Clues

It's a mystery without the murder

Dixon Hill is back! If only for the teaser. It seems Picard has dragged Guinan into the holodeck for fun and adventure. Does the presence of the Enterprise-D’s most famous private eye have anything to do with the story to come...? Well, after the credits we see that the episode title is “Clues”, which along with the Dixon Hill scenes seems to imply this episode is going to be something of a whodunnit, or at least a whassup.

So we plod around the Enterprise sets in a suspiciously cost-saving fashion for a bottle show about working out what happened after the crew were rendered unconscious by an unstable wormhole. Along the way, we get to see all sorts of domestic fun on the Enterprise-D, including Worf practicing Klingon Tai Chi (it gets named ‘mok'bara’ in season six, but here it’s just something cool Worf does with his crewmates).

The biggest mystery is why Data keeps coming up with bizarrely implausible explanations for all the weird stuff that everyone is seeing, and this provides the big reveal as the story cranks onwards. It turns out to be extremely xenophobic aliens who destroy anyone who discovers where they live. Surprisingly, the Enterprise-D crew co-operates with their mad schemes, whereas I feel the crew of the original USS Enterprise would have ended up humiliating them instead.

Words

This one started as a spec script submission from Trek fan Bruce D. Arthurs. Michael Piller liked the story idea, but the screenplay needed some rewriting, and he assigned this gig to Joe Menosky between season three and four. It seems Menosky wasn’t part of the writing team at the time, but Piller was so impressed with his work on this story that he hired him as ‘executive story editor’. Menosky would go on to work on a great many TNG episodes, a few DS9s and more than thirty episodes of Voyager.

I personally don’t find this a very interesting episode, but Michael Piller was apparently a huge fan:

I really loved that show. It’s one of my favourites of the year. It was a perfectly realized classic mystery put together in a Star Trek format, which came together into a very satisfying episode.

One of the surprising aspects of the screenplay is that despite having a role for O’Brien, they have Dr Crusher grow plants even though they now have a botanist on hand in the form of Keiko O’Brien.

The obvious explanation is the time the screenplay was written - in the break before season four began. The odds are there was no Keiko when the revisions took place. That said, one of the changes that Menosky had to implement was working around the absence of Wesley Crusher, which didn’t happen until a few episodes back. I conjecture that they knew Wil Wheaton was leaving long before they knew Rosalind Chao was joining the secondary cast.

Acting Roles

While this is most certainly a bottle show in which the core cast does all the heavy lifting, there’s some interesting things going on in the corners of the guest cast. For a start, how strange it is that they get Whoopi Goldberg in to shoot a couple of holodeck scenes in the teaser then never return to her once.

She’s not even mentioned again in the episode. This feels particularly odd to me, especially in a show that is often slavish about the construction of its bookends.

The return of Rhonda Aldrich’s Madeline, Dixon Hill’s long suffering secretary, is good fun. It’s a small and inconsequential part, to be sure, but Aldrich is always entertaining in this role.

Patti Yasutake is back as ‘Nurse’, although the screenplay does namecheck her as ‘Alyssa’ - which at this point could be a forename or a surname.

On screen, she has a season to wait until she gets a surname and becomes elevated to the higher echelons of the Enterprise-D’s lower decks cast. But behind-the-scenes, Yasutake is getting baked into her role in just four episodes time. For now, though, she’s just a convenient extra to populate sickbay.

Speaking of sickbay, Colm Meaney is back in for a shoulder injury - no mention of kayaking this time!

And speaking of the lower decks, lets welcome Pamela Winslow as McKnight, who gets a name and a speaking line on her very first appearance.

You have to presume that she was brought in to replace Mary Kohnert’s Ensign Tess Allenby who only lasted for two episodes at the conn. Why? Nobody seems to know. But TNG is her last appearance in any role, so either she suffered an untimely death or retired from acting. If anyone knows what happened to Kohnert, do let me know! Anyway, we’ll see McKnight twice more this season, and once more in season six as well (albeit in reused stock footage).

Lastly, let me say what fun it is to have Marina Sirtis play the Big Bad in this episode - not for the last time.

The pitch shifting of her voice helps a great deal, but it’s clear that Sirtis enjoyed the opportunity to do something other than act hysterically or pretend to be in great pain. I personally find her a lot of fun as a villain, and it pleases me greatly that she gets to do this again in later seasons.

Best of all, she gets to do the ultimate act of alienness - she gets to beat up Worf (Worf 7, Aliens 12)!

This is bad news for our beloved Klingon security chief, though, who is now batting a rather dishonourable 1-3 this season, having mostly taken on the bridge crew itself in his so-so skirmishes! His one win is beating up the Captain as Locutus, and two of his loses are to Data and Paxon-possessed Troi (in this episode). Warrior he may be, but this season he’s shaping up to be painfully defeatable.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Alas, there’s not much to look at in the SFX this week - although this planetary matte is rather lovely.

There’s also an unimpressive green cloud in space - look at it, it has nothing going for it but its rather fetching colour.

It does look quite cool when it tries to fondle the Enterprise's shields, though.

All in all, it’s a disappointing week for visual effects, but at least the wardrobe team get to have fun dressing up Whoopi Goldberg and pals for the teaser.