Renowned Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan is about to oversee the completion of his career’s crowning achievement: the establishment of relations between the Federation and the Legaran.
But while being ferried to the meeting site aboard the Enterprise, Sarek weeps during a Mozart concert. The Vulcan has developed Bendii syndrome, an Alzheimer’s-like disease that can erode an aged Vulcan’s emotional control.
Sarek unknowingly begins projecting his lack of control onto others: Wes and La Forge fight, Dr. Crusher slaps her son, and a brawl breaks out in Ten-Forward. But Sarek’s Vulcan and human aides remain in denial until Sakkath, a young Vulcan, admits he has been “propping up” Sarek’s control so the Legaran mission could continue.
Confronted by that fact and Picard’s insistence that he face reality, Sarek erupts in a fit of anger that even he admits proves the captain’s point. The Legaran, who have been dealing with Sarek for years, will talk only to him, so as a last resort to avoid canceling the mission the captain proposes a Vulcan mind-link to share his mental control with Sarek during the negotiations.
The Vulcan agrees, and Dr. Crusher braces Picard ­ who always wanted to know the remarkable Vulcan better ­ for the onslaught of Sarek’s life of repressed emotions. He is reduced to rage and sobs, but he survives the pressure as Sarek completes his mission.
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After being written out of “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, Mark Lenard here reprises the role he first played in 1967’s “Journey to Babel.” His appearance is the first major unifying event tying together the old and new Trek eras since McCoy’s cameo in the “Farpoint” pilot.
According to Michael Piller, the original story concerned the mental problems of an ambassador other than Sarek; from there, the writing staff moved to the problems of the aging, then added the Vulcan loss of control and the telepathic “bleeding.” Using Sarek was the last logical step in maximizing audience involvement and impact. “It brings home the idea that even the greatest of men is subject to illness,” Piller said.
Lenard’s work is complemented by the mind-meld scene in which Stewart is Sarek. His brilliant portrayal of pent-up emotional anguish is spiced further by the fountain of hints about the fate of Sarek’s famous son, Spock. Though later seen to be very much alive in the two-part “Unification”, Spock is referred to by Picard-Sarek in the past tense. We do learn that as a lieutenant Picard attended the wedding of “Sarek’s son,” but Spock is not specified.
References are also made to “Journey to Babel” ’s Coridan issue and to Amanda, Sarek’s first wife, played by Jane Wyatt in the 1960’s and in Star Trek IV. Given the human life span, it was decided that Sarek would have remarried; his second wife is played here by veteran actress Joanna Miles, a new kid on the Trek block. As Riker learned in school, Sarek is given credit, among other things, for the early Klingon-Federation treaties ­ credit that he shares with Riva (“Lourd as a Whisper”).
On the trivia side, note the scroll given Picard by the Mintakans (“Who Watches the Watchers?”) is seen draped over his chair in this episode. And for music lovers: the first selection played at the Mozart concert is the String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, also known as “The Dissonant,” while ­ in a blooper ­ the second is actually by Brahms, the andante moderato movement from his Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major.
The crew is puzzled when various members report strange symptoms following a false-alarm “explosion” in a cargo bay, thought to result from La Forge’s attempt to rechannel warp energy into the deflectors to more efficiently map an extremely dense cluster.
Riker reports extreme exhaustion, Worf and La Forge experience sharp pains and anxiety, and even Data has apparently “dozed off” for ninety minutes he can’t account for. No medical reason can be found, although it is soon realized that all were involved with the call to the cargo bay.
After a particle stream from outside this universe is detected, signs point to abduction by aliens when one of two crew members initially found to be missing returns and dies in agony. Then Troi leads the affected crew members in a re-creation of what she finds to be a common description of what they fear: an alien lab of some kind.
Armed with a stimulant and a homing signal, Riker volunteers to track where the missing people are being taken. He awakes in the lab to find insectlike inhabitants there battling to close a “rupture” between universes that the Enterprise crew has tracked and now opened on their own. Riker finally grabs the last missing crewmate and dashes back as the rupture closes, but the aliens’ exact origin is never discovered.
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This latest of Braga’s darkly macabre outings and one of the “high concept” hard-SF stories sought early on, “Schisms” proved disappointing due to a scaled-back ending less costly to shoot than the one he had envisioned: a single insectoid claw around Riker’s bed in the alien lab, with only a few sparse bits of light and the ever-present clicking sounds to break up the darkness. Veteran TNG director Bob Wiemer joined Braga and Michael Piller in their disappointment, saying the alien scenes were too “languid” and should have featured more cuts to aid in the off-balanced feeling. “There was a story consensus to do lighting control, smoke control, to limit what one saw, but it’s always harder to paint with light when you’re on the crush of time.”
