Descent
"Anyone have an idea for an end of season cliffhanger? How about we throw together the Borg, Lore, and Stephen Hawking and hope something happens..."
Data is playing poker with Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, when suddenly there’s a distress call from some outpost nobody really cares about. Data has to shut down the holodeck and rush off into a phaser battle with Borg drones. Worf is kicking ass (Worf 21, Aliens 21) but during the fight, Data inexplicably finds himself experiencing anger - and, as he later confesses to Troi, even some pleasure in killing the Borg. Drama!
Meanwhile, Captain Picard beats himself up about letting Hugh return to the Borg collective, which is fair enough, because this is precisely why the Borg have now got themselves the ugliest ship in the galaxy. When Data runs off with a rogue Borg, the bridge crew are so distressed they leave Dr Crusher in command of the Enterprise. They rush off to get captured (Worf 21, Aliens 22) by the Borg - led by Lore and Data! Well, it’s a cliffhanger I suppose, I’ve got to give them that much.
Words
As season six was winding up, the writing team was all out of ideas. Several concepts for cliffhangers were proposed, but none of them went anywhere. They turned down Jeri Taylor’s proposal for a DS9 crossover, rejected the idea of Data’s dreams from “Birthright, Part I” turning into nightmares, and pooh-poohed Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga’s concept in which the Enterprise was recalled to Earth and the crew dispersed to different postings in a story they called “All Good Things”…
The first idea to gain traction was one from Jeri Taylor inspired by Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. Her pitch was that the Enterprise crew encounter powerful new aliens while Data finds himself experiencing destructive emotions like anger and hate, with his behaviour becoming more erratic, before eventually revealing that Lore was behind the aliens. To this, Ronald D. Moore suggested picking up the story from “I, Borg” instead of introducing a new species. However, both Taylor and Rick Berman were hesitant to go back there. As Berman later remarked about the Borg:
I find them very two-dimensional in a way. They are faceless characters without personality and without specific character traits. They’re sort of a one-beat group of bad guys to me. In “Best of Both Worlds” they represented a threat as opposed to characters, and that was a great episode. In “I, Borg” you had the antithesis of that fact, which was a Borg pulled away from the collective and made human. It turned into a character and was given a personality and something to be sympathetic towards. My only interest in the Borg is when they’re used off-centre in other than the way they were originally conceived.
Taylor eventually came around to the idea, and Moore was in his element:
I liked the idea of “Descent” a lot. It was an opportunity to go very dark with a character. There were overtones to it that I was drawn to. Finding that Lore and the Borg had joined forces was a creepy proposition, and there was something delicious about that scene in the brig with Data talking to the Borg about killing. I liked taking Data to a very dark place.
Starship spotters can be amused in this episode by the references to the USS Crazy Horse, the USS Agamemnon, and the USS Gorkon, the first Federation starship named for someone who isn’t human, namely Chancellor Gorkon from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. This was Rick Berman’s idea (it had originally been called the USS Valiant, a name that DS9 would later reuse).
Why is the episode called “Descent” you might justifiably ask...? It’s after Charles Darwin’s term ‘descent with modification’. Darwin disliked the name ‘evolution’, as there was a whole metaphysical mess around this term in 1859 when Origin of Species was published, and to be honest this problem never went away. It doesn’t hurt that it ties in metaphorically with the ‘descent into darkness’ idea that is Data’s plotline this week.
Also: notice that this is the only episode of Star Trek in which the title card and guest star credits appear before the opening credits, within the teaser. It’s not at all clear to me why they did this, but I presume it’s because we we come back from the credits directly into a fight scene, and the production team didn't think people would read the credits with such exciting action on screen. Which suggests the production team thinks that anyone other than us Trek nerds read the credits! Now that’s optimism for you.
Acting Roles
The big guest star this week is just a throwaway concept for the teaser: Stephen Hawking plays poker with Brent Spiner’s Data, Newton (played by John Neville - the ‘Well-manicured man’ in The X-Files) and Einstein (once again played by Jim Norton, as in “The Nth Degree”).
Hawking is the only person to play himself in any episode of any Star Trek franchise. He came to Paramount studios to film promo footage for the documentary adapted from his book, A Brief History of Time, and while there asked for a tour of the TNG sets, since he was a huge fan. They let him sit in the captain’s chair to which he joked: “It is rather more comfortable and a lot more powerful than my wheelchair”, and while passing through engineering he pointed at the Warp Core and quipped “I’m working on that”.
Then he asked: “can I appear on the show?” The writers desperately fished around for some great profundity they could have come from Hawking’s mouth. Then they bottled it, and settled for a poker game. Spiner considered the chance to be in a scene with Hawking as “perhaps my favourite moment in the entire experience of doing Star Trek.”
Let’s welcome back Natalija Nogulich as Admiral Nechayev, who gets to chew out Patrick Stewart’s Picard for letting Hugh go last season.
And meet the new Borg!
Brian J. Cousins (left - see “The Next Phase” for his career) plays Crosis, the captured Borg who gets to describe in excruciating detail how to quickly kill everyone in the room.
Then there’s Richard Gilbert-Hill’s Bosus (centre) who moans about Riker killing ‘Torsus’ and swears revenge. Oddly, although credited as Bosus, and appearing in the dramatis personae of the screenplay as Bosus, his one speaking line is labelled ‘Borg #1’ in the screenplay.
Likewise, Stephen James Carver plays Tayar (right), who is named as such at the head of the script, but his two speaking lines are labelled ‘Borg #2’. Carver had previously appeared in the background of “Redemption, Part II” as a Klingon helmsman, and they get him back for a small role in DS9 later.
All in all, eleven extras were hired for the Borg scenes, and when you see more than this it’s because these plucky jobbing actors were multiplied through the use of split-screen overlays. Why eleven? That was the number of Borg costumes available.
There’s also some lower decks fun on location! Picard asks “Who's manning the command post?” to which Riker replies “Wallace and Towles”. Wallace is Guy Vardaman (see “A Fistful of Datas”) and Towles is the mysterious ‘Kathy’ (see “Timescape”). Always nice when they make up names for these recurring extras, and there’s a small handful of frames you can see the two extras together in the background too!
As for Michael Dorn’s Worf, he finishes the season 4-4, his only tied season as far as I know! This puts him overall at 21-22, a losing career at this point, but we still have one more season of TNG to put him over the top!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
We have a brand new studio miniature representing a whole new kind of Borg ship - and boy, is it ugly!
I mean, look at this monstrosity! Dan Curry was responsible for the horrible design, and Greg Jein implemented it. It was later auctioned under the name ‘Borg Type-2 Ship Model’ and described as follows:
An irregularly-shaped asymmetric ship visual effects model featuring numerous open areas, outer hull made of overlapping matrices of miniature conduit detail, and intricate interior details – 36×26 in.
They forgot to mention ‘butt-ass ugly’. It sold for $11,400. I really didn’t like it on first impression, and the only reason I don’t still hate it now is that it is the centrepiece of the magnificent 1993 Williams pinball cabinet - check it out!
Let’s welcome back this matte painting, which we last saw eight weeks back in “Starship Mine”.
Finally, the Borg building we see near the end of the episode is the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, which was also used for Camp Khitomer in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It lies some forty miles north west of the Paramount studios, provided you get lucky with the traffic through San Fernando.
All in all, I’m not much of a fan of “Descent”. Its a meandering mess of a story that has to make the Borg back into a threat after neutralising them in “I, Borg”. To some extent it succeeds... but it doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere new with it, even though Brent Spiner looks awesome in black as Lore at the end. All in all, a slightly disappointing finale to an incredible season.