Descent, Part II
Data and Lore kill the entire Enterprise bridge crew and then defeat the Federation with their cult of Borg followers. Well, that was the plan, anyway...
Lore is juicing Data with addictive dark emotions, getting him to play along with his exciting new job as ‘Borg Cult Leader’. Who will rescue Picard, Troi, and LaForge from their clutches? Well, there’s Riker and Worf on the planet or there’s Dr Crusher with some nobodies up on the Enterprise. I’m putting my bet on the Away Team, personally. And oh look, they’ve met up with rogue Borg extraordinaire Hugh whose role in the episode is to show them some secret passages into the compound that I really feel a tricorder could have discovered just as easily (I know, I know “high level of interference”, blah blah blah, but you know they only said that to justify the cameo). Anyway, off they go to kick off a big phaser battle, and Worf gets to blast a Borg (Worf 22, Aliens 22), bringing him up to evens on his scorecard. I guess we’ll count that as an assist for Hugh.
Words
As you may recall, previous cliffhangers had struggled with resolution since the writing room had simply rushed for a great finale to the current season, and then vanished into the post-season break with a ‘problem for future-me’ attitude towards how it was all going to pan out. This was not the case for “Descent, Part II”: the writers thought they knew how this one was going to play out when they left for their vacations. They were rather mistaken. René Echevarria, who got the writing credit for this episode, keenly remembered how problematic the south side of the mountain turned out to be:
Part I left many balls in the air and I had to catch them. We had a better idea of what this Part II was going to be like, but nothing turned out quite as simple as it seemed.
Similarly, Jeri Taylor lamented that there was “too much story to tell”:
It was an embarrassment of riches that a lot of things had to get short shrift. The Lore/Data thing took over, forcing us to almost ignore Hugh, who became a very minor kind of character. We were trying to deal with themes of cults and how a charismatic leader can lure and beguile people. But we had so many themes... Maybe it was just too ambitious because we were not able to do justice to any one of the themes. We spread ourselves so thin and that was our mistake.
This idea of the charismatic cult leader took over, with the writers heavily channelling David Koresh and the Branch Davidians into Lore and his Borg followers. As such, they originally intended to kill Lore in the massive phaser shootout. However, Michael Piller felt that Data’s resolution with Lore should be less combative and more personal, so we ended up with the HAL 9000 ending.
There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the final results, typified by Brannon Braga's feelings about it:
I think ‘Part II’ was less successful than ‘Part I’ in that not enough time was developed to the relationship between Geordi and Data and Data’s experience with these strange, warped, addicting, dark emotions. Unfortunately, you had all these disparate elements.
Braga and the other writers thought they could sustain the excitement by having so many irons in the fire, but it was all too much to do justice to, with many of the more interesting aspects of the story were swept away in a deluge of competing threads. That said, Braga conceded “it was action-packed and successful on that level.” True enough. But I share the writing team’s disappointment regarding this episode.
Acting Roles
Despite the story heavily focussing upon his two roles, Brent Spiner was another person disappointed with how it all turned out:
I don’t think it was as good as it could have been. There was a real nice potential there, but it was too mammoth an undertaking in the seven days we’re allotted to do shows. There was a nice subtext. Lore wasn’t really just villainous, he believed in what he was doing.
Regardless, Spiner gives a great performance as both Lore and Data, even if (rather inevitably) ‘Dark Emo’ Data is basically ‘Lore-lite’.
Pairing Dark Data with LeVar Burton’s LaForge makes a lot of sense, but giving this pairing the screen time basically means that we don’t get any time between Burton and Jonathan Del Arco returning as the “I, Borg” outcast Hugh. While it’s nice to see Del Arco again, he gets squeezed out of importance here, reduced to a mere cameo. Rick Berman apparently suggested that Hugh’s storyline was going to get picked up again later in the season, but of course this did not happen, and the original production run of Trek shows never returned to him.
Brian Cousins is back as Crosis (centre of left image, below), and he’s joined by Michael Reilly Burke’s Goval (right image, and right of left image).
