To prepare for the Borg threat, Picard asks for a master Zakdorn strategist to oversee a battle simulation he will wage against Riker, who will command the revived derelict USS Hathaway. Strategist Sirna Kolrami, who predicts that Riker has no chance, is also a champion at the game Strategema. His shockingly easy defeat of Data leaves Pulaski and others fuming at the tactician’s arrogance.
Meanwhile, Riker realizes his ship’s hope in the “battle” is his own flair for off-beat tricks. With the help of a dilithium sliver from Wesley’s science project, his crew stands ready.
Riker scores an early hit using the holographic image of a Romulan warbird as a distraction, but the games turn deadly when Picard mistakes an incoming Ferengi ship for another illusion. Its attack leaves his weapons fused in the harmless war games mode.
The Ferengi demand the secret weapon they surmise the Hathaway must be holding and threaten to destroy both vessels. But, using its jury-rigging, the older ship fakes its “shooting” in the split second as it warp-jumps, startling the materialistic Ferengi into withdrawing when they can’t fathom its illogical destruction.
Meanwhile, Data gets a Strategema rematch with Kolrami. This time he coolly plays only for a draw and “wins” when the frustrated Zakdorn loses his patience.
The antimatter shards seen in this episode are actually blue candle wax, the Hathaway’s bridge is yet another re-dress of the film set, and the Tholians ­ referred to in “The Icarus Factor” ­ are mentioned again here, this time as a “victim” of Riker’s quick thinking during an Academy simulation. This story also includes the first known name of a Ferengi ship, the Kreechta. The acronym LCARS, seen prominently on Enterprise computer screens here and in other segments, stands for Library Computer Access-Retrieval System.
More Okudagrams with in-jokes and anime references: Kolrami’s briefing chart calls the war games Operation Lovely Angel and lists Kei and Yuri as proper names of the three Braslota planets, along with Totoro. The Hathaway’s plaque, showing it was built at Copernicus Ship Yards of Luna (Earth’s moon), carries two Buckaroo references: Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems is the builder, and the motto is the film’s catch line, “No matter where you go, there you are.”
The Enterprise command staff decides it is time to give Wesley a real test of responsibility: oversight of a team checking into dangerous geological events in the Selcundi Drema system.
As the acting ensign seeks advice in picking and leading his team of older subordinates, a member balks at running a lengthy test Wesley feels is necessary. After soul-searching and a pep talk from Riker, Wesley gets the test run with no problem.
Meanwhile, Data interrupts Picard’s holodeck horseback ride to admit he has contacted a young girl on one of the unsafe worlds, Drema IV.
Although he wanted only to reassure the girl after picking up her lonely broadcasts for help when her world became unstable, Data now fears ­ and Picard agrees ­ that his contact may violate the Prime Directive.
After a lively staff debate on the issue, Picard agrees to let Data bring the young girl, Sarjenka, aboard as Wesley’s team tries to reverse the volcanic stresses that are about to wreck the planet.
Standing next to Data, Sarjenka watches from the bridge as the plan works and Wesley’s team celebrates. Picard then orders Pulaski to “wipe” Sarjenka’s short-term memory, and when Data takes her home she remembers nothing of her “pen pal” or of the ship that saved her.
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Melinda Snodgrass, who adapted Hannah Louise Shearer’s original story treatment, has called this Data’s “age of innocence” story. The android had carried on a dialogue with Sarjenka for eight weeks without reporting it, much as he would later do while developing his protege in “The Offspring”. In “Pen Pals,” however, the writers had to limit the two characters’ closeness, because Nikki Cox’s orange makeup became smudged so easily on contact.
Just as she had turned to her roots in the legal profession for “The Measure of a Man”, Snodgrass revealed her love of horses ­ and Patrick Stewart’s excellent horsemanship ­ in Picard’s equestrian holodeck visit. This scene was the only location shoot of the season, filmed at a ranch near the L.A. suburb of Thousand Oaks.
