In a bizarre turn of events, Picard is confronted by his own double from six hours into the future, out of phase and disoriented after being recovered from a shuttlecraft that has recorded the Enterprise’s destruction in a vast energy whirlpool.
The double Picard, dazed in a nightmare world, cannot communicate what happened, and the real-time captain begins to fear that the ship will become trapped in a time loop.
When the energy whirlpool appears on schedule and the Enterprise cannot escape, Picard almost becomes bogged down with indecision and second-guessing.
Energy bolts attacking Picard lead Troi to suggest it is he the whirlpool wants, but when his double tries to leave the ship, Picard decides his departure “again” will only perpetuate the cycle. After stopping “himself” with a phaser stun, he orders a full-speed course directly into the vortex. After one more moment of self-doubt, the double Picard, his craft, and the whirlpool all vanish, leaving Enterprise alone and on course, just as before.
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This story ­ originally titled “Time to the Second” ­ began as the first of what Maurice Hurley had planned as two consecutive but stand-alone episodes. “Time Squared” would segue into “Q Who”, in which the mischievous superalien is revealed as the cause of the vortex. That plan was scrapped at Gene Roddenberry’s insistence, Hurley has said, and so adds confusion to the ending. “Why would going into the vortex’s center save you?” Hurley asked. “It doesn’t make sense. But it does if Q is pulling the strings.” Still, the writer said his intent was to do a time-travel story involving just six hours, not “500 or a 1,000 years.”
A cheaper alternative to the full-size shuttlecraft, the low-budget shuttlepod, debuted here. The vessel is named for onetime NASA scientist Farouk El-Baz, who had earlier received a tip of the hat in “The Outrageous Okona”. According to Michael Okuda, the professor sounded very surprised the morning he called in from Boston University after he and his children had seen the show for the first time!
This segment also mentions the slingshot time-travel method used in the original Trek and in Star Trek IV, and introduces Riker’s fondness for cooking.
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Time’s Arrow, Part I”@2Next Generation episode #126
Production No.: 226
Aired: Week of June 15, 1992
Stardate: 45959.1
Directed by Les Landau
Teleplay by Joe Menosky and Michael Piller
Story by Joe Menosky
GUEST CAST
Samuel Clemens: Jerry Hardin
Bellboy: Michael Aron
Doorman: Barry Kivel
Seaman: Ken Thorley
Joe Falling Hawk: Sheldon Peters Wolfchild
Beggar: John M. Murdock
Gambler/Frederick La Rouque: Marc Alaimo
Scientist: Milt Tarver
Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg
Roughneck: Michael Hungerford
Called to the scene of excavations under San Francisco to investigate evidence of alien visitors in Earth’s past, the Enterprise crew is amazed to find Data’s head among artifacts dating back to the late 1800’s. Triolic wave traces in the cavern point to Devidia II as the source of the relics. After journeying there, Picard sends an away team to investigate. The team discovers a time rift and traces of life-forms that are invisible to them.
Deliberately left off the team in an attempt by Picard to cheat fate, Data must now beam down to deal with what he theorizes is a slight time shift in the life-forms on the planet below ­ a shift that renders them invisible. Using a mobile forcefield that he sets to match the aliens’ time shift, Data begins reporting back to the ship on what he sees. Then another time vortex opens up and sends the android to nineteenth-century San Francisco.
Thanks to poker winnings and a friendly bellboy, he quickly adapts and begins building a device with which to contact the Enterprise. Surprised to see Guinan in a local newspaper, he arranges to run into her, only to find that she has no recollection of him. She is not surprised, however, to learn that the two of them serve together in the future. Unfortunately, she is overheard by one of her guests ­ Samuel Clemens.
To uncover the suspected aliens’ threat to history, the crew rig a large phaseable forcefield, just as Data had done. Then Picard, unnerved by cryptic words from “his” Guinan, leads the team into the vortex. . . .
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Originally, TNG’s “top two” ­ Rick Berman and Michael Piller ­ had decided not to end season five with a cliff-hanger, but the planned Trek spinoff series, Deep Space Nine, changed all that. “Because of all the attention Deep Space Nine was getting and the rumors that Next Generation would be shutting down, we wanted to send a message that this show was alive and well and continuing to grow,” Piller said.
Surprisingly, “Time’s Arrow” marked the first real time-trekking for this crew, holodeck and Q-fantasies aside. At first Piller said he wanted to bring the crew to the 1990’s, but he discarded that idea because it had been done in Star Trek IV. The staff discussed the 1960’s and the 1930’s before deciding on the turn of the century. Piller said that before Joe Menosky went on sabbatical, he left notes on the concluding segment that would open TNG’s sixth season come fall.