They only get one scene, but it’s one of the better moments in the story, with Goval’s Borg cultist confused and afraid of the other Borg hearing his thoughts. It sets up a tender moment from cult leader Lore, which plays out nicely. This is Burke’s TV debut, the start of a more than a hundred bit parts and short recurring roles, including appearing in roles in both DS9 and Enterprise. Many of these gigs are unremarkable, such as ‘Commando #7’ in Seaquest DSV and ‘GNN Reporter’ in Mars Attacks!, but at least he got paid!
The other member of the core cast who has to prop up the episode is Gates McFadden’s Dr Crusher who is inexplicably in the captain’s chair. This fish-out-of-water scenario worked well for Marina Sirtis’ Troi in “Disaster”, but it’s less effective here. Part of the problem is a lack of support. Originally, Echevarria wanted Barclay to be part of the back up bridge crew, but Dwight Schultz was not available and so Alex Datcher’s utterly forgettable Ensign Taitt was invented to plug the gap (below left, in front of two other nobodies).
It’s not really Datcher’s fault that her role doesn’t work: with so many moving parts in the episode, it’s just too difficult for us to care about this inexperienced junior officer. What’s more, the attempt to develop her story just slows down the more interesting parts of the episode. Datcher went on to have a decent career as a jobbing actor, with a lot of bit parts on TV, and she even had a small role in Passenger 57 prior to this Star Trek gig. Afterwards, her high point was getting one of the lead roles in the short-lived sitcom Goode Behavior, which I think it’s fair to say nobody has ever heard of.
She’s joined by James Horan playing Lieutentant Barnaby (above right). We last saw him as the villainous Jo’Bril in “Suspicions”, and you can check that WAM if you want the skinny about his career (which I’m betting you don’t). He’s unexceptional here, but it’s very amusing for him to be involved in namechecking the metaphasic shielding tech that he was stealing in his last appearance!
And while we’re touring the lower decks, Transporter-Chief-of-the-Week is Benito Martinez’ Salazar.
This was his fifth role and as forgettable as it is, he still managed to leverage it into another hundred-plus career roles. He also undeniable became the most successful of this week’s guest stars, playing David Aceveda in 87 episodes of The Shield, and having significant recurring roles in Saving Grace, Supernatural, Sons of Anarchy, House of Cards, American Crime, How to Get Away with Murder, The Blacklist, 13 Reasons Why and 9-1-1: Lone Star. Not bad on the back of a role with seven speaking lines, most of which are quoting numbers!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
The ugly-ass new Borg ship is back, in a much more ambitious shot that nonetheless comes off much less impressively than the ‘contrast of scale’ scene in “Descent”.
It kind of worked when we could see it dwarfing the Enterprise, here it just looks as silly as it really is. It works slightly better in the metaphasic shielding scene, though, even if the GIF encoding below completely sucks. Use your imagination!
Mercifully, they then get to blow up the ugly ship so we never, ever have to see it again - boom! (So much for your Hippocratic Oath, Dr Crusher…)
But the real SFX stars this week are the tireless make-up team, not only because they had to get all the extras looking suitably Borg-ish, but because they had to keep them made-up even though the location shooting took place in a scorching 38 degrees Celsius (that’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit in old money). As visual effects supervisor Dan Curry put it: “Those Borg extras were dying. They had to wear black long johns under those rubber suits.” Here’s a great behind-the-scenes shot of two of those roasting Borg extras, Adrian Tafoya (left) and Pam Blackwell (right), who didn’t get a credit for this episode but certainly got heat rash!
And once again, the SFX team had to digitally multiply the eleven extras playing the Borg, because there weren’t enough costumes to go around! All in all, this episode is a bit of a muddle, but it gets season seven off with a bang, at least.
Once again the 2nd part of a 2nd parter always seems to disappoint. And that ugly Borg ship is put out of its misery. It may be winner of the most ugly ship award in all of TNG! As Jeri Taylor said, probably too much story - it's why say with DS9, they would have devoted 3-4 eps to properly draw out the story.
I've always thought how fun it would have been to have Lore come back instead of that ridiculous B4 'challenged' mess of a Soong Android in Nemesis. Maybe Shinzon cloaks/changes him so we don't know it's Lore till too late - blah blah whatever - but how much more dynamic a dual Spiner role would have been in that instead of the cringing silliness they produced.