Worf is nearly driven insane when, after returning victorious from a bat’telh competition, he realizes he is sliding from one alternate universe to another.
First the details of his unwanted surprise birthday party keep changing. Then the details of the sabotaged Argus Array ­ as well as his tactical console ­ are different too, resulting in La Forge’s death during a Cardassian attack. At that point, Worf finds himself on an Enterprise where Ogawa is chief medical officer and he is married to Troi!
After Data points out that La Forge was nearby each time Worf sensed a change, his VISOR is activated and immediately makes the Klingon dizzy ­ and this time he wakes up on a Riker-led Enterprise as first officer, with Wes Crusher at tactical. Data has found that Worf’s RNA shows quantum-level flux that is out of sync with the universe, and discovers with Wes a quantum fissure where many universes intersect ­ a fissure that trapped the original Worf and is aggravated by the VISOR’s subspace pulse.
During the search for Worf’s true universe, the warlike Bajorans of this one open fire, destabilizing the fissure so much that Enterprises from the various universes begin popping in together ­ including a ragtag fugitive in a Borg-controlled galaxy that opens fire as Worf returns to his correct universe. That ship is neutralized, the quantum states are repaired, and once home Worf can’t help but see his relationship with Troi differently.
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From the briefest of premises, Braga developed the latest of his complex, high-concept stories that turned out to be one of Season 7’s most popular ­ largely due to its unforgettable effects and the debut of what became known as the “Worf-Troi thing.” “It’s been kinda fun, but it infuriates some people,” Taylor said of the dream-state romance. “Some people are so upset that we didn’t put Riker and Troi together and just get it over with, and how dare we introduce this!”
Story needs and the nonpermanent formats of alternate universes were what tempted the staff to finally pursue the Worf-Troi romance they’d first toyed with in Season 5 (“Ethics”, et al.), after a plot based on Picard didn’t pan out. “I think most people didn’t pick up on the relationship we were trying to evolve, which was good ­ we wanted that surprise when we find out they’re married,” Braga said, noting its future incarnations (“Eye of the Beholder”, “Genesis”, “All Good Things...”). “This is a couple that only has relationships in alternate realities and timelines . . . even as creatures. They make normal couples look boring by comparison!”
The story, which Taylor said “broke like butter” despite Piller’s skepticism over its brief roots, is filled with other gems, as well: a Cardassian on the bridge in one universe, his people conquered by warlike Bajorans; another where Ogawa is a doctor and ship’s medical officer; and still others where Picard is killed by the Borg and ­ most haunting ­ a fugitive Enterprise on the run from the all-victorious cyborgs. The last line “Champagne,” originally unscripted, was written by Taylor at director Wiemer’s request for a more definitive ending ­ after a huddle over just how direct Worf should be. Wiemer noted that even Worf’s initial shuttle scene is not set in his “real” universe, but admitted the thought didn’t occur to him until after he was done with the show! For the record, seven alternates are seen in all.
Braga also revealed that the throwaway Wes Crusher role was first written for Tasha but felt to be redundant (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”); he would soon return in “reality” anyway (“Journey’s End”). Worf’s party song was to have been the traditional “Happy Birthday” in Klingonese ­ until producers learned the broadcast fee quoted by the copyrighted song’s royalty holders. He made his nephew a namesake again (“Liaisons”, et al.) for Worf and Troi’s “son,” and he returned to the Argus Array (“Nth Degree”), a favorite design, just to have it break down again. The shuttle Curie was originally dubbed the Borges, after the one of Braga’s favorite authors whose parallel-worlds story “The Garden of Forking Paths” greatly predated quantum mechanics as a science; the craft design is also finally given a name, Type 6. Bormanis said the “subspace pulse” of Geordi’s VISOR is not a warp-like field but merely a computational speed accelerator, much like a transistor.
Also: Worf’s birthday apparently fell on SD 47391.2, after a brief bio screen gave it as December 9 (“Conundrum”); his party featured a seventeen-candle cake, with twentieth-century balloons tied to chairs and poppers optically enhanced; Alexander is said to be visiting the Rozhenkos on Earth; the Galor-class Cardassian warship is mispronounced from its original “gay-ler” (“The Wounded”). Troi’s chocolate fetish has a long history (see “The Game”, “Liaisons”) as does Worf’s bat’telh, as well as a muddled spelling (back to “bat’tehl” of “Reunion”).