Three TNG veterans were among the guest cast: Ken Thorley had played the talkative Bolian barber Mot in “Ensign Ro”; Jerry Hardin, sans the Mark Twain makeup, had led the sterile child-stealers of Aldea as Radue in “When the Bough Breaks”; and Marc Alaimo, who finally plays a human here, was the first TNG actor to play a leader of the Anticans in “The Last Outpost”, the Romulans in “The Neutral Zone”, and the Cardassians in “The Wounded”.
The San Francisco exteriors were shot on location at historic Pico House and along Olvera Street, the restored area near the first mission in old Los Angeles. Data’s hotel room and gambling table were shot on a re-dress of a Stage 9 area and in the Planet Hell caves and caverns on Stage 16.
Troi’s quote from Data regarding friendship is straight from his good-bye speech to Tasha’s sister Ishara Yar in “Legacy”, and the marker beacons used to erect the large forcefield were seen before in “Power Play”.
As in the past two season-enders, few clues were provided for what a conclusion might bring. But a role seems assured for Hardin’s Clemens character, who appears to be the owner of the pocket watch found among the artifacts, engraved “To S.L.C. with love, 30 November 1889.”
What would the future bring for TNG? In addition to the conclusion to “Time’s Arrow,” Rick Berman was already talking of a possible seventh season, going beyond the six that the regular cast was originally optioned for. Too, early plans for Deep Space Nine, set to debut in January 1993, called for a two-hour pilot in the mold of TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint” using at least Picard to set up the spinoff series, which might include recurring regulars such as Ro, O’Brien, and Keiko. And then, like the cast that had blazed the trail for them, the TNG crew faced the prospect of appearing in theatrical movies long after their hardworking series years ended.
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Time’s Arrow, Part II”@2Next Generation episode #127
Production No.: 227
Aired: Week of September 21, 1992
Stardate: 46001.3
Directed by Les Landau
Teleplay by Jeri Taylor
Story by Joe Menosky
GUEST CAST
Samuel Clemens: Jarry Hardin
Mrs. Carmichael: Pamela Kosh
Policeman: William Boyett
Jack (London) the Bellboy: Michael Aron
Dr. Appollinaire: James Gleason
Alien Nurse: Mary Stein
Young Reporter: Alexander Enberg
Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg
Male Patient: Bill Cho Lee
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
Having traveled back to 1890’s San Francisco, Picard and his senior officers go “native” to retrieve Data and stave off his apparent destruction while probing the real reason that the energy-consuming aliens found on Devidia II are coming to the Earth of that time.
When they find two of the aliens in disguise, sapping the energy from dying cholera victims in one infirmary, Dr. Crusher snatches their time-vortex “cane” after a group fracas, and they find Data.
Meanwhile, the curious Samuel Clemens ­ convinced that Guinan and the stranded Data are themselves an alien threat ­ follows the Starfleet group to the cave where Data’s head will be found in the future. The crew has realized that the cave is the time-travel focusing device, but when the two aliens surprise them and grab back the cane, the resulting blast of the “time door” opening decapitates Data. Picard seems trapped when he alone doesn’t make it back through to the twenty-fourth century, but he keys a crude escape message in Data’s head that he hopes will be “found” later.
Once reconnected, Data’s “old” head recites Picard’s message and the door is opened, but just far enough for one. A reassured Clemens volunteers to go back so Picard can return, and with all as it was. The aliens’ doorway is destroyed ­ leaving no clue to their true motives.
____________________
“Any time you deal with time you’re going to have complexities that are hard to grasp,” Piller said. “But if you really look at that closely I think we got them all nicely stitched.” Taylor, who modeled her mix of historical fact and fiction on the writings of E. L. Doctorow, was satisfied with the outcome but regretted how much the demanding writing distracted her from settling in with the staff right after hiatus. It would be the last cliffhanger conclusion whose writing would be put off until after hiatus ­ an “exciting” but “very scary” custom she was determined to end.
Regretting that more wasn’t done with the 1890’s period, Ron Moore said that one of the ideas dropped due to time and budget would have picked up the time-travel crew in various jobs after several months, centered around their meeting place at a wharfside cafe run by Picard where the running joke was how bad his food was.