Sharp-eyed fans should spot one of the few TNG props not designed by Sternbach: the “spectral analyzer” used in the geology lab. This device was originally the “oscillation overthruster” sought by the evil red Lectroids in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension. Other homages to Buckaroo Banzai were planted throughout the series by the art staffers, most noticeably as passing references in graphics, as in “Up the Long Ladder”, for one.
Kriosian Ambassador Briam arrives aboard the Enterprise with a peace offering from his people for the ruler of Valt Minor. The gift, Briam declares, is priceless, and is intended to end years of war between Krios and Valt Minor. Picard immediately orders the object, being delivered in a stasis field, off-limits to his crew.
En route to Valt Minor the Enterprise rescues two Ferengi from a shuttle in distress ­ an act of mercy that soon backfires when the Ferengi are caught attempting to steal the Kriosian gift. In the process, the stasis field protecting the item is shattered, revealing a beautiful and exotic woman, Kamala.
She is an empathic mesomorph, a genetic rarity among her people ­ such creatures are born only once every seven generations. Kamala can be what any man wants her to be. Educated to fulfill her role as peacemaker, she has been prepared from birth to bond with Valt’s ruler, Alric. The Ferengi’s interference has caused her to be released prematurely, and the ambassador insists she be confined to her room until Alrik arrives.
That move sets off Dr. Crusher, who complains to Picard that the entire affair smacks of prostitution. The captain gamely cites the Prime Directive, but understands the ambassador’s request after seeing the effect Kamala has on his crew. When Briam is accidentally injured by the Ferengi, Picard is forced to turn to Kamala for help in performing his ambassadorial duties ­ and soon finds even his legendary resistance weakening. Kamala is drawn to him as well; she tells Picard he is the first man who has suggested she has value in and of herself.
Alric finally arrives and confides to Picard he cares more about treaties and trade than he does for his “peace bride.” Just before the reconciliation ceremony, a sad Kamala tells Picard she has chosen to bond with him, rather than become the woman Alric expects her to be. She assures a visibly shaken Picard she’ll carry out her duties nonetheless ­ as he will carry out his.
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What could have been just another romance became a much more significant story, as this episode again used a science fiction premise to turn conventional wisdom on its ear.
“We have Beverly argue the point that Kamala’s mission amounts to prostitution,” Michael Piller noted. “And we have Picard taking the other tack: that whether or not we approve, we can’t change or interfere with the way these people are. And if you accept Roddenberry’s vision, which we are built on, you have to respect that.”
The only writing pseudonym requested during Piller’s tenure turned up here: “Percante” was actually his friend Reuben Leder, who disliked the rewrite done on his draft. The script included an unused optional fantasy scene in which Picard, just before the actual ceremony, daydreamed that he spoke out at the wedding to claim Kamala as his own.
For once we actually got to see the Picard-Crusher morning tea ritual referred to in “Qpid”), which, in its own way, shows how the two officers’ relationship has matured over the years. We also learn that the young Jean-Luc spoken of in “Family”) hated piano lessons but briefly took them to please his mother.
The best line in the script almost went to Qol, upon his discovery in the cargo bay: “I must have lost my way ­ I was looking for the barbershop.” But ultimately that honor belongs to a painfully aroused Riker, who wipes the sweat off his mustache after barely escaping Kamala and says, “If you need me, I’ll be in holodeck four!”
La Forge is embarrassed by the ongoing failure of a newly installed warp core just as Data becomes troubled by disturbing nightmare images from his dreaming program.
From memories of eating a living cake in the shape of Deanna Troi to workmen apparently disrupting a plasma conduit, Data seeks out a Sigmund Freud holodeck program and even Troi herself for answers. Though wondering if he’s developing human neuroses, Troi, like La Forge, dismisses Data’s dreams as just a new level of humanity ­ until he drifts off during a work session, begins seeing eating and mouth images on crewmen and finally stabs Troi in the shoulder when he sees a mouth image there ­ even with his dream program turned off.
With Data confined to quarters and the new warp core still a problem, in sickbay Dr. Crusher finds an interphasic, leechlike creature on Troi at the point of her stab wound. She learns the creatures, largely invisible, are all over the crew and are fatally extracting cellular peptides.
