A Matter of Time

An archaeologist who declares he's come from the future to watch a silly planetary catastrophe tries to loot the Enterprise-D like it was an Egyptian tomb

Picard has to take a few steps to one side so that our guest star can beam in. He claims to be a historian from the future who has travelled back in time to witness a major historical event. Trouble is, nobody on the crew believes that what they’re doing is likely to be memorable in a few years time, let alone a few centuries. Yet there was a temporal disturbance when he arrived, and his ship is like nothing they’ve ever seen before... Is Berlinghoff Rasmussen really whom he says he is? Or is there some other explanation for his fascination with the artefacts that have taken his interest?

Words

This is the second and final TNG teleplay written by the Trek head honcho after Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman. I’ve always known a little of the backstory of this episode, which was that Robin Williams was a huge Star Trek fan and wanted to be in a TNG episode... but then he wasn’t available at the time of shooting, so it never quite happened. Rick Berman has confirmed this story:

I developed the show with Robin Williams in mind. He had said he wanted to do a show and when it got finished his wife was 8½ months pregnant and they were about to go and he had just finished Hook and was starting something else and couldn’t do it.

When Williams was not available, Matt Frewer was substituted. I’ve been a huge fan of Frewer ever since Max Headroom - the sci-fi show, and the Channel 4 talk show that probably never aired outside of the UK - and I can’t say I’m unhappy to get Frewer instead of Williams, even though I’m sure Williams would have been good as well.

Max Headroom montage! The original sci-fi show Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future (top left), a typical Max Headroom digital composition (top right), blowhards Penn and Teller on one of the US Max Headroom chat shows (bottom left), and Matt Frewer enduring the make-up chair (bottom right)

It’s a fun story, too. Berman remarked:

I am fascinated by all the episodes that have dealt with the implausibility of time travel. I have always had in my head the idea of an episode that had someone who was capable of time travel and professes he is from the future, and we find out he is actually from the past. It’s part of that Mark Twain feeling of what Leonardo da Vinci could have done with a calculator or Alexander the Great with a shotgun.

He also enjoyed spitballing the episode’s technobabble subplot:

To sit with the scene guys and research and develop it and to try and come up with something that would work, you get lost in the technical elements of it. You need other people to come and hit you over the head and pull it back. Sometimes we succeed with that and sometimes we don’t.

Michael Piller remembered that the backroom staff worked remorselessly with Berman on the script problems and had “a lot of challenges to overcome.” However, he felt it was a good time in the season for a comedy show.

Scientifically, the script amuses me in so many ways. There’s a reference to ‘greenhouse gases’ - a major environmental scare in the 1990s when this was filmed that gradually transformed into the more nebulous and more ill-defined threat of ‘climate change’. I don't mean to suggest we shouldn’t care about what gases we’re emitting - especially at the dinner table! - but nonetheless, the hilarious flip-flopping between fears of ice ages and fears of ‘global warming’ are a dead giveaway that on the subject of climate we’re still largely just fumbling about while pretending to have definitive answers.

Likewise, Dr Crusher’s remark about “surgical masks” tickles me, since prior to 2019 it was coming to be understood that these were not at all effective at preventing cross-infection, and there was talk about discontinuing the practice in some European hospitals. Sadly, the politicising of face masks in the years since has now made this issue just as fractious as ‘climate change’. Tragically, it is a ubiquitous fact of scientific research that nothing destroys our capacity to honestly investigate a subject quite as effectively as politicians taking an interest in it.

Anyway, the writers and tech team are entirely innocent here - they did the best they could with what was understood about these issues in the 1990s, and they couldn’t have known how much we would mess up scientific discourse in the decades to come - not without building an actual time machine, anyway, which is a lot to ask of a TV production team!

Also of note - the Prime Directive gets brought up this week! It’s been a long time since this was mentioned, not counting Picard being accused of repeatedly breaking it in “The Drumhead”. Khan gets a namecheck too. Berman certainly raided the big box of Trek history while writing this screenplay! My only real complaint is that I don’t believe that an inventor from the 22nd century would have any hope of reverse engineering gadgets from two centuries later, but since the story doesn’t depend upon him succeeding it’s a trivial complaint at most.

Acting Roles

This is all about Matt Frewer’s Rasmussen, and he’s wonderful throughout.

Although the director, Paul Lynch, was not a fan of the episode as a whole, he was extremely happy with Frewer’s performance:

Matt Frewer was wonderful as a space con man... He got the reputation of being large for his comedy roles, but he was a consummate actor and he found the level of comedy and realism of the character which is what makes him such a good character. He was never schticky.

It’s also that rare guest star appearance that works with the ensemble cast - everyone has a scene with Frewer somewhere in this show. Surprisingly, he gets a lot of screen time with Gates McFadden’s Dr Crusher, whom Rasmussen hits on remorselessly like a time-travelling Riker.

As for other sci-fi films and shows Frewer has been in - there’s so many I cannot hope to list them all. But my wife pointed out that he was in fact in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, as ‘Cornered Executive who Jumps’ in “The Crimson Permanent Assurance” skit (his second ever role). I encourage you to scroll through his credits at some point and marvel at all the things you’ve forgotten he was in!

There’s a few other guest performers, too. Stefan Gierasch plays Doctor Moseley, our representative down on the planet, who has the all-too-familiar job of making this rather dull disaster story feel like it matters.

He’s fine, but they don’t give him much to do. Gierasch’s other roles include a few prominent frontier tales - he was the mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson and the Major in the Clint Eastwood vehicle High Plains Drifter... and both of these movies are so far from what is currently culturally palatable that I’ll wager you’ll find neither on any streaming service today, even though both are fascinating and disturbing movies. Sci-fi wise, though… not so much. He had recurring roles in the revived Dark Shadows show (which may have got him this part), a role on the revived Twilight Zone, and one appearance on The Incredible Hulk. That’s it.

Below decks, we have Sheila Franklin as ‘Ensign’.

The screenplay mentions ‘an Ensign’ and talks about ‘the Ensign’ quite a bit, which is a little weird... She’s back next week, though, and gets a name in the screenplay - ‘Ensign Felton’ - and one week after that they mention this name on screen as well. All in all, she has five appearances this season, then has two other bit parts elsewhere before vanishing off the face of the universe.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

There’s quite a bit of SFX this week, all in all. The time-pod is a reuse of the studio-scale exterior of the Nenebek from “Final Mission”, although it’s barely recognisable! (You can see the studio miniature version at the top of this WAM too). This will be back one more time in the final TNG season.

There’s lots of swirling and flashing on the surface of the planet, including some reuse of footage from “The Survivors”, but this entirely new sequence is particularly pleasing:

But of course, my SFX star of the week is this wonderfully snowy matte painting of the surface of Penthara IV by the legendary Syd Dutton.

...and this variation, in which one of the buildings has disappeared!

It’s a simple painted scene in many respects, but there’s no episode that’s not improved by including a matte painting, let alone two!