None of the three liked the look of the aliens and Piller said they wouldn’t be back, despite the open ending. “I felt they looked like monks ­ fish monks,” Braga said, “and monks aren’t terrifying.” Still, the tale was a far cry from the last TNG effort of the Matthias-Wilkerson writing team (“Imaginary Friend”), and in his rewrite Braga was proud of the “creepiness” and atypical mysteriousness of the first three and a half acts that pushed the show’s limits, his use of the holodeck as an investigative tool, and especially Data’s bad poetry, the bulk of a light teaser in direct contrast to the dark story to follow. He hoped the verse would reappear again beyond (“A Fistful of Datas”).
On her fourth appearance, Lanei Chapman’s Ensign Rager (first seen in “Galaxy’s Child”) gets a first name, Sariel, while Trost’s character Shipley would appear to have been promoted since he previously appeared as an ensign transporter operator (“Unnatural Selection”); Ken Thorley’s Mot is put to good use again (“Ensign Ro”) as the series’ latest Bolian (“Conspiracy”, “Data’s Day”, and DS9’s “The Forsaken”). We also learn that Data not only is “marked” by traces from a warp field whenever aboard a starship, but that he can record and file that data for retrieval.
Picard’s Aunt Adelle’s home cures are mentioned again (“Ensign Ro,” “Cause and Effect”), as is the “FGC” catalog prefix for space phenomena (“Imaginary Friend”); Geordi’s diagnostic device and Riker’s arm beacon are props recycled from “Cause and Effect”, and tetryons would figure anew in another story (“Suspicions”). Though Cargo Bay 4 is on Deck 4 the indicator light in Main Engineering is seen to be below the battle bridge (Deck 8). Counting each grid as two feet square, the empty holodeck’s opposite walls seen here can actually be figured to be at least sixteen feet high, twenty feet wide, and thirty feet long. And Braga revealed that the Amargosa Diaspora was named for a spot near Death Valley and his mother’s onetime pet finch, while the character Kaminer was named for author Wendy Kaminer.
Riker’s lateral abduction into the dimensional doorway ­ ”Not another vortex!” groaned FX supervisor and “Time’s Arrow, Part 2” veteran Ronald B. Moore ­ was accomplished by mounting a fast-speed camera atop a tower before blue screen and shooting down as a stunt man jumped off stiff-legged, then tilting the footage laterally for the playback at the slower film speed; it took three takes to get it right.
Co-producer Wendy Neuss, who counts overseeing sound effects mixing among her many duties, recalled that the funniest session of her tenure came as she, sound editor Jim Wolvington, and supervising sound editor Bill Wistrom brought to life the carefully crafted clicking language of the aliens. “We had decided what kind of clicks we wanted with Rick [Berman] and Peter [Lauritson] at the spotting session,” she recalled. “Then the three of us actually sat there one night and wrote a script in English and then transposed it to ‘clicks.’ We wanted it to be organic, not synthesized, and we had a cadence to it; we decided where the clicks should be and what kind of feeling they should have. Then we brought in the group people to do it ­ so in addition to the individual clickers we had group clicking: you see five people clicking, really intently, like the professionals that they are. And I just had to leave the stage ­ that’s when you think, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this!’”
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Ship in a Bottle”@2Next Generation episode #138
After a glitch turns up in Data and La Forge’s “Sherlock Holmes” role-play holodeck game, Barclay, while making repairs, comes across the stored file of Holmes’ fictional archvillain Professor Moriarty, accidentally given consciousness and intelligence four years earlier.
Incensed that he has been “forgotten,” Moriarty astounds the naysaying officers when he walks off the holodeck, alive and whole! While the crew struggles to understand, he demands that his love, the Countess Regina Barthalomew, be made alive as well ­ taking control of the ship’s computer from Picard until he agrees to do it.
Amid the effort ­ made more dire by the ship’s dangerous proximity to two colliding gas planets to be studied ­ Data realizes that he and Picard are trapped in a holodeck simulation themselves that Moriarty devised: the professor isn’t real, but he does have computer lockout on the ship and access to their program.
To outwit him, the officers create their own false reality and have Moriarty and the Countess “beamed” into it, ostensibly giving them a shuttlecraft in return for releasing ship control.
Once “launched,” Moriarty returns control to Picard and the two lovers are allowed to roam forever in their own “reality” within a protected file.