Sensing that Data’s dreams are a clue to their removal, Picard and La Forge enter a holodeck sequence connected to his dream program and encounter the images Data has been seeing. Upon awakening, the android successfully uses a high-frequency interphasic pulse to drive out the creatures, whose effects ­ including the warp-core failure ­ had been depicted in his dreams.
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In his weirdly offbeat trademark style, staff writer Braga delved successfully into the nightmarish side of Data’s dreams ­ a goal ever since he introduced the idea of dreams earlier (“Birthright, Part I”) ­ but around the set the episode went down in Trek lore as simply “the cake show.” Perhaps the most infamous production headache since the first season’s Armus creature (“Skin of Evil”), “the cake” reveals that even TNG’s well-oiled production machine has its breakdowns.
“The episode was fun and easy and it turned out great,” recalled the writer, who enjoyed taking jabs at Freud’s theories, “but the cake was the big thing: the production team, for some reason, God bless ’em, it threw ’em for a loop.” Never mind the old “saw a lady in half” magician’s trick table, or the same gag used in one of his own low-budget student films or the Tom Petty Wonderland-themed rock video; from the first production meeting Braga had wanted a full-length, anatomically correct cake with more gore, but that was pulled back by Berman and simplified to what staff members thought they’d finally agreed on: a torso sheet cake on a cutaway table.
Prop man Alan Sims, who at first suggested building the cake right over Sirtis’ body to employ her own limbs, told of a morning rush-hour call to his Santa Clarita baker after director Stewart, helming his fourth TNG outing, realized two hours before shooting that a “life-sized torso” wasn’t that large after all; store-bought sponge cakes added on and color-matched frostings were the jury-rigged answer. “The producer’s there now, the production manager’s there now, everyone’s upset, Patrick’s upset,” he recalled. “You can’t see it before [shooting day], so that’s why I ask these questions in the production meetings ­ ‘You want arms or you want it like a Venetian statue?’ “ “Dreams are not practical . . . because no matter what you do someone’s gonna say ‘Oh, that’s not what I thought it was going to look like,’ “ agreed designer Richard James. “You virtually have to throw the head back because otherwise the head’s going to be looking right into the cake . . . but they didn’t want her ‘thrown back.’”
“I think there was a little bit of panic that day” was producer Peter Lauritson’s understatement, while set decorator Jim Mees was more blunt: “I thought everyone was going to kill each other! It was one of those things that if you could have you’d have pretended you were dying in a hospital rather than come to work!” And Dan Curry, who tried the “box” out himself, recalled that “if you put a prisoner of war in there you’d be put on trial for war crimes. . . . Marina (Sirtis) was a trooper about it.”
Despite it all, Braga said he was more “stunned” that Data’s stabbing scene of Troi was left in. “It’s really a very shocking moment, very disturbing ­ I fully expected children in the audience to scream about Data hiding in the closet to their parents!” Lines cut for time featured Data’s study of 138 dream theories, including Dr. Syrus of Tilona IV (“Frame of Mind”) and a banquet featuring Ktarian spice cake (see “The Game”) and a keynote speech on Bajoran aqueduct management (as in “Birthright, Part I”). Braga’d named Ensign Tyler after his girlfriend’s niece, and pointed out that Data did not yet know he had a “mother” (“Inheritance”).
Kutsatsu reprises Nakamura, one of Starfleet’s fifty-plus admirals, all the way from Season 2 (“The Measure of a Man”), while longtime con extra Joyce Robinson gets dubbed “Ensign Gates” here, an homage to actress McFadden. Also for the trivia buffs, Alexander is finally mentioned this season and said to like Riker’s jazz (“11001001”, “Second Chances”), and the “new” hatch cover was meant to be an all-new reactor core, cut for budget; the metaphasic scanner prop (“The Next Phase”) is an anyonic scanner here.
