A young honor student’s world is turned upside down when she realizes during her Enterprise stint that the powers she has been trying to ignore mean she is actually a member of the Q Continuum of superbeings.
Picard’s old nemesis, Q himself, turns up to take the girl back with him but agrees to let the girl decide her own destiny with either humanity or the Continuum.
The girl, Amanda, is confused and torn between the newfound abilities Q tempts her with and her love for her old friends ­ even willing Riker into a romantic fantasy until its lack of reality grows disappointing. When Data discovers that her supposedly natural human parents were killed by an odd tornado on Earth, Q admits that the two were actually executed as renegades from the Continuum ­ and the same fate might befall Amanda.
Informed of this, the furious girl gets Q to back down to his original agreement ­ but he tells her that if she remains with humans she must pledge to give up her powers. That seems an easy task until Amanda can’t help herself by intervening in a planetary disaster, and sadly realizes the best choice for all is for her to go live among her own kind.
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Originally entitled “Q Me?” until well after live filming was finished, the first Q story in one and a half seasons on TNG did not come easy after various premises had been considered and discarded (a “Q Olympics” story and another with him creating doubles of the officers based on their opposite character poles) ­ but it did finally live up to Piller’s goal of returning the super-alien to a more malevolent tone “so that he’s just not there for the jokes.” Showing how far the series’ writing had matured since Season 1’s “Hide and Q” covered much the same human-turned-god theme, the story mirrors that with the stress of adolescent-turned-adult.
The premise by seventeen-year-old Matt Corey from North Carolina had the guest role as a young man so he could play it, Taylor said. Despite its original plot involving Wesley Crusher, a teenage love affair, and an unwanted pregnancy, Echevarria noted it was “quite good” ­ and it provided a special thrill when Taylor let him call Corey to tell him of the sale. “It was kind of the mirror of three years ago, when Michael Piller called me one day ­ after more than a year of sending scripts to Star Trek and having them rejected ­ and then saying they wanted it.”
Even then, Echevarria said his first show as a staff writer had its share of stress in working for the first time on deadline, and admitted with a laugh that he didn’t even know that the various colors of script rewrite pages were coded to keep them in order. But the humor didn’t suffer: for the young woman’s character he had “sneaked” the name of Samantha ­ Elizabeth Montgomery’s supernatural sitcom nose-twitcher of Bewitched ­ through several drafts before Rick Berman caught it.
If Amanda’s holodeck fantasy with Riker seems more airy and offbeat than usual, it’s due to the late decision by Piller to punch up the underlying tension by letting the audience hear just before that Q might kill her ­ a change made after the fantasy scene was filmed. As in “Relics,” the single biggest scene cut for time involved Troi, who early on brought Amanda a vacationing crewman’s dog named Henry to “dog-sit”; a scene with a puppy litter she conjured up was cut for time, although a white blur is visible next to Q on the sofa immediately after.
FX supervisor David Stipes recalled that the big challenge here was filming the warp-core breach, accomplished by having live FX man Dick Brownfield actually squirt the ever-useful liquid nitrogen onto the reactor set over specially appliqued flashing bulbs. Animation to both widen and heal the breach was added by Digital Magic.
On the trivial side, it is spelled out that Jack Crusher died when Wesley was five and that a “Weather Modification Network” largely protects Earth from severe storms like tornadoes. Starbase 112 had been mentioned earlier (“Identity Crisis”), while the shuttlecraft, named for the twentieth-century pioneer atomic physicist, is seen to be Shuttlecraft 16 in the next outing, just before its destruction.