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After three years, it turned out that the perceived taboo in doing more Sherlock Holmes stories ­ first laid down in Season 3 (see “The Defector”) following the first Moriarty story a year earlier (“Elementary, Dear Data”) ­ had all been a mistake! “Apparently the Arthur Conan Doyle estate was irritated with Paramount because of [the movie] Young Sherlock Holmes and they said no more, ever,” Taylor said. “Well, as in many walks of life it was never say never again; to my amazement they were willing to give us the characters for a very reasonable license fee.”
Even with that hurdle cleared, a planned Moriarty script fell through and the idea languished until Piller told Taylor to ask about one of the three story ideas Echevarria had suggested during his very first pitch session during Season 3 ­ a feat that amazed the young writer: “My God, the man’s an elephant! He remembered that pitch?” Though not a Holmes story, the premise centered around a character on the holodeck who actually thinks he’s aboard ship. While brainstorming at one of Taylor’s Sunday sessions, Echevarria recalled, his hostess had just spoken of watching the first Moriarty episode and an idea to bring back the professor though alien embodiment when the two ideas struck him ­ solving the problem of getting Moriarty off the holodeck plausibly. Still, the nested universes kept even the writing staff dizzy: Ron Moore recalling diagramming the various universes as nestled boxes during the break sessions.
Schultz was booked to reprise Barclay when it was initially felt a character was needed who had not known about the first Moriarty encounter in Season 2, but that became a moot point and viewers ­ as well as director Singer, asked back after his first-ever TNG outing (“Relics”) ­ got to enjoy Schultz, Daniel Davis, and Stephanie Beacham ­ later of SeaQuest DSV ­ all in the same episode. Too, Echevarria mused, no one but Barclay could have made the whole episode’s final punch line work.
Set decorator Jim Mees revealed that his crew had to please two masters of continuity when outfitting the 221-B Baker Street study ­ the original Doyle story descriptions as well as the previous scene in Season 2. For instance, the first set’s wallpaper design had been discontinued in the past four years and could not be exactly matched.
Not to be overlooked, too, is FX supervisor David Stipes’ sequence featuring the collision of the star and gas planet; Stipes which allowed him to bring in “real science.” Designer Rick Sternbach said of the effect, “Our cry became ‘This is not Nova,’” he joked, referring to the PBS science series, “but we wanted to be as accurate with the gas exchange as possible. A lot of testing ensued, along with the discovery of the need for longer than usual sequences ­ twelve seconds as opposed to the typical four-to-five-second shot.”
For detail hounds, it is made clear in back-to-back shows that voice command codes are changed often: Picard’s goes from “Delta-5” (“Chain of Command, Part I”) to “Epsilon 7-9-3” here. The pattern enhancers are old hat (“Power Play”, “Time’s Arrow”, “Frame of Mind”, “Inheritance”), while the newer rear-entry live shuttle set doesn’t match the stock footage of the Sakharov original (from “Unnatural Selection”). Other oddities: Picard orders a “Class A” probe be launched when all others had previously been designated with numbers, and the “real” Riker talks to the Holo-Generated Moriarty via the main viewer.
Riker and an away team are helping a group of colonists survey their new home when they are suddenly attacked by an old nemesis: the Crystalline Entity. All but two of the colonists and the away team are eventually rescued by the Enterprise.
Dr. Kila Marr, on the trail of the destructive alien ever since her son Renny was killed on Omicron Theta, now joins the starship in a hunt for the entity. Blaming Data for her son’s death because his “brother” Lore lured the entity to Omicron Theta, Marr is ice-cold to the android until she learns he has the stored thoughts of the colonists ­ including her son. Through Data ­ who can even mimic his voice ­ she is able to relive her son’s last few months of life.
Meanwhile, she and Picard clash over how to treat the Entity once it is contacted: the captain wants to try talking to it first, arguing the creature may not know it is killing. Marr simply wants revenge.
They lure the Entity with graviton pulse emissions, and the moment of truth arrives. The starship and the entity appear to be communicating ­ until Marr coolly and quietly raises the frequency of the pulse. The emissions shatter the entity.
Outraged, Picard can barely contain himself, but back in her quarters, Marr is strangely calm. She asks Data to talk like her son again, repeating that she “did it for him.” As dispassionate as ever, Data tells her that Renny would be sad that his mother had ruined her career for his sake.