Finally, in Data’s room we see another casually stored phaser (“Aquiel”), Jenna’s gift (“In Theory”), and his getups for Dixon Hill (see “11001001”) and Sherlock Holmes (“Elementary, Dear Data”, “Ship in a Bottle”); despite his bedtime ritual we know he needs no rest (“The Best of Both Worlds”) although he has tried it (“Tin Man”). Ongoing here are the jokes about Spot’s pet-sitters (“Timescape”, “Genesis”), and his picky appetite, now up to feline supplement 125 from 74 (“Data’s Day”, “Force of Nature”). And in the season’s biggest blooper, the cat’s clear status as a male here would soon change (“Force of Nature”, “Genesis”).
The surreal imagery translated into a full plate for the post-production teams, the most complex being the quick holodeck dissolve from Ten-Forward to Freud’s office while Picard is talking on Data’s “chest phone.” Aside from director of photography Jonathan West and second-unit DP Tom DeNove matching lighting on the various sets to blue-screen shootings and to the half-second transformational cross-fade, the scene already required that prop man Alan Sims’ telephone within a cast Data “chest” be matted in on the imaged Data, who himself would dissolve with the backgrounds and the phone receiver that Picard holds.
Modelmaker Tony Doublin created two different creature puppets for the episode, including cable-actuated foam models for the “mouths” initially five times larger than the finished shot and then scaled down, with the background blended digitally so even Geordi’s skin muscles appeared to move. His interphasic creatures were originally much more complex, sporting visible tentacles and shot on two plates for a transparent “jellyfish” effect with internal organs visible on the fourteen-inch model. After the shots had all been filmed and composited, FX supervisor David Stipes recalled with a groan, the word came down to make them more mollusk-like with embedded tentacles and not so much movement apparent in “this” dimension ­ so the extras were all painstakingly “painted” out. “You can still see their guts moving but it’s about a tenth of what we did,” Stipes said.
Finally, the dream aura allows a reality warp on the sets: As Picard and La Forge round a corner to enter Ten-Forward, the wall of “fake” cabin doors can be seen backing up to the wall behind the bar.
After receiving an old-style distress call from a moon of Mab-Bu VI, previously thought to be uninhabited, and after learning also that magnetic storms prevent the use of the transporter, Riker, Troi, and Data take a shuttlecraft down to the moon’s surface to investigate.
Stranded after the shuttle crash-lands, they are relieved when O’Brien risks his life to beam down to them. He brings along transport enhancers to enable them to beam back to the ship. As they depart, a strange cloud envelops all but the injured Riker.
Troi, Data, and O’Brien have been possessed by alien entities, who soon secure themselves in Ten-Forward with hostages ­ including a bewildered Keiko and little Molly ­ until Picard agrees to their chief demand: move the ship to the area over the moon’s south pole.
The entities claim to be from the USS Essex and say they want only to be buried in peace. Troi, possessed by the spirit of Captain Bryce Shumar, says they were disembodied when their ship broke up over the moon two hundred years ago.
But their violence belies this story, and Picard eventually learns the truth: the entities were actually prisoners condemned to the penal colony Mab-Bu VI. They tried to possess the Essex’s crew and use that ship to escape ­ as they plan to do now with the Enterprise and its crew.
Taken hostage by the three, Picard accompanies them to a cargo bay where the rest of the entities are beamed up. The captain then turns the tables, saying he will open the outer cargo bay doors and kill all of them, including himself, rather than allow the entities to take his crew. The entities relent, abandon their host bodies, and return to their prison.
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Bearing a slight conceptual resemblance to an original-series episode, “Return to Tomorrow,” another tale of alien possession, this story went through several script treatments by free-lancers before being assigned to Braga. Herb Wright brought in the ghost angle when the two teamed up for the version eventually used.
“It was supposed to be the ultimate bottle show, a tense psychological drama between Picard and the possessed Troi, crammed into one room, but it became one of the costliest of the year with the shuttle crash and the phaser fight,” Braga said. “It has no socially redeeming value, but it sure is action-packed!”
“It was wonderfully directed,” Michael Piller agreed, praising David Livingston for his second outing behind the camera. “That’s why it was successful.” Marina Sirtis finally got into some rough stuff, and Brent Spiner found an edge different from Lore’s for his character as well. They and Colm Meaney invented nicknames for their “possessed” personae: Slugger, Buzz, and Slash.
