1:[3,#b],4:[2,#i]@1“Unification, Part I”@2Next Generation episode #108
Production No: 208
Aired: Week of November 4, 1991
Stardate: 45236.4
Directed by Les Landau
Teleplay by Jeri Taylor
Story by Rick Berman and Michael Piller
GUEST CAST
Spock: Leonard Nimoy
Perrin: Joanna Miles
Capt. K’Vada: Stephen D. Root
Klim Dokachin: Graham Jarvis
Senator Pardek: Malachi Throne
Proconsul Neral: Norman Large
Romulan No. 1: Daniel Roebuck
B’ljik: Erick Avari
Admiral Brackett: Karen Hensel
Sarek: Mark Lenard
Soup Woman: Mimi Cozzens
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
Picard is shocked to learn that the legendary Vulcan scientist and ambassador, Spock, appears to have defected to the Romulan Empire.
While traveling to Vulcan, where Spock’s equally legendary father, Sarek, lies near death, the captain learns that Spock may be working toward rejoining the Vulcan and Romulan peoples, who split aeons ago when the Vulcans adopted logic as the cornerstone of their civilization. Sarek’s human wife, Perrin, reveals her bitterness at Spock’s continued estrangement from his father, especially in her husband’s last days. Picard is soon saddened to hear that Sarek has died.
After securing a cloaked Klingon ship and disguising themselves as Romulans, Picard and Data venture on to Romulus in the hope of meeting Spock’s contact, Pardek, an aging peace advocate now back in favor. Neral, also an apparent reformer, has been elected proconsul.
Meanwhile, Riker and the crew track a Vulcan deflector stolen by the Ferengi. The search leads them to a ship junkyard, whose manager is surprised when several Vulcan vessels turn up missing. Encountering an unidentified ship at one of the vanished ship berths, the Enterprise fires a warning shot at the mystery vessel ­ which promptly self-destructs.
On Romulus, Picard and Data are discovered and taken hostage, but their captors turn out to be members of Pardek’s Romulan underground who help them, finally, to meet Spock.
But things had changed in the intervening three years. Nimoy, an even hotter property than before, thanks to his success as a director of Star Trek III and IV and Three Men and a Baby, could not afford to ask much less than a salary that by itself would have soaked up most of the episode’s budget. As Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country went into planning, Rick Berman said, the key turned out to be an idea of Paramount president Frank Mancuso’s ­ ”to somehow find a way to lock the two together” during Trek’s silver anniversary.
Berman recalled that he and Nimoy talked about story ideas. After that “we structured a deal with him: he got very little, a little more than scale [union salary minimum]. But with Leonard as executive producer of Star Trek VI, what you had in essence was a cross-promotion. It made everybody happy.”
Star Trek VI director Nick Meyer was brought in to discover ways to bridge references between the generations in his movie script and in “Unification,” since the motion picture filmed long before the episode did. “Nimoy loved the idea of making slight references in the future” to the Kirk era, Berman recalled. The recent filming of the movie helped in other ways, too: the movie’s Klingon Bird of Prey bridge and other sets on Paramount’s Stage 5 were used for Picard and Data’s cloaked ship in both segments.
Michael Piller was to have written the teleplay for both parts, but the time squeeze and the shift in production order proved too demanding and he offered Part I to Jeri Taylor. At first disappointed to do only the story setup, she had no idea how much a part of her life “Unification” would become. When Pocket Books called to suggest a novelization of the historic meeting of the Trek eras, Taylor ­ who wanted to break into books ­ asked for the job.
“The hitch was that I had thirty days to do it!” she said. “Yes, September 1991 was a month I’ll never forget. I was writing Part One, I was writing the novel ­ it was like an endless finals week. You live on coffee, you’re wired, you shut yourself off from family and friends: I had no other life but ‘Unification’!”
After a month like that, and writing around the on-set changes made to Part 2, which was filmed before Part 1, Taylor finally got the manuscript off on time, only to receive another surprise: a “stunning” party thrown by the staff, complete with a full-size framed and autographed print of the book cover by Pocket’s cover artist Keith Birdsong. The deal provided her with yet another first when she attended her first convention, the giant TNG fifth-anniversary celebration in March 1992 in L.A., for a book signing.
~1:[3,#b],4:[2,#i]@1“Unification, Part II”@2Next Generation episode #107
Production No. 207
Aired: Week of November 11, 1991
Stardate: 45245.8
Directed by Cliff Bole
Teleplay by Michael Piller
Story by Rick Berman and Michael Piller
GUEST CAST
Spock: Leonard Nimoy
Captain K’Vada: Stephen D. Root
Senator Pardek: Malachi Throne
Proconsul Neral: Norman Large
Romulan No. 1: Daniel Roebuck
Omag: William Bastiani
Romulan No. 2: Susan Fallender
Commander Sela: Denise Crosby
D’Tan: Vidal Peterson
Amarie: Harriet Leider
Having found Spock on Romulus, Picard must perform the uncomfortable task of telling the ambassador his father has died. The news, combined with Picard’s attempt to fulfill his friend Sarek’s requst by telling Spock of his father’s love, breaks the tension between the two. Spock then reveals he is indeed undertaking an unauthorized mission to pursue the reunification of the Vulcan and Romulan peoples. While Data begins working to crack the Romulans’ computer net, Picard confides to the ambassador that he mistrusts the Romulans.