More than ever before (“The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”, “Ensign Ro”), the facts of Guinan and Picard’s first “true” meeting presented here mean that the “listener” was misleading Wesley Crusher when she told him at their first meeting that she’d “never met the captain before I came aboard” (“The Child”). In reality, all three top producers pleaded guilty to not realizing the line planted in Guinan’s very first appearance, which predated all but Berman’s tenure on the show.
While writer Jack London turned up as the bellboy, a sidelight to the use of Mark Twain, the “Judge Williams” and “General Mallory” mentioned were fictitious. Twain’s reference to Halley’s Comet harkens to his birth during its 1835 appearance and his famous comment that he “came in with the comet and will go out with the comet” ­ a prophecy of his 1910 death.
Hardin had not played Mark Twain before and was simply cast for the general physical type, Berman noted, but he became so enamored of the author that he created a one-man touring show. William Boyett had played a TNG cop in another past time ­ he was holodeck Lieutenant Dan Bell back in Season 1’s “The Big Goodbye”. Repeat faces would include Enberg (“Lower Decks”) and Kosh (“All Good Things”); extra Leonard Jones was the Bolian crew member spied by Twain, while O’Brien is spoken to but not seen.
Unlike Part I, the period scenes were shot not on location but right on Paramount’s newly completed New York Street backlot; original plans called for using one at Universal, but with a few camera cheats and the removal of non-period fire escapes they made do. The scenes sported a horse-driven fire vehicle from a museum that had loaned it out for the first time ever thanks to “the power of the words ‘Star Trek,’ “ noted production designer Richard James. Among the in-joke signs adorning the street were the “Okuda Laundry,” “James Bank,” and “Purser Carpentry,” for TNG scenery shop foreman Tom Purser.
Visual FX supervisor Ron B. Moore noted that the many opticals here included new computer “morphing” by Joe Walter to clarify the ophidian snake-head cane’s transformation first seen in Part I. Accomplished completely by computer were the arcs and sparks of Data’s “invention” when disturbed by Clemens ­ a moving-camera shot ­ and Data’s decapitation in the explosion, though Moore recalled the first take on the effect, as sometimes happens, proved comical until some extra animation touches and a change-up in speed were added to dull its effect. Smoke filmed through lighted holes in paper provided the main element for the vortex itself.
Returning by runabout from a conference, Troi, Picard, Data, and La Forge are puzzled by time “freezing” and “speeding up” around them until they discover it is due to temporal “pockets” that their runabout must dodge.
Even more shocking, they find their starship likewise frozen in time before a Romulan Warbird, a disruptor bolt partway to the starship’s half-raised shields. Riker had reported moving to help a stricken Warbird, but ­ by adapting emergency transporter armbands to create skintight forcefields of “real” time ­ Picard and the others board the Enterprise where they find freeze-framed signs of apparent Romulan boarding and a warp-core breach in progress.
Visiting the warbird, they find an odd alien vortex in the engine core. After Data’s tricorder sets off the vortex and time races forward and backward only to “freeze” again, with the Enterprise exploding and re-forming, they try to shift time backward far enough to prevent the breach.
Meanwhile, an alien from another time dimension reveals it is his young who are the “vortex,” accidentally attracted to the core’s artificial gravity well. They are the cause of the time pockets. Time is “reset” successfully, but one of the aliens ­ distracts Data long enough to allow the breach to re-form.
Picard has the runabout steered into the transfer beam’s path to break it, sending the aliens back to their “time” and restoring his own.
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“At the end of “Rascals” we told Adam Nimoy ‘We owe you one with grown-ups!’ “ Rick Berman said. “The joke was, my next one would be all animals!” Nimoy recalled. Whatever the case, the still-young director here went from the frying pan into the fire with what has been dubbed the most “techie” TNG episode ever to shoot, the first of two requiring eight and a half days to shoot.
When the planned story fell through for this slot, Braga again stepped in to complete a script and skipped the story-outline stage, going right to the break session to save time ­ just eight days before the first production meeting with the director. Inspired by the simple late-season premise “ship trapped in time like amber,” pitched by Mark Gerhed O’Connell, Braga set out to top his own “Cause and Effect” of a season before with another out-of-the-ordinary time story: “I wanted to do this as ‘man against nature,’ or ‘man against time’,” he said. “What The Abyss was to deep-sea diving, this would be to ‘deep-time diving’ “; in fact, “Deep Time” was almost the segment’s title.
