actually reached Riker’s brain. In a desperate try, she uses a tearful Troi’s help in electronically stimulating his brain to help fight off the growth.
When Troi senses that Riker’s romantic dreams promote the microbe’s growth, she and Pulaski begin trying to stimulate the negative memories, including a recollection of Tasha Yar’s death, to slow the organism. Pulaski finally decides to risk the potentially fatal all-out induction of Riker’s most primitive emotions; after his body is racked with convulsions, the organism is defeated and disappears.
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A limp “clip show” finale to the season, “Shades of Gray” is probably the weakest Trek script ever written for either generation; even writer Maurice Hurley agrees that it was “terrible, just terrible.” Hurley wrote the hurried script ­ designed as a budget-conscious “bottle” (all-shipboard) show ­ on his way out the door after deciding to leave the series. Even Rob Bowman’s touch as director couldn’t save a show that only took three days to shoot; production assistant Eric Stillwell searched through tapes and came up with scenes representing Riker’s memories to pad out the show.
For the record, those scenes included the momentary aloneness of away team command (“The Last Outpost”); fond first memories of Data (“Farpoint”); flirting with Guinan (“The Dauphin”); and a possible good-bye with Deanna (“The Icarus Factor”). More erotic memories include his times with the Edo (“Justice”), Minuet (“11001001”), Beata (“Angel One”), and Brenna (“Up the Long Ladder”). When his recollections turn increasingly negative, they cover his grief at the death of Yar (“Skin of Evil”) and Troi’s “son” (“The Child”); violence at the hands of the Pagh’s officer Klag (“A Matter of Honor”); the alien-controlled Admiral Quinn (“Conspiracy”); and the primal survival urge when threatened by T’Jon (“Symbiosis”), the Ferengi (“The Last Outpost”), and Armus (“Skin of Evil”); the possible autodestruct of the Enterprise (“11001001”), his near-death on the exploding Batris (“Heart of Glory”), and a rapid-fire melange of many crises, including those involving Remmick (“Conspiracy”), the Tsiolkovsky virus (“The Naked Now”), the Solari traitor (“Loud As A Whisper”), and the infected Lantree (“Unnatural Selection”).
The drug tricordrazine ­ also used in “Who Watches the Watchers” and in “Yesterday’s Empire” is a likely descendant of cordrazine, the drug that fired McCoy with enough hysterical paranoia to change history in the original-Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.”
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Sins of the Father”@2Next Generation episode #65
Production No.: 165
Aired: Week of March 19, 1990
Stardate: 43685.2
Directed by Les Landau
Teleplay by Ronald D. Moore and W. Reed Morgan
Based on a teleplay by Drew Deighan
GUEST CAST
K’mpec: Charles Cooper
Commander Kurn: Tony Todd
Duras: Patrick Massett
Kahlest: Thelma Lee
Transporter Technician: Teddy Davis
Assassins: B. J. Davis and Chris Doyle
The Enterprise receives a Klingon exchange officer on board who turns out to be the younger brother Worf never knew he had. The officer, Kurn, tells Worf their family name is about to be shamed: their dead father, Mogh, has been branded the traitor behind the Romulan attack at Khitomer that killed thousands and left Worf and Kurn orphans.
With Picard’s backing, Worf returns to challenge the accusations before the Klingon High Council, even though the penalty for an unsuccessful appeal is death. Shortly after their arrival, however, Kurn is attacked.
Worf had used his brother as his advocate before the council, so he asks Picard to replace him. Together they locate Worf’s childhood nurse, whose tale forces the revelation of the real truth in a closed-door meeting with aging council leader K’mpec.
It was the father of Duras, Worf’s accuser, and not Mogh who was the traitor. Worf and Picard are stunned when told that the truth, if exposed, would plunge the Klingon Empire into civil war.
K’mpec sadly prepares to carry out the death sentence until Worf, putting his people ahead of himself, agrees to drop the challenge and be publicly branded an outcast and coward ­ and to live on for another day to clear his father’s name.
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This landmark show gave the Trek audience its first-ever look at the Klingon homeworld, and won art direction Emmys for production designer Richard James and set decorator Jim Mees. Worf’s discommendation amounted to his being branded a coward, one without honor. The withdrawal of his win-or-die Council appeal left him a nonperson in Klingon society. Worf would carry the emotional baggage of this episode through the beginning of the fifth season.
Perhaps best known as Sergeant Warren in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, actor, playwright, and longtime Trek fan Tony Todd has played many stage, TV, and film roles. He auditioned four times for guest spots on TNG before he scored with the part of Kurn, who would return later in the series to help reclaim the family honor in “Redemption” and “Redemption” II.
Veteran actor Charles Cooper brought pride and forbearance to the role of the elder Klingon ­ traits that, because of a weak script, he was unable to show off in the part of General Korrd in the movie Star Trek V. In uncredited roles are stuntmen B. J. Davis and Chris Doyle as Duras’s assassins.
