After being gravely wounded by terrorists during a diplomatic mission, Picard awakens in a white limbo to find Q, his old nemesis, announcing that the captain’s artificial heart has failed him ­ and that He, Q, is God.
Though Picard scoffs at that, he cannot deny the regrets he feels about his rambunctious younger years and wishes that he could change them. Instantly, Q whisks him back to the eve of one of his life’s biggest turning points: the fight where, as a fresh-faced ensign just before shipping out, he was stabbed through the heart during a brawl with three large Nausicaans.
Determined to change history, Picard avoids the situation which caused the fight, Q returns him to the present once he escapes injury, where Picard finds himself a junior lieutenant in astrophysics, bluntly told by Riker and Troi that he plays it too safe to have a chance at command.
Pleading with his old foe, Picard begs Q to let him relive the fight so he can die rather than live his new dreary life. History is reset, the fight ensues, and Picard again falls to the Nausicaan ­ until he comes to back in sickbay, recovering from his wounds and actually grateful to Q for the new insight.
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Based on a brief mention way back in Season 2’s “Samaritan Snare”, Picard’s Nausicaan encounter was actually just part of “A Q Carol,” a Dickensian premise pitched years ago in which Q tours the “mistakes” of Picard’s life: the stabbing, a family scene, and an event aboard the Stargazer, possibly Jack Crusher’s death. Ron Moore said his longtime yen to do such a Capraesque script led back to that old premise as a starting point, pruned down to only the Nausicaan incident that had always piqued his curiosity ­ although, as with Picard’s brother (“Family”), we do get a taste of his father’s disdain for a Starfleet career. The tale also reinforces the contrast in Trek’s two captains, Moore noted: Picard was the hard-drinking womanizer who became studious, reserved, and cool, while Kirk was a bookworm at the Academy before becoming a hell-raiser later on. He felt the segment overall was better than his own “Relics,” while Michael Piller had mixed feelings about it but took its popularity as a sign of audience interest in metaphysics and examining one’s mortality.
But the premise behind Q’s first tale since the pilot, whose title did not include his “name” ­ had murky roots. No one could remember the source of the “near-death white light” premise, especially after one pro with a similar old pitch passed on the claim; it was not until after the show aired that a heartbroken and disillusioned letter arrived from James Mooring, who’d actually pitched the exact same idea after submitting a spec script. With the first-season story-credit disputes ironically unknown to this staff, they immediately set out to settle up and make amends. “I talked to him, Ron talked to him,” Jeri Taylor said, “and they paid him. He was very happy. All he wanted was acknowledgment of this, and we apologized profusely; I hope it restored his faith in our integrity, because we would never do anything like that intentionally.”
Unaware of Bob Justman’s formative idea to credit the ban on captains’ dangerous beam-downs to Picard, Moore said the brief mention of just such an instance with Picard taking command was meant to show that his “twenty-two-year mission” on his old ship as laid out in GR’s original Writer’s Guide was not all spent as captain. Also, he added, the stabbing is not the major event Boothby talks of in “The First Duty”, and Jellico (“Chain of Command”) was his later-nixed first choice for Enterprise’s captain in Picard’s altered future.
Station Earhart, Picard’s “laugh at death,” and the Bonestell facility (filmed on an extra, non-Star Trek Stage 10) are taken right from “Samaritan Snare” populated by many of Michael Westmore’s aliens from DS9, such as buck-”toothed” alien and the “tailhead”; a script note warns against the use of Ferengi before their discovery, but within inches of each other here are a remarkably calm Antican and a Selay ­ supposedly some thirty-five years before they make peace in “Lonely Among Us”. The nonspeaking Nausicaans are veteran TNG stunt men Tom Morga and Dick Dimitri, the latter seen sans makeup as the “henchman” with the Bandito (“A Fistful of Datas”) and the cabdriver of “Emergence”. Finally, Q may not be so omniscient: he says the just-graduated Picard is twenty-one in 2327 although his file says he was born in 2305 (“Conundrum”).
The jacket-style uniforms of the 2320’s here feature a previously unseen low-profile collar, rather than the plush ones of the Trek films and the later bare look (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”). In that color style, Corty wears engineering gold, Marta has services blue-gray, and Picard, despite his later washout, has command white. Prop man Alan Sims said many of the odd “coins,” glasses, and tableware were from a Paramount vault of long-stored Ten Commandments props.