The alternate realities have a host of trivia, too: Troi’s wardrobe from the entire series (except for the buttoned-down Season 1, of course) is emptied here; set pieces from the alternate bridge would turn up in the finale (“All Good Things . . .”), while Barash’s future comm badges with included rank bars (“Future Imperfect”) are worn here with pips. The fourth deep space station ever mentioned, DS5, is seen to be a Regula One design from the second Trek feature; the others besides DS9 are DS3 (“Inheritance”) and DS4 (“Suspicions”). “Starbase 47” is the redressed cryocapsule/relay station (“The Neutral Zone” “Aquiel”), while we finally get a glimpse of Utopia Planetia’s land-based facility, complete with surrounding red Martian terrain.
Recalling the earlier “cake crisis” (“Phantasms”), Braga early on contacted FX supervisor Ron B. Moore about a feasible way to create a “hundred Enterprises” to fill the screen after the fissure’s collapse. Rather than using the “abomination” of stock shots with dozens of light-source angles, he and his coordinator Michael “B.” Backauskas developed a motion control plan to film the model while rotating and lit in the same direction but from above and below and varying distances. The “multiple Worf” shuttle scene, conceived of as a clip sequence, was accomplished with split-screen shots, two with a stand-in in the back to allow more easy-to-matte crossing movement. Tossed in with a “less ominous” all-new anomaly and an old explosion effect (“Timescape”) for the Borg Enterprise, Moore was able to boast that his formidable segment’s FX came out under budget and on time: “I don’t know how many Enterprises are on the screen, but it’s a good deal more than a hundred!”
Painful memories and choices are stirred up for Riker when his first captain, Erik Pressman, joins the Enterprise to lead a mission to retrieve their old ship, the Pegasus, before the Romulans can salvage the secrets it was testing.
Pressman, now an admiral, upsets Riker when he reveals his plan to salvage the ship and continue with the original test: a phased cloaking device that not only allows ships to pass through solid material but violates the original Treaty of Algeron with the Romulans.
Riker, ordered not to share the secret with Picard, is haunted when the frustrated former captain reveals that a cover-up muffled the news that Pressman’s crew mutinied just before the ship was lost.
After a standoff with a Warbird looking for the Pegasus, Pressman orders Picard to take the Enterprise inside a fissure of the huge asteroid, where the Pegasus is eventually located. Aboard the ship, now phased partly into solid rock, Riker puts the loyalty he gave Pressman as an ensign behind him and defies the enraged admiral. But the two are suddenly beamed back with the salvaged phasing cloak as the Romulans seal the Enterprise inside the fissure. Riker reveals Pressman’s secret as an escape option. Picard takes it ­ revealing the technology to the Romulans and arresting Pressman for the treaty violations, with the promise of an inquiry to expose his Starfleet allies.
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Winning praise as LeVar Burton’s second directorial stint and one of Ron Moore’s finest efforts, the writer said this story began as a bare-bones “Raise the Titanic” idea and struck paydirt when the conflict-torn Riker story was coined. Though it grew from the secret project, Riker’s silence on the subject, and his “straight arrow” character as a young officer, Moore acknowledged a certain resemblance to the themes of honor and duty of his own “The First Duty”, where Wes Crusher didn’t have the benefit of fifteen years’ good record to minimize his early-career mistake. In contrast to Pressman, Picard is also portrayed as the type who’d pick his first officer sight unseen from resumes ­ a fact not explored since the pilot.
As a sidelight, Moore also jumped at the chance here to nail down the eternal question: Why not a Federation cloaking device? “I thought, let’s sew this up,” Moore explained, “not because it’s the last season but because I’m sick of that question at the conventions! It’s such a screamingly obvious thing to the fans, and I was just tired of it and wanted to put it to rest.” After some thought, the treaty ban seemed to be the “cleanest” explanation, he added ­ and much better than the “bizarre theories” he’d heard in the past: “ ‘The cloaking device hurts humans but not Vulcans and Romulans,’ or ‘It wouldn’t work on Federation starships because of their design’ . . . or that the Federation wasn’t smart enough to figure it out! Somebody also said, ‘We don’t sneak around’ ­ and I thought that was kind of ridiculous too.”
Ironically, the “phasing cloak” is the same concept that the “devious” Klingons and Romulans were known to be testing at one time or another (“The Next Phase”). Moore also wanted a lighthearted teaser to contrast with the coming heavy drama, but revealed that instead of “Captain Picard Day” ­ written to utilize Jonathan Frakes’ never-aired Stewart impersonation ­ his first idea was a rehearsal of Shaw’s “Pygmalion” performance shipboard directed by Crusher with Troi, Riker, and Data as Eliza, her father, and Professor Higgins. “After the [story] break, Michael kinda frowned and said, ‘OK, give it a shot,’ but it was just insane ­ it didn’t fit at all,” he said, hoping in vain that the scene could have been one of many saved and used later on.