The simple Klingonese words and phrases spoken here and in future episodes were all coined by linguist Marc Okrand. They include Qapla’! (success), mev yap (That is enough!), and cha’Dich (literally, second ­ the ritual defender-supporter). When Kurn and Picard accept Worf’s invitation to join him, they reply, “jllajnes. ghlj qet jaghmeyjaj” (I accept with honor. May your enemies run with fear.)
Curiously, often overlooked is the actual name of Duras’s father, Ja’rod ­ mentioned only once here and never in succeeding stories. A briefly seen computer display reveals that the Intrepid ­ another ship renamed for a Constitution-class vessel (from 1968’s “Immunity Syndrome”) ­ was commanded by Captain Drew Deighan when it reached Khitomer on SD 23859.7 ­ perhaps a descendant of the writer of the spec script this episode sprang from.
~1:[3,#b],4:[2,#i]@1“Skin of Evil”@2Next Generation episode #22
Production No.: 122
Aired: Week of April 25, 1988
Stardate: 41601.3
Directed by Joseph L. Scanlan
Teleplay by Joseph Stefano and Hannah Louise Shearer
Story by Joseph Stefano
GUEST CAST
Armus: Mart McChesney, voiced by Ron Gans
Lieutenant Commander Leland T. Lynch: Walker Boone
Nurse: Brad Zerbst
Lieutenant Ben Prieto: Raymond Forchion
Troi and her shuttle pilot are pulled off course. They crash on Vagra II, the home of the sadistic being Armus, created from the cast-off sins of his race and then abandoned.
An away team beams down to rescue the counselor, but Armus and a forcefield of his creation are in their way. Then, acting out of sheer malice, the black oozing form of goo tortures Riker, taunts La Forge and Data ­ and kills Yar.
Worf, who is now acting security chief, and Wesley discover that Armus loses his power when provoked. Using that weakness, Picard is finally able to get his people out, but not before trying to reason with Armus one more time. He even has the splintered shuttle destroyed to prevent Armus from leaving the planet.
Back on board the Enterprise, crew members play a recorded hologram of Yar’s will and her last thoughts to her friends. All of them ­ even Data ­ derive strength during their grief from their friendship with the security chief.
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Long before this episode was filmed, rumors were flying about the manner of Denise Crosby’s departure and the reasons for it. She was, after all, the first regular Trek character ever to be permanently killed off ­ the movies’ resurrection of Spock notwithstanding. Thanks to media reports, it became widely known that Crosby was dissatisfied with her role’s development and had asked to bow out on friendly terms so that she could pursue a film career. Shearer, who was handed the task of rewriting the original draft by Outer Limits veteran Joseph Stefano, said the in-house debate on the nature of her exit finally went the way Gene Roddenberry wanted, with a “senseless” but typical sudden death befitting a security chief. Originally, Tasha’s demise came much earlier in the episode and the focus was more on the Armus creature than on the crew’s reactions to their comrade’s death.
“Gene felt we couldn’t kill the creature, because it is not up to us as human beings to make a moral judgment on any creature that we encounter because we are not God,” Hannah Louise Shearer has said. She added that her job was to devise a satisfactory punishment for Armus without resorting to “eye for an eye” justice.
Everyone involved in this episode knew that the look and mechanics of the alien villain Armus had to be believable if the story was to work. “You’re talking about a living tar pit,” recalled Legato, who felt the episode was the series’ biggest special-effects flop. “It’s not attractive if you do it well, and if it’s even worse it’s not even that.” Director Joe Scanlan, though noting the ironic and “wonderful intellectual quality” of Armus, told the staff: “If we don’t make this monster believable, we are in deep shit.”
A surrealistic mime-type actor modeled on the Mummenschanz group was the original concept for Armus. This was later changed to a more concrete “shroud” creature that would draw its oil slick up off the ground when arising. A plan to achieve this effect by reversing the film of a melting ten-inch figure on a hot plate had to be discarded. Finally, a grave-size pit ten feet deep was dug on the Planet Hell set and a hydraulic step was used for the rising-up effect. A mix including Metamucil was used for the black goo. Scanlan recalls that the “oil” was so heavy that actor Mart McChesney’s suit began to disintegrate and new ones had to be built overnight. At one point he had to wear an open-backed costume in scenes where his back wouldn’t show!
Recalling the final memorial scene, Scanlan said he filmed Tasha’s “hologram tape” two ways: straight ahead, as if looking into her “holo-camera” (his preference), and the version used, in which she nods to each listener. “Don’t ask me how she knew where they’d be standing,” he said. Still, if the sadness of the scene looked tearfully real, it was: Yar’s death and Crosby’s departure were sad for the actors as well as for the characters. Marina Sirtis began sobbing during reaction takes as her friend cued her from off-camera, leading Frakes and the others into one of the most moving scenes shot for the young series.
