Booby Trap
Geordi LaForge overcomes his nervousness around women by cyber-stalking a hologram
Remember how last episode saw the Enterprise stumbling upon a booby trap from a long-extinct culture that killed a crew member? Well this week we’ll do you one better with a booby trap that endangers the entire ship and not one but two long-extinct cultures. We open in the holodeck. LaForge is trying way too hard on a date that is just as disastrous as the final battle between the Menthars and the Promellians that Data and Wesley are discussing in Ten Forward. Suddenly, there’s a distress call from one of the Promellian battleships but - oh no! - it’s a trap. If only the crew could read the on-screen episode title they might have avoided it. All the Enterprise’s power is being drained away by an ancient plot device that turns stolen energy into deadly radiation. Fortunately, LaForge puts his creepy stalking skills to work and summons up the original designer of the Enterprise-D’s warp engines, Leah Brahms, with whom he has has a stormy one-night engineering stand in order to rescue the ship from disaster.
Words
This was a troubled script, but the draft screenplay I have is the ‘revised final draft’ and is remarkably close to what we see on screen in this episode. There are no fewer than four writers credited, and it looks like Ron Roman wrote the first draft when Michael Wagner was the head writer. In this early version of the story, it is Picard on the holodeck - which seems extremely weird given the story we ended up with but might have made more sense earlier in the story’s development. Michael Piller, Wagner’s replacement, immediately wanted to get LaForge onto the holodeck:
It just said to me, ‘Picard should be on the bridge, not chatting with some woman.’ I said to myself, ‘It should be Geordi, because Geordi is in love with the ship and this is a story about a guy in love with his ‘57 Chevy.’ That played into Geordi’s character, who's always been a fumbling guy around women, but if he could just marry his car, he’d live happily ever after. He gets to create the personification of the woman who created the engine he loves. It’s sort of a relationship between he and his Pontiac.
As for who should have been in the holodeck, it was originally going to be a character named Navid Daystrom, who was supposed to be descended from Richard Daystrom from the classic Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer”.
However, nobody mentioned to the casting department that this would require a black actress until after Susan Gibney had been given the role. Whoops. A swift name-change later and Leah Brahms was born, but they kept the classic Trek connection by having her work for the Daystrom Institute.
Oh, and I don’t know which wag decided to have the violinist in the teaser playing Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, but it gave me a giggle all the same.
There’s all sorts of technobabble holding this story together, but none of it leaps out as being especially clever, nor indeed egregiously foolish. However, I must remark that the idea in the final act that you could use an asteroid’s gravitational pull as a slingshot is utterly preposterous. Gravity is an extremely weak force so you need a lot more mass than just one asteroid and one Galaxy-class starship if you want to pull of a slingshot manoeuvre of any consequence. However, much like LaForge’s slightly creepy holostalking, we should probably just turn a blind eye and move on.
This was the first TNG episode directed by Gabrielle Beaumont, who would direct seven episodes for this show and several more in the later Trek franchises as well.
Beaumont was a pioneer who helped break down barriers for women in Hollywood, and indeed was the first woman to ever direct an episode of Star Trek in any franchise. A British citizen, it was she who lobbied for Joan Collins (also British) to be given the role of Alexis Colby on Dynasty, which made Collins career. I have a feeling there’s a lot more interesting anecdotes about Beaumont’s career and life, but sadly I'm not party to any of them.
Acting Roles
LeVar Burton is given the starring role in this story, and succeeds in portraying LaForge as both competent and insecure, which is no small feat. However, he is helped by this week's key guest star, Susan Gibney as the holographic Dr Leah Brahms. As TNG fans, it is impossible to watch this episode without allowing for the fact that Gibney will be back as the flesh-and-blood Brahms next season - indeed, one of the things that really makes this episode is precisely the way it is followed up later in a way that gives it a completely different texture.
Even taken on its own merits, though, there is a real charm to Burton and Gibney’s performance, and the way that holographic Brahms is powered up from a flat holographic mannequin into a lively simulacrum of a human being works extremely well - especially when they’re passionately arguing with each other. It’s hard not to root for LaForge to overcome his romantic insecurities in this relationship, which distracts us somewhat from the rather creepy way LaForge is projecting his emotions onto an image of another person whose appearance and personality he has appropriated without permission. Of course, this is what the second story so beautifully brings into perspective...
Julie Warner is not given much to do with the character of Christie Henshaw in this episode, but they will get her back at the end of the season to reprise the role, and that makes this guest slot feel more weighty in retrospect.
However, Albert Hall is brilliant as the Promellian captain - a small role that he manages to infuse with a quiet despair even under a great deal of prosthetics.
Hall is somewhat wasted in this role, however, as he's capable of much more. His most famous role was as Chief Phillips in 1979’s Apocalypse Now, although he had a recurring role as Judge Seymour Walsh on two David E. Kelly shows, Ally McBeal and The Practice.
And unlike last week’s episode, Colm Meaney's O’Brien has a couple of speaking lines. Michael Piller, who wrote the scene about ‘ships in bottles’, was apparently really pleased with how it came out.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
It’s a shame we don’t get to see the Promellian make-up in any detail, but it works well, and the desiccated corpses of the Promellian crew members are a nice touch.
Speaking of the Promellians, we have a lovely studio miniature this week. It was created for the invading aliens in 1986’s Night of the Creeps, in which you really don't ever get a good shot of it.
Here, it appears upside down and in great detail, which really shows off what a nice model it is. The fact that the shot is littered with asteroids adds some further character to it.
Not to mention that they blow it up too, which is always an added bonus!
But the special effect stars of this episode are the new sets. Actually, I say ‘new’ but the bridge of the Promellian battleship is one we’ve seen several times before. Originally built for the Klingon Bird-of-Prey nicknamed ‘Bounty’ in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, we saw it previously as the Pagh in “A Matter of Honor” and as the Romulan bridge in “Contagion”. They removed some headrests and shot it in the dark, to great effect.
However, it’s the set of Mars Station’s Drafting Room 5 at the Utopia Planitia yards that takes the prize this week. In DS9, these are designated ‘Fleet Yards’, but here its just ‘yards’ in the script and merely ‘Utopia Planitia’ in the dialogue. Martian-o-philes may want to raise the question as to how this orbital station could be at Utopia Planitia, which is the enormous plain inside the Utopia crater, the largest on the Martian surface. However, the lore has it that we are in geosynchronous orbit above the crater, which if you squint and are in an extremely forgiving mood, just about makes sense.
It’s a great set, made all the more special by that matte painting of the substructure of the Enterprise-D as it is being constructed. Without this, it’s just a room full of spaceship models. With the matte, we’re taken back to a time when the Enterprise is being built, where we get to meet the engineer who designed her. These are those tiny details that make all the difference to the feel of a Trek episode.
Nicely done as usual. Booby Trap is one of my faves!