Bringing that “eerie ambience” of the teleplay to life became Nimoy’s main goal, especially in his favorite moments: the frozen-time reaction and reveal shots aboard the runabout, inspired by old German impressionistic films like The Hands of Dr. Mugabi. Though the scenes of live “frozen” actors are tricky ­ and an occasional minor twitch can be seen here and there ­ watch how Nimoy avoided much of that problem with a constantly moving camera, establishing the “frozen” person and then moving on to provide the actor some relief.
For the first time we get a look at a Warbird’s engineering room and the aft compartment of the runabout vessel created for DS9 ­ which, oddly enough, was built on TNG’s budget to help out its sister show. Designer Richard James and set decorator Jim Mees lamented that seven weeks went into the creation of the cockpit over on DS9, but he had only nine days to design and build the living quarters ­ and his crews worked round-the-clock at that.
On the trivial side: a clue to the rules of Parrises Squares (“11001001”, “Future Imperfect”, “Silicon Avatar”, “The First Duty”, “Second Chances”) is that an “old” player like Riker could “fall and break his neck”; the Ktarians (“The Game”, “Birthright, Part I”, “Liaisons”, Generations) appear to be respectable after all; we see Troi “plexing” when stressed (“Realm of Fear”); and the sickbay phaser bin (“Starship Mine”) is still accessible to anyone. Actor Bofshever also played Minister Toran in DS9’s “The Storyteller” and an Excelsior engineer in ST VI; Spot is mentioned (see note, “Birthright, Part I”), as is Worf’s “calisthenics” program (“Where Silence Has Lease”, “The Emissary”, “New Ground”). Two of the conference speakers’ names, Wagner and Vassbinder, come from a onetime date and a high-school teacher of Braga’s. And in what seem to be bloopers, the power-transfer beam (“The Next Phase”) emanates from the port side of the dorsal rather than the main deflector, possibly due to the needs of FX work, and we discover the bridge restroom is a Jefferies tube access point: the officers using the tunnels enter the bridge from that door in the aft starboard alcove.
The Enterprise takes on board a Betazoid first-contact specialist, Tam Elbrun, to establish relations with a creature known as Tin Man ­ an alien life-form resembling an organic spaceship. This seems like a straightforward task ­ except that the Romulans also wish to contact Tin Man, and have sent two warbirds to carry out that assignment.
Elbrun is an unusually powerful telepath; on their way to rendezvous with the creature, he tells his old friend Troi about the pressure he feels as a result of being constantly bombarded by voices in his head. Troi sympathizes, but when Elbrun hints that he has already made contact with Tin Man, a suspicious Riker recalls that Elbrun’s last assignment caused the death of forty-seven Starfleet officers.
Just as the Enterprise arrives in the star system in which Tin Man has taken up orbit around an incipient supernova, one of the Romulan ships opens fire on them and on the creature, intending to prevent the two from making contact. At Elbrun’s mental suggestion, the creature destroys the Romulan warbird with a shock wave. Picard wants Elbrun to coax Tin Man into a safer sector, but the lonely alien has come to this system intending to die in the upcoming explosion. Beaming over with Data to make physical contact, Elbrun establishes an immediate rapport with the creature.
As the second warbird prepares to open fire on Tin Man, the creature emits a shock wave that sends the Enterprise and the warbird hurtling through space, away from both it and the exploding star. Later it returns Data to the Enterprise. The android tells the crew that Elbrun has decided to remain with Tin Man, the two of them having found peace and comfort with each other.
____________________
Based on “Tin Woodman,” a 1979 Ace book by Dennis Putnam Bailey and David Bischoff, this spin on the familiar alien encounter was the first for new composer Jay Chattaway, who late next season would take over Ron Jones’s slot in alternating episodes with Dennis McCarthy. The show also gives us more background on the Betazoid race, as we learn that their mental powers, which usually blossom during adolescence, can be emotionally unsettling if they are present at birth.
Harry Groener played the insecure nerd Ralph on NBC’s Dear John and later won a Tony for best performance by a lead actor in the Broadway musical Crazy for You. Here, his Tam Elbrun is the first male Betazoid depicted on TNG.
The interior sound of Tin Man ­ ”Gomtuu” in his native tongue ­ was actually based on the noises in sound-effects editor James Wolvington’s stomach, recorded through a stethoscope. The model was another Rick Sternbach creation built by Greg Jein. It was designed in homage to the thermal pods in Buckaroo Banzai. Rob Legato created the organic chair that seems to form out of Tin Man’s very structure by reversing a time-lapse sequence of a melting wax chair.