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Just when the writers had decided on no more sequels and no more “cannibalizing,” as Jeri Taylor put it, along came this premise by free-lancer Lawrence V. Conley, who took a bus down from Oregon to pitch the idea. “And of all the characters to bring back, who’d have thought the Crystalline Entity?” Taylor said. “But the Moby-Dick premise of this obsessed woman whose son’s consciousness was stored in Data was too good to pass up.”
It didn’t hurt that the staff loved the title, Taylor adds, even though “no one ever knew exactly what it meant.” One meaning of “avatar” is “the appearance on earth of a god in bodily form,” but Taylor prefers another meaning: “a repository of knowledge,” referring to Data.
The pastoral opening scenes of the Melona IV colony before its destruction were shot in a day at the Golden Oaks Ranch, also known as the Disney Ranch, in the Santa Clarita Valley north of Los Angeles.
The Entity’s destruction, though, was accomplished by adding eighteen-inch miniature trees to the foreground after the live filming of the fleeing colonists. The light beam was animated on computer later, Rob Legato said, but the “sand trap” was actually a four-foot-wide tarp spread along the ground with air shot up from under it through the mesh. As with its first appearance, the Entity itself was generated entirely by computer.
Commander Calvin “Hutch” Hutchinson: David Spielberg
Kelsey: Marie Marshall
Devor: Tim Russ
Orton: Glenn Morshower
Neil: Tom Nibley
Satler: Tim deZarn
Kiros: Patricia Tallman
Waiter: Arlee Reed
Pomet: Alan Altshuld
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
With the Enterprise shut down and its crew evacuated at the Remmler Array for a routine yet deadly baryon-purging sweep, the senior officers brace for a dreary reception at nearby Arkaria Base with Commander “Hutch” Hutchinson, known as the king of boring hosts.
Picard, anxious to slip away to get his saddle on the ship for some planetside riding, discovers a plot by six thieves to drain off the warp engine’s toxic waste, trilithium resin, whose only use is as a weapon. Escaping capture, Picard begins a cat-and-mouse game on the lifeless, darkened ship as he escapes and slowly knocks off the gang one by one.
Picard knocks out the field diverter that would have protected the thieves from the sweep, sending them all scurrying to Ten-Forward to escape the beam. Back on the base, administrator Orton, ­ a co-conspirator ­ leads a takeover and kills Hutchinson, taking the senior officers hostage.
Gang leader Kelsey, after killing a cohort who’d rigged a stabilizer for the explosive resin, recaptures Picard but loses her last assistant to one of his booby traps. After they fight for the container, she grabs it and beams off to a waiting shuttle. Picard’s pleas for help over his captured communicator are heard by his officers, who have turned the tables on their captors. The beam fades just as Kelsey’s shuttle explodes ­ thanks to the stabilizer he removed during their melee.
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This take on Die Hard was a violent action/adventure concept so far off the TNG norm that Jeri Taylor predicted it probably wouldn’t have been done in years past. “It was very violent,” Michael Piller agreed, “but it’s good to have one of these kind in the mix [of stories]”; Stewart enjoyed the break from the “sitting and talking” norm and did several of his own stunts, as he had in “Tapestry.” With only a slight rewrite by Ron Moore for budget needs ­ ”all those stunts take forever to shoot ­ we’re just not geared to it,” he noted ­ the script from Morgan Gendel won praise as coming from one of the show’s better outside writers. It was far afield from his last effort, the gentle “The Inner Light”.
Denied extras in the reception scenes due to cost, director Bole asked co-producer Wendy Neuss to round out the effect with background small talk among the regular cast ­ who had only the gabby Commander Hutchinson and two terrorist/servants to make up a formal occasion. In a unique move, Neuss virtually choreographed all the dialogue with a flowchart, tracking the cast involved even when not on camera and what they might be saying. She even had staff writers Brannon and Echevarria write scripted small-talk “walla” for the regulars, which led to the series’ first-ever group “looping” (or redubbing) session by the cast at Modern Sound. Unfortunately, Neuss noted, most of that ­ Gates McFadden’s improv with the waiter about him being an out-of-work actor, for one, and Braga’s lines for Troi and Geordi about cheese logs, later deemed too over-the-top ­ will never see the light of day.
Picard’s interest in horses was nothing new (“Pen Pals”/141, “The Loss”/184, Generations), but his apparent use of a Vulcan neck pinch is really supposed to be just a carotid-artery block; amid the chatter Data mentions the Sheliak (“Ensigns of Command”) and Hutchinson reveals he’d met Beverly during her stay at Starfleet Medical (“Evolution”). The matte shot of Arkaria Base was originally used as Darwin Genetics Research Station (“Unnatural Selection”) and would be reused again this season (“Descent”). And with the need for routine baryon “cleansing” of starships established, Geordi mentions that his starship gets double the number of warp-hours as is usual; it is also established that his VISOR comes with a pain-blocker. And for an odd bit of background, we learn that Phaser IIs are stored in Sickbay when Picard pulls one out of the same bin that Riker uses later (“Timescape”).