Meanwhile, the trail of the missing Vulcan ships leads Riker to a Ferengi smuggler, who finally admits that Romulans are involved. Number One contacts Picard, who has met Proconsul Neral in person and still does not trust the Romulan’s intentions.
Soon they find Spock has indeed been double-crossed: a proposed peace envoy of Vulcan ships is just a ploy staged by Commander Sela, Picard’s Romulan nemesis in the Klingon civil war. She and Neral plan to send the stolen vessels filled with Romulan troops as a “Trojan horse” ­ a sneak attack to conquer Vulcan.
Sela captures Spock and the two disguised Enterprise crew members, but can’t force the Vulcan to publicly endorse the phony peace mission. She then reveals a holotape in which the ambassador does just that. Left unguarded in her office, Spock and Data send a coded signal to Riker and use a holotape of their own to escape Sela and her guards.
When Riker intercepts the “peace envoy,” the Vulcan ships are destroyed by their cloaked escorts to remove any trace of the mission. Spock decides to stay on Romulus and work with the underground for real peace. At the last he bids his father good-bye by sharing Sarek’s previous mind-meld with Picard.
____________________
Part 2’s production number precedes that of the opening segment because it was filmed first to accommodate Leonard Nimoy’s schedule. During his five days of work, the set was closed to visitors, although Rick Berman recalled that the week was like most others on the series. Nimoy has said that his TNG experience was a sentimental yet hectic reminder of his days of weekly television, a stark contrast to the more leisurely pace of motion picture production.
Michael Piller used the unification of Germany as his basic thematic metaphor but was disappointed that his teleplay couldn’t provide more chemistry in the Picard-Spock scenes. “We got some good moments, and Leonard was splendid,” he said, “but I thought a lot of it was flat, talky, and dull.” The historic meeting of Data and Spock was one of his favorite scenes, though, and he took issue with fans who ridiculed the idea of a Romulan invasion force of only three ships bound for Vulcan. “That’s the only way you could do it, with a Trojan horse,” he said. “You couldn’t launch an all-out attack.”
With two episodes to spread the cost over, the size and scope of the Romulan street-office complex built on Stage 16 rivaled the Victorian London holodeck set in “Elementary, Dear Data”. Production designer Richard James also re-dressed the cargo bay ­ last seen as the control room of the attack cruiser Bortas’ in “Redemption” ­ to the Quaylor II piano bar seen here.
“One of the show’s major strengths,” observed Rick Sternbach, “is how they can put these Tinkertoy set pieces together again and again in different ways and repaint them and come up with completely different looks.”
The Vulcan ships were originals, built by Greg Jein from an original design by Sternbach, with a Reliant-like feel featuring long, pointed engine pods and a bridge-over-hull look. Urged to go for a more alien non-Starfleet look, Sternbach said he based the design on a central core surrounded by a wraparound circular generator.
Notable among the nonspeaking actors in the Qualor II bar scene ­ which includes Riker’s Trek play on words, “Andorian Blues” ­ were Jerry Crowl as yet another background Antican, Shana O’Brien and Heather Long as Omag’s women, Leonard Jones as the Zakdorn waiter, and April Rossi as an extra known as Space Hooker.
The title of this most unusual of all TNG episodes carries more than the usual layers of meaning. The hoped-for reunion between Romulans and Vulcans is only the first of many “unifications.” Symbolically carried out through Picard’s mind-meld with Spock, it extends not only to a posthumous reconciliation between Sarek and his estranged son but indeed to both incarnations of Gene Roddenberry’s vision, Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. When this episode is viewed in tandem with Star Trek VI, it’s clear the torch has been passed, and any breach that may have existed between productions and between fans has been closed.
Answering a distress call from the USS Lantree, the Enterprise finds by visual scans that the supply ship’s entire crew has died of old age.
Mysterious “hyperaging” has also hit the ship’s last stopover, the Darwin genetics lab, where the stricken staff begs to have its genetically bred “superchildren” rescued, after assuring the Enterprise crew the children do not carry the disease.
A skeptical Picard wants the children checked anyway; to avoid crew contamination Data pilots a shuttle so that Dr. Pulaski can examine one child in isolation.
But the youth and his “siblings” turn out to be infected, and the crew is shocked when Pulaski herself is quarantined at Darwin to help with the cure research.
Picard is not willing to accept the loss of his chief medical officer. He pushes his people to modify the transporter biofilter to screen out the virus. A hair sample finally provides the necessary pre-infection DNA, and the doctor and the lab staff are eventually cured.