The show debuts the first black Romulan, making it the latest Trek species to be depicted as multiracial, although not everyone got the message at first: actor Michael Mack ­ due back as the human Starfleet Ensign Hayes at tactical in the first feature ­ recalled that he was made up as a traditional Romulan with “lightened” skin for his first shooting! A second take with correct makeup had to be reshot a third time when the producers wanted his intensely menacing portrayal softened.
There’s history of another kind in Act III, when longtime bridge extra Joyce Robinson ­ having finally gained a character name (“Phantasms”) ­ got to utter an uncredited reply to Picard. The line was written for Data but actor Brent Spiner ­ joined by the rest of the cast, when too late to change the setup ­ pointed out that the helm and not the ops officer should carry out the “course plotted” order.
Also for trivia hounds: Moore marks the difference here between Starfleet Security (internal) and Intelligence (external), noting that “There was a time when you couldn’t even mention Starfleet Intelligence on the show ­ and I kept sneaking it into scripts ­ and finally people sort of stopped caring.” His dating of the Treaty of Algeron puts in at the time of the never-detailed “Tomed Incident,” the last Romulan-UFP encounter before TNG’s first season (“The Neutral Zone”). Contest winner Paul Menengay was named for a friend of Brannon Braga’s, although the entries actually came from two area elementary schools and prop man Alan Sims’ own children. Science adviser Andre Bormanis was proud to contribute his first original “technobabble”: a “duonetic field,” coined from Daystrom’s original duotronics (“The Ensigns of Command”) as the field equivalent of the fictitious verterons (“Force of Nature” and DS9’s “In the Hands of the Prophets,” “Playing God,” et al.) and tetryons, when factual forms became too awkward to say repeatedly.
Other past references include Admiral Shanti (“Redemption II”), the Excelsior-class U.S.S. Crazy Horse (“Descent”), the JAG office (“Gambit, Part II”), extending shields to protect another object (“The Next Phase”, “Final Mission”, “The Defector”, “Deja Q”), and the first emergency exception for exceeding warp five (“Force of Nature”). We learn that Riker trains for the bat’tleh with sticks and, curiously, says his beard is four years old; perhaps he shaved it after the second season!
Thanks to a convincing early test shot, the Enterprise-D for the first time was seen illuminated within the darkened asteroid with only its own sources and spotlights ­ actually, inexpensive focal spots attached to Image G’s motion-control camera ­ to avoid what was facetiously dubbed “magic cave lighting.” “To me, that’s what really sold the show,” FX supervisor David Stipes said. “I really wanted to get that creepy quality, dangerous and claustrophobic: Picard doesn’t want to be there!” The five-foot carved-foam asteroid model and the many cave wall pieces were again Tony Doublin models, with the molten wall made of backlit paraffin and dissolvable styrene, plexiglass, and aluminum foil. Though Rick Sternbach readied sketches of a new ship based on Enterprise-”C”-era designs (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”), budget forced the reuse of the Grissom model of ST III (“The Naked Now”, “The Drumhead”, “Realm of Fear”) in unaltered form with the “rock” simply pressed in around it; Richard James’ interior set was tilted at a fifteen-degree angle.
Fresh from a year away at Advanced Tactical Training, newly promoted Lieutenant Ro Laren finds herself at the center of the growing Maquis crisis when Starfleet asks her to infiltrate the rebel colonists.
Gaining access to the Maquis in the guise of a Cardassian-killing Bajoran fugitive, Ro soon learns that the group suspects the alien empire of smuggling biogenic weapons into the Zone to use against the outsiders there. She gains the local cell’s full confidence by staging a daring raid against the Enterprise for medical supplies ­ brought off with Picard’s acquiescence, of course ­ but finds herself more and more sympathetic to the Maquis’s plight.
Picard, the troubled officer’s longtime supporter, is concerned to hear of Ro’s new self-doubts about loyalty and sends Riker along with her on the next mission: a trap to lure Maquis in for capture. But when her elderly Maquis mentor Macias is killed in a surprise Cardassian raid at their base, Ro’s mind is made up: during the mission she holds Riker hostage long enough to reveal the Starfleet ambush to her comrades.
Before leaving to go with them, she sadly hands over her Bajoran earring to Riker and lets him return, asking him to tell Picard her greatest regret is betraying the trust he put in her.