Lines trimmed for time indicated that a third of Academy freshmen cadets don’t make it and referred to Picard’s superintendent as Admiral Silona, perhaps the Betazoid he once mentioned (“The First Duty”), and to “Scobee Hall,” named for the captain of the ill-fated Challenger space-shuttle crew in 1986; another cut scene showed the low-ranking Picard reporting to a disinterested Geordi in Engineering, where engineer Duffy (“Hollow Pursuits”) is mentioned. Dr. Selar is also audibly resurrected (“The Schizoid Man”, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Remember Me”), while “Penny” was named for an older woman Moore himself had once dated; her reference to Rigel as her home may be Rigel IV, as with fellow humanoid Hengist of 1968’s “Wolf in the Fold.” Corey’s posting, the Ajax, may be the one later worked over by Kosinski (“Where No One Has Gone Before”) and a part of Picard’s blockade (“Redemption, Part II”).
~1:[3,#b],4:[2,#i]@1“Thine Own Self”@2Next Generation episode #168
Production No.: 268
Aired: Week of February 14, 1994
Stardate: 47611.2
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Teleplay by Ronald D. Moore
Story by Christopher Hutton
GUEST CAST
Talur: Ronnie Claire Edwards
Garvin: Michael Rothhaar
Gia: Kimberly Cullum
Skoran: Michael G. Hagerty
Apprentice: Andy Kossin
Ensign Rainer: Richard Ortega-Miro
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
Sent to retrieve radioactive debris from a downed probe on preindustrial Barkon IV, Data loses his memory and unwittingly spreads the fragments throughout a village, where radiation sickness begins to sicken the inhabitants.
Limited by the culture’s unenlightened primitive science, the town’s healer has no clue to the sickness, but all signs point to the odd-skinned man as the reason behind the outbreak. As it soon engulfs his befriended “family,” a man named Garvin and his young daughter Gia, an angry mob confronts Data and reveals his inner circuitry, scaring them but intriguing the android, who was already far along in discovering a cause and cure.
The mob finally “kills” the “monster” and buries him, but with the starship’s return Riker and Crusher arrive to locate and beam up the overdue android. Upon reactivation Data cures the villagers and finds he is now outranked by Commander Troi after she opted to take the bridge officer’s test.
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If moments of this story feel like an old Universal movie, it’s no accident: Chris Hatton’s “Data as Frankenstein” pitch, his second sell of the season (“Gambit”), quickly caught the staff’s attention. “He wanders into the medieval village, is befriended by the little girl, and villagers come out and chase him with torches!” joked writer Ron Moore, who liked the show even though he never had a “close feeling” about it. Ironically, director Rick Kolbe felt it provided him a personal chance to improve on TNG’s other “little girl” show, which he’d also helmed, “Pen Pals”: “I felt we had more character in there and didn’t veer off into ‘tech talk.’ ”
For what construction coordinator Al Smutko called a $104,000 investment, production designer Richard James’ Barkon IV village saw action many times throughout the spring, lasting through three major revampings for TNG (“Journey’s End”, “Firstborn”, “Preemptive Strike”) as well as a shot on DS9’s “Shadowplay.” Among the segment’s few visual effects, producer Dan Curry noted that computer “Harry” animator Adam Howard at Digital Magic designed the arcing around the pole spearing Data, while Harry animation and dry-ice elements provide the luminous cloth shimmers. Visual FX supervisor David Stipes joined Kolbe in seeking, for once, an instantaneous warp-core breach during Troi’s crisis simulation ­ done inexpensively with a white-out wipe begun with blinding flash bulbs from onstage FX man Dick Brownfield.
For trivia hounds: “imzadi” is used ­ for the first time in a year (“Second Chances”) and the last time on the series ­ at Frakes’ request, rewritten by permission from the original Act II line written as simply “ship’s counselor”; his trombone playing is nothing new (“11001001”, “Future Imperfect”, “The Next Phase”, “Second Chances”).
Cut speeches specified that Troi passed the bridge test on her fourth try and, in the village, explained the roots of the name “Jayden” ­ Hatton’s original premise title ­ as a handsome nobleman in a Barkon folktale, transformed to an ugly frog by a demon’s spell. Also, the U.S.S. Lexington harks back to a Kirk-era starship in 1968’s “The Ultimate Computer,” while Data’s once-secret on-off switch (“The Measure of a Man”, et al.) was already known to all those present in the last scene (“Datalore”, “Brothers”, “The Game”). That moment in sickbay features Patrick Stewart’s only line of the whole show, a briefest-ever appearance arranged so he could perform his Olivier-winning A Christmas Carol in London during the segment’s early December filming. Michael G. Hagerty earlier played a Klingon (“Redemption II”).