Ironically, Crosby said later that if scenes like the opening between her and Worf had been written more often, she would not have asked to leave the show. She would soon have second thoughts about departing the series, though, and would eventually find herself back in TNG through some of the most bizarre plot twists even Trek had ever come up with.
~1:[6,#bi],7:[8,#i]@1Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)@2Produced in 1987-1994, the made-for-syndication story of the Starship Enterprise -D under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. The series ran for seven seasons, totalling 178 episodes. Following the production of the series, the feature film Star Trek: Generations continued the adventures of these characters.
Answering a distress call from Delta Rana IV, the Enterprise arrives to find the planet ravaged and its 11,000 colonists dead ­ except for two elderly botanists, Rishon Uxbridge and her unfriendly husband, Kevin. The two say they don’t know why they were spared death, but they refuse to be evacuated.
Then the massive ship that leveled the planet reappears, beginning a cat-and-mouse game with the Enterprise that leads Picard to suspect a connection between the heavily armed mystery ship and the Uxbridges. The aliens cripple the Enterprise in battle, then return to blast the Uxbridges’ home; in turn, the Federation starship destroys them.
Picard has the couple beamed up to the bridge against their will. There Kevin finally reveals the truth. He is actually a Douwd, an immortal superalien disguised as a human, but in all the fifty-three years they’ve been married, he has never revealed that fact to his wife.
His credo against killing would not let him defend the planet against the aliens, a warriorlike race known as the Husnock, and his wife is actually just an image after she too died in the fighting.
Her death enraged Kevin, who used the powers he had always denied himself and blinked out the lives of all fifty billion Husnock instantaneously, without thinking.
Stunned at Kevin’s crime and sobered by his shame, Picard knows there is no court that can try Kevin and he leaves the Douwd to his own thoughts and conscience ­ alone.
____________________
In Michael Wagner’s only solo writing effort during his short-lived tenure as a producer, veteran actor John Anderson brings great dignity and mystery to the man whose grizzled exterior masks a sad and amazing story ­ though the actor has since revealed he almost didn’t take the role due to the death of his own wife only a year earlier.
A day of location shooting of the Uxbridges’ house was done at a beach house in Malibu; the moving master shot with the beam-in effect, a first for Trek, had the house matted into the landscape painting.
The Husnock warship, built by Tony Meininger, was one of the first not designed by a member of the TNG art staff. “Usually there just isn’t time to put into designing them if they’re just a ‘ship-of-the-week’ that’s going to be re-dressed later anyway,” said Rick Sternbach, adding that decisions on re-use are made by the alternating TNG visual-effects teams headed by Dan Curry and Rob Legato and their model contractors.
The mention of Andorian renegades marked the first time the antennaed, blue-skinned aliens of original Trek, who debuted in 1967’s “Journey to Babel,” were brought into the TNG era.
Teleplay by Robert Lewin, Richard Manning, and Hans Beimler
GUEST CAST
Sobi: Judson Scott
T’Jon: Merritt Butrick
Romas: Richard Lineback
Langor: Kimberly Farr
While studying drastic solar flares around Delos, the Enterprise picks up a confusing distress call from a disabled freighter in the system. Only four of its six passengers are beamed away in time because the crew members insist on sending over the cargo first.
The survivors are from two neighboring worlds, Brekka and Ornara, and the cargo is felicium, a drug grown only on Brekka, which cures a two-hundred-year-old Ornara plague. The two haggard Ornarans demand the shipment; the Brekkians insist the deal’s off.
The desperate Ornarans convince Picard to mediate; he gets them one dose apiece. But Dr. Crusher realizes the “cure” is a narcotic. The Brekkians have kept the unknowing Ornarans addicted for profit for two centuries!
Crusher demands to let the Ornarans know, but Picard cites the Prime Directive. He does find a solution to the dilemma, however: he refuses to repair the Ornarans’ remaining freighters. Now no trade in the low-technology system will occur and the Ornarans, although they will suffer withdrawal, will conquer their addiction.
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This episode will likely be remembered for three things: the teaming of two Star Trek II actors in guest roles, the late Merritt Butrick (his name was misspelled in the credits as “Merrit”) and Judson Scott; the overbearing Nancy Reagan-era “Just Say No” anti-drug speech Tasha gives Wesley; and the real last scene for Denise Crosby.
Butrick, who reprised his role as Kirk’s son, David Marcus, in Star Trek III, died after a long illness in March 1989, barely a year after filming this episode. Judson Scott, uncredited as one of Khan’s followers in Star Trek II, played the lead in the series The Phoenix. In an uncredited speaking role, veteran character actor Kenneth Tigar appears as Margan, an Ornaran leader.
Because this story was filmed after “Skin of Evil” but would air before it, Crosby’s real last scene as Tasha came in the cargo bay in act five. She can be seen wildly waving good-bye from behind a console just as the cargo bay doors close behind Picard and Crusher! Her name would continue to be listed in the opening screen credits for the rest of the season.