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The long-awaited return of Ro Laren, with Patrick Stewart in his fifth turn at directing and the second this season, was another late-season tale borne of desperation for Jeri Taylor and the writing staff ­ but even more so it depended on a near-miracle that actress Michelle Forbes, who’d spurned a DS9 transfer to keep busy in films, would even consider it. After having one premise after another turned down by Michael Piller in search of the best final shows possible, Taylor found herself pursuing the actress anyway just days away from prep ­ the design week before live filming ­ after coming up with a bare-bones Maquis idea to follow DS9’s two-parter (see notes, “Journey’s End”).
One scene Echevarria was sad to lose from the first draft was based on the elder Macias being Bajoran and not wearing his people’s traditional earring: after Ro’s successful “raid” he asks her if she’s ready to stop wearing hers because “you’re not Bajoran, you’re Maquis now.” The moment was meant to add even more poignancy to her final request that Riker take her earring to Picard, which already harks back to her memorable run-in with Number One in Ro’s very first time onscreen (“Ensign Ro”). Another rewrite change, he said, converted Macias’ death from a greatly disfiguring one caused by the “mutagenic” weapons described previously (“Chain of Command, Part I”); when the staff didn’t want Picard and Starfleet to be caught so “flat-footed,” the filmed version mentions only a rumor of “biogenic” arms in the area and Macias’ death is more routine. His name, though mispronounced from the namesake “mah-SEE-us,” was inspired by a Cuban freedom fighter in that nation’s War of Independence from Spain.
Along with yet another hair change, Ro herself ­ in her first real TNG role in two years (“The Next Phase”) after a brief turn last season (“Rascals”) ­ has jumped a whole rank to full lieutenant but is without the original Bajoran nosebridge piece she debuted and that Michael Westmore gradually phased out on DS9 due to the constant re-gluing needed. Her quarters are seen to be Deck 8/Room 4711; references to her father’s death and her court-martial are now new (“Ensign Ro”). For the record, Forbes has told more than one interviewer she’d consider turning up as Ro again on DS9 if the story and role were up to par.
Nechayev and Evek, those denizens of the Demilitarized Zone, again lend continuity to the Maquis arc (“Journey’s End”), while the village extras ­ as with DS9’s “The Maquis” ­ include Klingons, Vulcans, and the Dorvan V Native Americans (“Journey’s End”) as subtle setup for the Voyager cast; the resigned lieutenant commander Ro speaks of from Tactical Training is a veiled reference to the new series’ character Chakotay. Ongoing set-swapping between the sister series has DS9 art director Randy McIlvain’s council room from the two-parter redressed for use here; the village itself, with an added catwalk to provide yet more depth of action, is the fourth revamping of Richard James’ original Barkon IV community (“Thine Own Self”).
One of either series’ largest space battles, storyboarded and supervised by visual FX associate Joe Bauer, featured many of the newer ship miniatures; its Star Wars-like conflict of smaller craft attacking the larger Cardassian Galor-class warship was a virtual first for any Star Trek, which tended to keep its rare space skirmishes to the ship-on-ship variety. DS9 illustrator Jim Martin designed both the Maquis fighter first seen on the DS9 two-parter, built by Tony Meininger, and Ro’s fighter/transport debuting here as built by Greg Jein ­ with a cockpit window matching the regular “alien shuttle” interior set. Two Bajoran ships Meininger built for DS9’s second-season opening trilogy, Kira’s “attack ship” and a troop transport, are also in on the action here. The first-ever nighttime phaser fight also used more complex live interactive lighting from FX man Dick Brownfield’s flashbulb arrays and live squibs fired from a converted paint gun, designed to spark on impact.
Trivia notes: Bajoran references include the belaklavion instrument Ro’s father played and the foods foraiga and hasperat ­ which propmaster Alan Sims revealed was simply Armenian flat bread coated with cream cheese, lettuce, dried tomatoes, and black olive bits, then rolled burrito-style and cut in half to reveal the colorful cross-section. Also, “Type VIII” phasers are here said to be large and ship-mounted, in contrast to the long-established hand, pistol, and rifle phasers dubbed types I-III. Old references include the Pakleds (“Samaritan Snare”, “Firstborn”), the Yridians (“Birthright, Part I”, “Suspicions”, “Gambit, Part I”), and biomimetic gel (“Force of Nature”, “Firstborn”). Lastly, until someone realized that its title and the finale’s both contained the same word, this episode was known as “The Good Fight.”
