Four young Enterprise ensigns find their friendship strained during personnel evaluations, as Sam Lavelle and Sito Jaxa learn they are both up for the same job as ops relief. Joined by their civilian waiter pal Ben, they learn that promotions seem assured for Nurse Ogawa and engineer Taurik ­ though the young Vulcan has his people’s historic problem in reading his human friends and superiors.
Riker, blind to how similar he and Lavelle are, is not high on the young officer, while Worf has much faith in Sito ­ even though she receives a surprise tongue-lashing from Picard, who recalls her role in the cover-up by Wesley Crusher’s Academy flight team.
The tension of promotions is abruptly broken by a baffling secret mission that all but Lavelle have a hand in: Ogawa must keep mum about a recovered Cardassian, and Taurik intentionally distresses a shuttle with phaser fire. Then Sito, after a lesson from Worf, stands up to Picard, giving him what he needed to see: the guts to volunteer to pose as a Bajoran captive taken by the Cardassians.
Sadly, Sito is lost on the mission, leaving behind only scattered escape-pod debris. Lavelle’s promotion and new job leave him empty after her presumed death, but his spirits ­ and those of her mentor Worf ­ are bolstered by their friends’ support.
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Once again, Jeri Taylor regretted not being able to give veteran TNG freelancers Wilkerson and Matthias a shot at the teleplay of their “great, great concept” of the self-styled “little people” ­ which was so popular it fueled erroneous rumors that the junior officers were being primed for Voyager. The writing team presented this pitch ­ partly inspired by Wilkerson’s love of the BBC classic Upstairs, Downstairs ­ in the unorthodox manner of fleshed-out character notes.
“Again, like our ‘Lessons’, what was important was not the mission but the relationships of the people,” Wilkerson said: “What it is like to work for Riker, to work for Worf, to wonder what goes on in secret briefings in the observation lounge” ­ and to put faces to the always-nameless crew. The lineup saw the writers return to the known character of Sito (“The First Duty”), develop TNG’s first fully realized Vulcan (Matthias’s favorite Star Trek race), create a “young Riker,” and lean on an already established regular like Ogawa ­ Barclay having been considered but dropped as too well-known; a fifth, “nerdy” character was scrapped. Echevarria added the civilian waiter Ben, perhaps the first ever in Ten-Forward besides Guinan allowed to speak, just to have a character “who hitched aboard the ship for fun, who’s unconcerned about rank, and who passes along stupid rumors!”
For his part, Echevarria enjoyed getting more humor into less “buttoned-down” Starfleet characters with this story, which like his “Second Chances” went practically unchanged from first to final draft. All the cast won praise, with Enberg’s Taurik mentioned as a recurring guest had the series gone on; he had already played the reporter dogging Mark Twain (“Times Arrow, Part II”). Though the original name Sorik was changed to echo the new “T” Vulcan male name, as with Tuvok of the uncoming spinoff Voyager, all three writers’ concept for Taurik matched: an odds-figuring “young Spock” barely concealing his pithy sarcasm as a junior officer.
Sito gained a first name unheard in her first appearance (“The First Duty”), while visual FX producer and martial-arts adviser Dan Curry marveled at actress Shannon Fill, a trainied dancer and acrobat but new to martial arts: “I’ve never seen anybody learn it that quickly and so convincing.” After seeing the idea first nixed and then approved for development by Michael Piller based on Fill’s performance, Taylor hinted that Sito may yet turn up on Deep Space Nine as a former Cardassian hostage. “I’ve gotten more mail on that ­ how could Picard send Sito to her death?” she said. “A lot of people were very upset by that and felt that was very inappropriate for him, and didn’t behave as even the military now would behave.”
Ogawa, who was almost cut from the story to make more room for the other characters, gets her personal life in order in a hurry: a new fiance, only seven episodes after her last boyfriend (“Attached”), who conceives a baby only four episodes later (“Genesis”). Taurik’s research guru was named for Cuban nuclear engineer Nils Diaz, Echevarria’s true-life godfather and a propulsion-system researcher. And for true trivia fans, Sam Lavelle’s name can claim two sources: a close friend of Echevarria’s and, initially, Wilkerson’s Canadian labrador Samwell.
Though the segment is light on visual effects, supervisor Ron B. Moore singled out computer “Harry” artist Adam Howard’s nice touch of dimming Taurik’s phaser-rifle beam behind the smoked glass of the shuttle window in only the weapon’s third appearance (“The Mind’s Eye”, “Descent”). The tough Curie was Worf’s quantum-crashing craft (“Parallels”), where it was seen to be Shuttlecraft 3 ­ the same as the onetime Justman (“Suspicions”). Other notes: Echevarria originally had Sito not only track a lost puppy at ops but deal with a “turbolift traffic jam” Worf adds a red lapel to his mok’bara gi here (“Clues”, “Man of the People”); Riker learned poker on the Potemkin, a stay of only six weeks (“Second Chances”); Cardassian dissidents would next be seen on DS9’s “Second Skin”; and though the Klingonese gik’tal is not a mok’bara manuever, it does relate to death (“Firstborn”). This outing provides the first TNG mention of DS9’s Bajoran religious vedeks, implies that Canada was still a Terran entity two generations earlier, recalls Riker’s Alaska roots (“The Icarus Factor”), and reveals that a probe sent into Cardassian space is a treaty violation. Bridge duty shifts are apparently not long-lived: we see “alpha shift” with Worf and Data, while “beta shift” has Ensign Gates (“Phantasms”, “The Pegasus”) and extra Tracee Cocco’s character ­ usually all seen working together. Also on ship, we learn that ensigns must share a cabin while junior lieutenants do not.