Sadly, the fate of the Darwin youth cannot be so easily reversed, and because of the health threat, the “superchildren” must be isolated forever.
In one last gesture, the Enterprise returns to the Lantree and solemnly atomizes the plague ship with full Starfleet ceremony.
____________________
An echo of an original-series episode, “The Deadly Years,” this story almost let the proverbial “cat out of the bag” by using the transporter to reconstruct a “younger” Dr. Pulaski. To avoid a stream of endless complications (unlimited duplication of the characters, for one), specific limitations were later laid down on the use of this technology. The script is the only dual effort by John Mason and Mike Gray during their half-season stint as coproducers.
TNG’s first named shuttlecraft is called the Sakharov, in honor of the late Soviet physicist and human rights advocate Andrei Sakharov, and a little more interior space has been added.
The Darwin “superchildren” were originally to have appeared nude and the extras were asked to shave from the neck down. But the use of transparent furniture quickly nixed that idea, and costumes were hastily made as the extras endured stubble itch. The youth who was brought aboard the Sakharov was played by actor George Baxter and had a name, David, but in a budget crunch all his lines were cut to save money.
~1:[4,#b],5:[2,#i]@1“Up the Long Ladder”@2Next Generation episode #44
Production No.: 144
Aired: Week of May 22, 1989
Stardate: 42823.2
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Written by Melinda M. Snodgrass
GUEST CAST
Danilo O’Dell: Barrie Ingham
Granger: Jon de Vries
Brenna: Rosalyn Landor
O’Brien: Colm Meaney
Stellar flares are about to destroy the Bringloidi homeworld when the Enterprise rescues the colony, populated by a simple but lively people long ago forgotten except for fragmentary post-holocaust records.
The Bringloidi bring along their livestock and set up camp on a cargo bay. Riker is soon keeping company with the bumbling leader’s lovely but feisty daughter.
Then Picard and Data learn that the colonists’ were one of two groups to settle in this solar system. The Enterprise heads off to warn the other of the danger.
Soon they find the Mariposans, an entire society composed of clones from the five crew members who survived the original colony ship’s crash landing.
Now fearful of degeneration due to replicative fading, the Mariposans beg for fresh DNA from the Enterprise crew. But the idea is repugnant to the Starfleet people ­ just as the idea of sex is to the Mariposans ­ and they decline.
Desperate, the colony leaders kidnap Riker and Pulaski and collect DNA cells. But the two return to destroy the maturing bodies of the clones and bring a compromise suggestion from Picard: rejoin the Bringloidi, their original fellow colonists, and breed on a resettlement world.
____________________
Snodgrass’s story, originally titled “Send in the Clones,” began as a look at immigration and the “we don’t want their kind here” prejudice, but the author admits it lost something in the push-and-shove of rewrites and budget limits. Still, she recalls the story drew some flak from two different directions. Right-to-life advocates objected to the pro-choice “I’m in charge of my body” sentiment espoused by Riker (intended) in denying the Mariposan permission to use his body for cloning, and Irish Americans protested what they felt was a stereotypical portrayal of the Bringloidi (unintended, since Irishman Hurley conceived their look). The original title, a pun on the title of the Sondheim song “Send in the Clowns,” actually survived until well after the scripts were printed.
The pregnant Bringloidi woman’s condition was not faked: propman Alan Sims’s wife was two weeks overdue with her baby when she appeared here. The Sims family, incidentally, bred the miniature goats that were used in the cargo bay.
Mention is made here of Earth’s recovery from World War III in the early 2100’s and of the European Hegemony signaling the first stirrings of world government later that century. How this war fits in with the twenty-first-century “post-atomic horror” mentioned in “Encounter at Farpoint” and the Eugenics Wars of 1992-1996 from the 1967 episode “Space Seed” is not clear, although some Trek buffs explain this continuity flaw by assuming that the Eugenics Wars and the “Third World” War are one and the same, since Khan and most of his supporters were said to have come from non-Western nations.
An Okudagram seen here ­ Picard’s search menu for Ficus sector launches ­ includes several humorous references. There’s the SS Buckaroo Banzai, captained by John Whorfin with a “mission to Planet 10, Dimension 8”; and two other ships are the anime-related Urusei Yatsura and the Tomobiki, the setting of “Urusei.” Then there are mission assignments such as “diplomatic mission to Alderan,” a Star Wars homage, and the one given “Commander Gene Roddenberry” to “explore strange new worlds.”
Though it can barely be glimpsed, Picard overlooks on this screen the very launch he’s looking for: the sixth line is for the SS Mariposa. Beyond the data he reads aloud, another chart shows the ship to be a DY-500 class vessel owned by OCC, launched November 27, 2123, with U.N. registry NAR-7678 and powered by ­ yes ­ yoyodyne pulse fusion. According to the 1960’s “Space Seed” episode, the DY-500 class dates back to the early twenty-first century, making it a decades-old model by the time of this launch.
