Aquiel

LaForge's terrible love life continues as he makes a series of bad decisions during a murder investigation

Picard mentions the Klingon border in his opening Captain’s Log, which sounds promising, but it’s all a tease as this isn’t an exciting Klingon story at all but rather a dull ‘police procedural’ style investigation. Anyway, we’re off to a subspace relay station where somebody has been turned into goo and there’s also a dog. Threatening music plays when they find the dog, which feels like playing their hand too swiftly. But sure, let’s go along with the murder mystery until the disappointing conclusion reveals that the dog did it.

Words

Jeri Taylor gets the ‘Story by’ credit for this one, and expressly admits that her purpose was to attempt to provide LaForge with a recurring love interest, saying “We were looking for a new spin to put on a love story. A straight love story didn’t seem good enough.” She spoke to Michael Piller about it and he suggested mounting the story in the manner of the 1944 mystery movie Laura, in which a detective is investigating the murder of a woman falls in love with her, only to discover that she is not only alive, she might in fact be the killer.

Part of Taylor’s concern was that with Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao having shuffled over to DS9, the show had lost its only married couple.

We now portray the twenty-fourth century as being full of single people... It seems to me that’s not the comment we should be making – that marriage and serious relationships don’t survive into the twenty-fourth century.

Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore (who got the ‘Teleplay by’ credit) spent two days breaking the story with Taylor, a time which Braga recalled as a “torturous experience”. They started with the idea that Aquiel was indeed the killer (somewhat undermining Taylor's intentions), but this was felt to be too close to Basic Instinct. Moore later recalled that the concept finally occurred to them to make the dog the murderer, and joked that he and Braga wanted to call the episode “Murder, My Pet!”

Behind the scenes of Aquiel: LeVar Burton, Renée Jones, and director Cliff Bole

Moore remembered that the biggest problem was creating a mystery that couldn’t be solved using all the Federation’s fancy gadgets:

We were at pains trying to make the murder mystery harder than it needed to be, so the script became very technobabble heavy... Technology had run amok on the show. People had gotten careless about establishing what devices like the tricorder could do, and we were stuck with that. Walk into a room with a tricorder and it could tell you who’d been in there, and what they’d done... We were always trying to trip up the technology. It was just too powerful.

I’ve always been largely underwhelmed by this episode, and I’m not alone: many of the production staff considered this to be the weakest of the otherwise stellar season six. When asked by fans what he would do differently in his time on Star Trek, Moore suggested he would have unwritten “Aquiel”, although he also admitted to enjoying the “cool little C story” about the Klingons. Braga was conflicted about it:

I thought it was going to be terrible, but when I sat down and watched it I kind of liked the mystery. I rather enjoyed that the dog did it. Ultimately, I didn’t think the romance part worked but I liked the feel of the episode, which had a rather tragic, mysterious feel to it.

The one sci-fi idea in this screenplay, the ‘coalescent organism’, doesn't really work in the story as it is simply brought up by Dr Crusher as a deus ex machina right before the reveal that the dog did it. There was the potential for doing something more like 1982’s The Thing with this idea, instead we get something that's not even as good as 1958’s The Blob. In fact, I’d much rather watch that again than this episode. The special effects are better, and it has Steve McQueen in it.

Acting Roles

The star of the episode is the dog Maura, played by Friday, a mixed-breed terrier who had previously played Commissioner Robert Scorpio's dog on General Hospital.

It’s certainly the best performance by a dog in TNG!

Of course, the centre of the episode is supposed to be the relationship between LeVar Burton’s LaForge and Renée Jones’ Aquiel Uhnari. But there’s just no spark here. Even the addition of a psychic sex crystal doesn’t make it work.

Jones’ career is heavily tied to the US daytime soap Days of Our Lives, in which she was currently appearing and would go on so until 2012. She played two roles, racking up an astonishing 1752 episodes over her tenure. I’m not the only one who thinks she was miscast: Jeri Taylor suggested:

Star Trek sometimes does to actors what it does to writers – people who are very effective in one kind of thing feel very exposed. So I don't think this was quite her cup of tea.

Her other major role? She appeared in eleven episodes of L.A. Law as attorney Diana Moses before being cast in TNG. Other than Corbin Bernsen and Diana Muldaur, this appears to be the most episodes of any L.A. Law performer who appears in TNG.

Jones as Aquiel (left) and as Diana Moses in L.A. Law (right)

Then we have the Klingons. Wayne Grace gives us a solid performance as Governor Torak right).

Grace had a long career of bit parts, mostly in cop shows, although he had a role in Wonder Woman in 1976, played a police officer in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, and a sheriff in the short-lived Starman TV show. They get him back for DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise, not to mention getting him in over and over again to provide voices for Trek branded videogames.

Less impressive is Reg E. Cathey as Commander Morag (above, left), who doesn’t seem comfortable in this role at all. A shame, as he’s a great performer with some classic roles to his credit!

You may have seen him without the latex in the 2015 Fantastic Four as Dr Franklin Storm (top left) or as Freeze in 1994’s The Mask (bottom centre), but even if not there’s a good chance you’ve run into him in something, as he’s had a huge number of recurring roles, including 8 episodes of Oz as Martin Querns, 23 episodes of The Wire as Norman Wilson (bottom left - he was part of Councilman Tommy Carcetti's political team), 3 episodes in Grimm as Baron Samedi (top centre), 15 episodes in House of Cards as the owner of Freddy’s BBQ Joint, 20 episodes in Outcast as Chief Giles, and 8 episodes of Luke Cage as James Lucas (top right - Luke Cage’s father) - not to mention 231 episodes of Square One TV as the ‘But Who’s Counting?’ announcer (bottom right). It’s safe to say this episode is not his best work.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Relay Station 47 is, of course, a reuse of the ‘SS Birdseye’ from “The Neutral Zone”.

It works okay as a space station, really, and if we weren’t such nerds we’d probably not have noticed the reuse.

We also get to see the Klingon attack cruiser, which feels like overkill for the Governor to have, but I suppose a bird-of-prey (the only other option, really, in terms of available studio miniatures) would be undercooking it.

Of course the big special effects sequence is the most disappointing aspect of the episode: the CGI blob representing the coalescent organism. Here it is in a collection of its key shots:

This is less of a sizzle reel than a splat reel.

Visual Effects Supervisor Ronald B. Moore (no relation to the writer) recalled that many names were given to the creature, and that “Mr. Peanut was probably the kindest that I had.” The effect was subcontracted out and delivered so close to when the episode was due to air that there wasn’t enough time to add the texture and motion that the effects team wanted to add in post. The result is a disappointing blob in a disappointing episode.