1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Man of the People”@2Next Generation episode #129
Production No.: 229
Aired: Week of October 5, 1992
Stardate: 46071.6
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Written by Frank Abatemarco
GUEST CAST
Ambassador Ves Alkar: Chip Lucia
Nurse Alyssa Ogawa: Patti Yasutake
Admiral Simons: George D. Wallace
Ensign Janeway: Lucy Boryer
Sev Maylor: Susan French
Jarth: Rick Scarry
Liva: Stephanie Erb
Ensign (Troi’s): J. P. Hubbell
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
After the Enterprise assumes the transport of an ambassador to the site of an interplanetary war’s peace talks, Troi begins aging rapidly and acting without abandon following the sudden death of the mediator’s aged mother.
The woman had accused Troi of having designs on her son Alkar, a Lumerian, but after her strange death he refused an autopsy according. Upset at the woman’s outburst and later death, Troi aids Alkar in what he says is his planet’s “funeral ritual,” which leaves her feeling odd and her libido running amok.
First she seduces a young ensign after both Alkar and Riker turn her down. Then, aging shocking she stabs Captain Picard ­ which leads him to order the dead woman autopsied over Alkar’s objections.
It is found that Alkar and Troi actually shared a process that let him “dump” his negative thoughts in her in order to keep his mind clear for negotiating. The dead woman was not his “mother,” just his previous victim.
Picard, angry at Alkar’s nonchalant admission, waits until near the end of the successful talks before faking Troi’s death. The broken “link” with Troi in mid-link forces Alkar to turn to one of his aides, whom Picard has beamed out ­ leaving Alkar to die in agony, aged just like his victims.
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Piller and Moore, among others, praised Sirtis’ “sexy but scary” scenery-chewing performance for lifting one of the season’s early disappointments, an episode that shows the signs of being rushed into production one slot early when the next show, “Relics,” had to be pushed back due to the schedule of James “Scotty” Doohan. With Abatemarco an experienced writer but the “new guy” on the block, the staff each took an act and pulled another committee-write to break the script for his treatment. “He was a seasoned veteran, but it wasn’t a fair introduction for him,” said Taylor, who was still preoccupied with the season debut at the time. “It remained for his later work for everybody to realize that perhaps this wasn’t for him.”
A Q story by Echevarria was considered for this slot, Piller revealed. The plot had the superbeing dividing the crew into twins representing opposite halves, but not just good/bad as in original Trek’s “Enemy Within”; in fact, the lack of agreement on what the two polarities should be is what bogged down the story.
This episode’s closing is one of the warmest Riker-Troi scenes yet, her chocolate habit (see notes, “The Price”) is recalled, and the plot device of an autopsy ban would be used later in the season (“Suspicions”). Here Troi’s quarters are seen to be Deck 9/0910, Worf’s martial arts class (“Clues”, “New Ground”) is glimpsed again before gaining a name (“Birthright, Part II”), the biobed forcefield restraint is used again (“Time Squared”), and the extra playing Chief Daniels is seen with a solid ensign’s pip, as per O’Brien’s rank from the preceding episode. Past references include the cortical stimulator (“Ethics”, “Inner Light”) and the stimulant inoprovalene (“Transfigurations”, “Ethics”), while mention of the drug cordrazine (see “Shades of Gray”) and the Federation Council date back to sixties Trek.
The voice of Captain Talmadge was provided by Terrence Beasor, who had previously given uncredited vocal life to aliens (“Skin of Evil”, “The Ensigns of Command”, “Devil’s Due”).
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Matter of Time, A”@2Next Generation episode #109
Production No.: 209
Aired: Week of November 18, 1991
Stardate: 45349.1
Directed by Paul Lynch
Written by Rick Berman
GUEST CAST
Dr. Hal Mosely: Stefan Gierasch
Berlingoff Rasmussen: Matt Frewer
Ensign Felton: Sheila Franklin
Female Scientist: Shay Garner
While trying to reverse the nuclear winter-type effects caused by a crashed asteroid on Penthara IV, the Enterprise is visited by a time-traveling historian from twenty-sixth-century Earth, Berlingoff Rasmussen.
The officers’ initial suspicions give way to impatience when Rasmussen asks repeatedly to see their “artifacts” and to have questionnaires filled out. Troi is convinced he is hiding something, but most crew members go along with his teasing and his annoying cheeriness.
The ship’s first try at helping Penthara IV only makes matters worse; then La Forge comes up with an alternative plan that will either clear the atmosphere or burn it off entirely, killing every living thing on the planet. Desperate for help, Picard turns to Rasmussen, but the time traveler says he can’t divulge the future. When the Pentharans agree to Geordi’s plan so does Picard. Luckily, it works.
Rasmussen quickly moves to leave after the planet is saved, but Picard first demands he be allowed to search the time pod for items reported missing by his crew. The time traveler agrees to let Data enter because he can be ordered not to divulge any secrets of the future, but once the two are inside the pod, Rasmussen pulls a phaser and reveals he is really from the twenty-second century. He appropriated the real twenty-sixth-century time traveler’s craft and came forward in time to gather trinkets ­ which now include Data ­ that he could claim to have invented.
But a suspicious Picard had Rasmussen’s phaser deactivated. Helpless, Rasmussen is stranded in the twenty-fourth century when the pod’s timed return mechanism whisks it away without him.