Filming the Remmler Array, as designed by Rick Sternbach and built by Greg Jein, proved tricky in itself since video of the eighteen-inch miniature had to be composited with the four-foot starship model. FX supervisor David Stipes revealed than an actual laser was used to scan the ship, its reddish glow serving as a target for the green-tinged animation added later. Curry’s shuttle drone briefly seen was the same used earlier in “11001001”: a six-inch “quick-and-dirty” model with disposable Gillette razor handles as nacelles. Budget cuts also trimmed the look of the male “shoelace eye” alien terrorist, whom Michael Westmore said was to have had a fuller face treatment. Kiros, the lesser female terrorist, was a Bajoran and was played by Patricia Tallman, a frequent stunt double ­ Crusher’s, for example, in “Suspicions”. The later much-traveled cast also included Arlee Reed, script coordinator Lolita Fatjo’s husband and later “human” (“Emergence”); Alan Altshud, a later Yridian (“Gambit, Part I”); Glenn Morshower, also seen as a bridge officer reincarnated from one Enterprise (Generations) to another (“Peak Performance”); and finally Tim Russ, who was not only the Klingon T’Rul in DS9’s “Invasive Procedures” and a 1701-B crewman in Generations but played older Vulcan regular Tuvok on the second TNG spinoff, Voyager.
The Enterprise discovers a failed Talarian craft adrift with five unconscious teenage boys, one of them human.
Raised a Talarian and known as Jono, the human checks out as Jeremiah Rossa, kidnapped a decade earlier when his parents were killed and his colony attacked by Talarians.
But Jono is the adopted son of Talarian Captain Endar, who by custom raised him after his own son was killed. He threatens war when the boy’s human grandmother, a Starfleet admiral, asks that he be brought back home.
The boy also shows signs of having been abused, but Endar says the scars are only reminders of a rough-and-tumble Talarian boyhood. With Jono at the age of decision, Endar and Picard finally agree to let him decide his own fate. Photos help him recall his parents and the attack. But Jono is so agonized by the choice before him that he tries to avoid it by killing Picard so that he will be put to death.
Seeing that, Picard realizes Jono should remain with his adopted people and returns him to a grateful Endar.
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A budget-saving bottle show sandwiched in among this season’s ambitious early stories, “Suddenly Human” stirred rumors throughout Trek fandom that it would address the issue of child abuse. Instead, it deals with the emotions and decisions faced by broken families and by cultures in collision.
Viewers may remember young Chad Allen as the autistic son of the doctor played by Ed Flanders on St. Elsewhere. He shares some fine moments with Picard who once again must confront his discomfort with children (“Farpoint”, “Disaster”). Under Troi’s gentle probing, the captain wonders if the feeling stems from his lack of friends as a duty-driven child who early on wanted to be in Starfleet. His brother later speaks of Jean-Luc’s childhood in “Family”.
“To us, it was the issue of the foster parent, having raised and nurtured the child, having as much right to custody as the natural parent,” said writer Jeri Taylor. Taylor, who had been recommended by short-time producer Lee Sheldon before his exit, won an ever-expanding staff job as a result of this script. She came from a line producer’s background on series such as Quincy, Magnum P.I., In the Heat of the Night, and Jake and the Fat Man, but knew nothing about Trek until she took a crash course by watching all prior TNG and original-series episodes as well as the motion pictures.
Originally, Taylor named these aliens Phrygians, but after Okuda suggested that a once-mentioned race be used instead, the staff chose the otherwise undescribed builders of the Batris (“Heart of Glory”). The look of Endar’s warship, Q’Maire, is based on the big galactic patrol vessels of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, Sternbach revealed. The training ship, with its two great power panel “sails,” harks back to the early wind-powered Coast Guard trainers. Although neither was based on the often-re-dressed Probert-designed freighter, their armament ­ like that of the Batris ­ includes “merculite rockets.”
Judging by the art department’s galactic “map,” Talarian space lies adjacent to that of the Federation, opposite Klingon and Romulan territory. A historical note: the evidence given here indicates that Starfleet’s uniform style changed sometime between Wesley’s birth (“Family”) and the tape of Jono’s parents, thirteen to eighteen years prior to this episode.