Once again Planet Hell lived up to its nickname: filming spilled over an extra half-day on Stage 16, where Livingston recalled worrying about Spiner’s contact lenses and where Sirtis got so dirty from the blowing sand she had to take a midday shower and get made up again.
The crashed shuttlepod was the Campbell, named for pioneering science fiction author Joseph W. Campbell. Inspired by the movie Cape Fear, a 360-degree rotating camera was used to film the craft’s interior crash scenes.
A bit of early Federation history is revealed here with the mention of the NCC-173 Exeter and its ill-fated crew of 229. The end of service for the ship’s Daedelus class is established as 172 years earlier, or 2196, and its specific loss over two hundred years prior to this episode means the Daedalus prototype was likely designed and commissioned well before the UFP’s founding in 2161, as established in “The Outcast”. At the time of its loss, though, Starbase 12 is referred to as already in operation.
Finally, another bit of Klingon culture ­ their notion of spiritual possession, Jat’yln, ­ is revealed here as well.
Troi falls for the charismatic Devinoni Ral, a soft-spoken yet determined negotiator who comes aboard the Enterprise to bid on an apparently stable wormhole found near Barzan II.
The wormhole allows almost instant travel to an unexplored corner of the galaxy, and the Barzan hope that proceeds from its sale will bolster the economy of their poor planet.
Ral, a human working for another world, arouses concern when he anticipates another bidder’s fears and eases him out. Then the Ferengi crash the talks and secretly make the Federation delegate too ill to finish bidding. In a pinch, Picard makes Riker take that job, hoping that the commander’s poker instincts will see him through.
To check the primitive Barzan probe’s report, Data and La Forge take a shuttlepod through the wormhole; the protesting Ferengi send one of their own as well. But after the Starfleet officers emerge in the wrong area, they realize the wormhole does change endpoints, and they escape just before it collapses ­ stranding the pooh-poohing Ferengi far from home.
Ral finally confides the secret of his success to Troi: he too is part Betazoid. She clears her conscience by revealing this to all after the Barzan accept his bid ­ and sadly discover the wormhole is no good anyway.
Ral tells Troi he needs her to be his conscience, to help him change, but they part, with her reminding him she’s already got a counselor’s job.
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Despite the advance hype about Troi’s “bed scenes” ­ a first in the Trek series ­ the finished product didn’t quite live up to the rumored raciness. Other scenes, though, are wonderful: the lovers’ debate on the ethics of being Betazoid among non-empaths; Beverly and Deanna’s workout gossip, in which we learn that the doctor dated Jack Crusher for months (“Conspiracy”); and more good comic Ferengi scenes, including Goss’s crashing of the wormhole negotiations.
Matt McCoy, who worked with Jonathan Frakes on Dreamwest, brought a slick yet sympathetic air to the role of the galactic manipulator who finally meets his match. A veteran of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, he later had regular roles on We’ve Got It Made, Penn ‘N’ Ink, and Hot Hero Sandwich and starred in the films Deep Star Six and Police Academy V and VI. Kevin Peter Hall, who died after this episode was filmed, stood seven feet four and had donned the alien suit for the original Predator movie and the Bigfoot costume for Harry and the Hendersons. In the script, Ral’s traveling companion, quickly tossed aside for Troi, is named Rojay.
A re-dressed set for Troi’s office finally turns up in this episode and would see more use in the future. For trivia fans, its location is given as Deck 8/3472, while her quarters are at Deck 9/0910. This story also introduces Troi’s love of chocolate ­ a recurring theme in “Deja Q” and “The Game” ­ and she informs us that even her years with Riker were nothing like the passion she feels with Ral at first. The European Alliance, mentioned as Ral’s birthplace, is likely a successor to the European Hegemony of two hundred years earlier mentioned in “Up the Long Ladder”.
In one background scene in Ten-Forward, a crew woman turns down a pass made by Goss, whose subtle gesture harks back to an original concept of the Ferengi: the fact that the males have large sex organs. The show also identifies the Ferengi ship as belonging to the Marauder class. Though this one turns out to be a fluke, a stable wormhole went on to become a historic find in the TNG spinoff series Deep Space Nine.