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Too Short a Season”@2Next Generation episode #12
Production No.: 112
Aired: Week of February 8, 1988
Stardate: 41309.5
Directed by Rob Bowman
Teleplay by Michael Michaelian and
D. C. Fontana
Story by Michael Michaelian
GUEST CAST
Admiral Mark Jameson: Clayton Rohner
Anne Jameson: Marsha Hunt
Karnas: Michael Pataki
A hostage situation on Mordan IV brings the Enterprise and Admiral Mark Jameson, who successfully negotiated a peace there forty years earlier, back for another case.
Unknown to Starfleet and Federation historians, Jameson actually appeased the planet leader Karnas with arms for his hostages then but kept the Prime Directive by supplying all his enemies, thus sparking four decades of civil war. Karnas doesn’t need Jameson to negotiate on behalf of hostages now; the invitation is just a ruse to get him there so the governor can exact his revenge.
But the wheelchair-bound admiral has another surprise, which he has kept secret even from his wife, Anne. Another planet, grateful for Jameson’s diplomacy, has revealed their de-aging compound to him, and he has been using it.
His youthfulness startles his wife and the crew until the overdoses start to backfire: his body can’t take the strain.
Meanwhile, Picard arrives at Mordan and confronts Karnas with the truth, but the leader wants Jameson and doesn’t believe the young man he sees before him is his enemy of so long ago. Only Jameson’s display of their blood-cut scar convinces an amazed Karnas, but by now even vengeance is futile: the governor allows Jameson to die as his wife watches, and the admiral is buried on Mordan IV at her request.
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Michael Michaelian’s original story used the reverse aging device to deal with the issue of male menopause. In that version Jameson helps Governor Zepec and his rival, the high priest, sit down to peace talks and does not die at the end. Instead, he regresses to the age of fourteen and loses all memory of his wife. Fontana tightened up the terrorism trap as the dramatic story’s lure and had Jameson die for having tampered with nature.
Rob Bowman, the director, remembered being excited about working on weekends with actor Clayton Rohner to build up the character of Jameson, but otherwise he recalled the show as a “sit-and-tell” script that was long on dialogue. Other problems with this episode included a sub-par makeup look for the aged admiral Jameson and a malfunctioning $10,000 wheelchair.
Michael Pataki had previously played another K-role on the original Trek: that of Korax, Captain Koloth’s aide who taunts Scotty and Chekov in “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
This show marks the first appearance of a Starfleet admiral in TNG and of his duty uniform, which would eventually be revised for season two. Little used here is a miniature of the Mordan city, built by Okuda and Sternbach. This marked the last time miniatures were seen; from this point on, matte paintings were used. The wall behind Karnas’s desk is lined with “old-style” phasers from the 1960’s and the Trek movie eras. The Portal’s Tkon-style staff from “The Last Outpost” also hangs there.
A severely injured humanoid ­ known as “John Doe” because of his amnesia ­ is found in the wreckage of an escape pod. After being linked to Geordi’s nervous system to initially stabilize his body functions, the man recovers much faster than expected.
The good-natured John brings an unusually strong sense of serenity and confidence to those around him: La Forge, for one, who resumes his romance with a onetime holodeck date.
But as he recovers, John Doe is racked by fits of pain marked by a glowing energy burst within him.
The mystery man also demonstrates incredible healing powers, but increasingly severe bouts of pain frighten him into trying to steal a shuttlecraft. After he is subdued, John tells Picard he knows he is a threat to the crew and asks to leave.
The truth is revealed when a Zalkonian ship approaches and demands that the Enterprise turn John over to them. When the alien captain uses a paralysis beam against the Enterprise, John’s memory finally returns. He frees the crew from the beam’s effects. Then he explains that he is among the first of his people to have taken the next step up the evolutionary ladder: transmutation into a being of pure energy. He is also the only survivor of his fearful government’s attempt to exterminate this new life-form on their world so as to preserve their own power.
John now completes his transformation into an energy-being and prepares to return to his people and tell them of their own coming rebirth.
While Geordi was gaining new confidence with women, Julie Warner’s character, Christy, gained a last name here ­ Henshaw ­ in an encore appearance following her series debut in “Booby Trap”. Also returning is the shuttlepod El-Baz, first seen in “Time Squared”, while the motor-assist bands were used again later during Worf’s therapy, in “Ethics”. A new medical tricorder was designed and built for this show; watch closely and you’ll notice that Dr. Crusher almost always has one in her hand.