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Rick Berman said he’d always been interested in the idea of someone traveling through time to steal Data, and he got the chance to do it in this, his second turn at storytelling and his only solo writing credit during the first five seasons. “It’s like imagining what Newton could have done if he’d had a calculator,” Berman said. “What would someone of the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century do with Data? He’d be a very powerful individual!”
The effort to replace Wesley with a female conn officer had of course ended with the addition of Ro, but beginning here and for five shows this season, Sheila Franklin’s Ensign Felton filled in as well. Though never spoken aloud, the name Felton appeared in all of the scripts she turned up in “New Ground,” “Hero Worship,” “The Masterpiece Society” and “Imaginary Friend”.
Among the tidbits of Trek information provided here: a phaser on maximum stun is required to stun Data; the Federation was founded after the Romulan War “The Outcast”; and phasers, medical forcefields, and the warp coil were all invented after the twenty-second century.
A comet discovered by the Enterprise is found to be the “archive” of an ancient society. Unexpectedly, a sensor scan activates an odd replication program that begins converting areas of the starship to the Mayan-like culture of the archive’s makers.
The program targets Data and deposits various iconic characters from the culture into him: baffling voices speaking of pain, death, and sacrifice. When areas of the ship actually begin to be transformed into foliage and jungles and Picard regretfully orders the archive’s destruction, his command is cut short by the transformation of Main Engineering.
Eventually, Picard and the others deduce that Masaka, the most feared character, and “her” pursuer, Korgano, share a nip-and-tuck chase dynamic not unlike that of the Terran sun and moon. With time running out and direct override impossible, La Forge finally locates the archive’s transformational program just in time for Picard to assume the “mask” of Korgano and “chase” Masaka off her temple throne.
Once Masaka is subdued, both the ship and Data return to normal ­ without the whole society of characters that were once within him.
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Former staff writer Joe Menosky’s second offbeat and long-distance script of the year, from an old premise off Michael Piller’s suggested take on the “Lost Library at Alexandria,” featured a large amount of well-done opticals but proved confusing to many ­ including several who worked on it! “I think a lot of people have been utterly mystified by it,” admitted Jeri Taylor. “I loved the mythic aspect . . . how important that has been to so many cultures, and how we in contemporary days have strayed away from that.”
“Joe has a magnificent imagination, he thinks in a deep way,” agreed Naren Shankar, charged with clarifying some of the vagaries in his uncredited polish. “But in this case it was too much. . . . We had to make it more understandable, make the clues clearer. And the end result is . . . it’s still kinda confusing!” Director Bob Wiemer, heading up his eighth TNG effort, was more to the point: “I didn’t get it,” he said, noting the extensive rewrite. “I always look and find a meaningful subtext of some kind in most every show I’ve done; more often than not they’re little morality plays, and I was unable to find that in ‘Masks’ . . . it ended up kind of an exotic adventure story, but it didn’t have any heart.” Recalling a core element of the second Star Trek movie, science adviser Andre Bormanis said the script’s original explanation of the archive was an “advanced Genesis device” that was to scout out a planet to re-create members of an old society kept “on file” and but mistook the Enterprise for such a world by a triggering malfunction.
Menosky’s original use of purely archetypal forms were hard to conceptualize, Shankar recalled, and so they were changed to actual characters suggested by the archive’s image files. That didn’t help actor Brent Spiner, who made no bones about his concern in bringing off the various character extremes. “He said ‘Dustin Hoffman took a year to figure out how to play a woman in Tootsie ­ how am I supposed to do it in two days?” recalled Taylor. “But I thought he did an extraordinary job. . . . He’s a fine actor and he needn’t be so worried.” Even so, Wiemer backed up Spiner’s request for revoicing and, when refused, to have subtle effects done in post-production with Wendy Neuss’s crews: raising the pitch of the child voice, lowering the man’s, and adding reverb to the Ihat voice. The youngster Eric (“Liaisons”, “Firstborn”) returned as the lone guest actor.
Visually, the show was a clear triumph, with the props themselves featuring a hand-silversmithed mask for Picard and a sandstone-finished styrene version for Data. With Stage 16 taken up with the previous show’s village, “Masks” saw Richard James’ elaborate temple set built on DS9’s Stage 18. Drawing from many ancients’ design influences, it was later revamped on the sister show for the Albino’s fortress interior on Blood Oath. We learn that Crusher took her test “eight years ago,” before the Enterprise launched, and that perhaps antimatter pods can be ejected separately.
The visual effects crews had a field day, with supervisor Ron B. Moore praising the melting comet effect performed by Santa Barbara Studios, creators of the comet in DS9’s main title sequence. This opening shot was such a hit that he won a costlier longer slot for the effect in the show’s tightly budgeted running time ­ from six to nine seconds. The foot-high, primer red library model itself had been cobbled together from wood pieces by visual FX producer Dan Curry in the shop at Image G, where miniatures are filmed, and then digitized by Santa Barbara before the decision makers picked a texture to be applied.
Less splashy but more intricate were the onboard set transformations needed, a blue-screen dissolve overlaid with a visual ripple stemming from a water element much revamped from its initial use, the de-aging anomaly in “Rascals”. Both Curry and Stipes were amazed at another one of Patrick Stewart’s feats: complete body control that allowed a blue-screen shot of his mask’s final disappearance to be shot without a hokey “jump cut” when footage of it actually being removed is trimmed out. “You say ‘stand still’ and that guy’s a statue!” recalled Moore, who tugged loose the mask’s slip knot and let it fall while Stewart never budged nor blinked.
