Disaster

It's the greatest threat the Enterprise-D has faced to date - Deanna Troi is in charge!

Keiko O’Brien is pregnant... didn’t she just marry Miles last year? Doesn't time fly when you're part of the secondary cast. Meanwhile, Dr Crusher is trying to bully LaForge into singing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But the real crisis is on the bridge where Counsellor Troi is introducing Captain Picard to the winners of the ship’s science fair. It’s so shocking that a red alert follows immediately, and the Enterprise threatens to shake itself apart as it collides with a quantum filament. And that’s all before the opening credits! After the title card, it’s carnage on every deck as unusual pairings of familiar characters have their own version of The Poseidon Adventure in the cold depths of space.

Words

Did I not promise ship-in-jeopardy plots this season...? This one was another pitch from outsiders, Ron Jarvis (who is also an actor) and Philip A. Scorza (who seems to have been Jarvis’ partner in crime when scriptwriting). It was accepted because it sounded like fun to have a disaster story. Somehow, Ronald D. Moore got the short straw and had to write it:

I thought let’s just have fun with it. We put our people in interesting and fun situations. It was nice to put Troi in the captain’s chair and Picard in the elevator shaft. It was very episodic, and I remember the best moment was when we were breaking the story. Michael left the room and we were looking at different elements – Data and Riker in the powertube, in particular – and somebody said, “What if Riker takes Data’s head off?” Michael came back in and we said, “You're going to hate this, but what if we took his head off?”, and he laughed and rolled his eyes and said, “Do it. No one will let us do it, but go ahead, it’ll be fun.” I wrote it and Rick never said a word. It's amazing that we got away with it.

Moore, who gave Worf his most Klingon plotline ever, had the opportunity to play Michael Dorn’s character in a very different manner here:

The Worf plot came out of our constant search for things to cut against his fierce, hyper-masculine Klingon nature. We all fell in love with the idea of him being the guy who delivers the baby. And Michael Dorn liked doing comedic stuff. I think he got tired of us beating him up all the time.

Above all else, though, Moore wrote this as a tribute to the 1970s disaster movies. Indeed, he apparently joked about casting Shelley Winters - which removes any doubt about The Poseidon Adventure being an inspiration. And if you somehow haven’t seen that 1972 classic, don’t delay - it's great fun!

The production crew found this episode a lot of fun, although Michael Piller later regretted the way they played Michelle Forbes’ Ro Laren against Marina Sirtis’Troi:

We gave her the role of the disbeliever who had nowhere to go but lose in the end because she didn’t believe Troi. I think, as I wrote in a memo, it would have been much better if she’d been around a year with some victories before we threw her right into that situation to look rather foolish.

Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering what a ‘quantum filament’ is, it was completely made up for this story because the original idea of colliding with an asteroid felt a bit anticlimactic. Technobabble to the rescue!

Acting Roles

“I shall appoint you my Executive Officer in charge of radishes.”

You know its a bottle show when suddenly there are guest stars flowing out of every turbolift! Let's start with Picard's posse, who are Erika Flores as Marissa Flores, John Christian Graas as Jay Gordon Graas, and Max Supera as Paterson Supra. Notice how every one of them has a character name with the same (or similar) name as their own, to make the kid-wrangling easier.

Left to right: Max Supera, Erika Flores, and John Christian Graas

They’re a lot of fun this bunch, and brilliantly played against Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard. It builds well on all of his issues with Wesley in a way that’s much more fun that that ever was. Erika Flores went onto keep performing until 2009, most memorably in the recurring role of Colleen Cooper on Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. This was her fifth role in a career that started a year earlier. It’s John Christian Graas’ ninth role - he’d already been on L.A. Law (his second role) and in Kindergarten Cop - again, all starting one year before this appearance. And the youngest, Max Supera, had three roles - one before and one after this, before turning his back on acting forever. I’m not a fan of kids in sci-fi, but I have to hand it to these three - they make the Picard subplot really entertaining.

Then there’s our returning folks, which includes Rosalind Chao’s Keiko O’Brien and Colm Meaney’s Miles O’Brien. They split them up here, pairing Chao’s Keiko with Michael Dorn’s Worf in an absolutely brilliant double act that puts Worf massively out of his depth dealing with Keiko’s pregnancy. It’s a brilliant performance by Dorn, and he has great chemistry with Chao too. I wish there were outtakes, as I reckon these two were having brilliant fun!

Meanwhile, Meaney’s Miles is on the bridge with Marina Sirtis’ Troi, where they’re joined by Michelle Forbes’ Ro Laren - her first reappearance since her debut. This is a really clever grouping as well, because Troi is out of her depth and Miles’ patience is perfectly contrasted by the Bajoran ensign’s caustic attitude. I tip my hat to Marina Sirtis here, I’m quite happy with her performance here, which flows from her being believably out of her depth into her being forced to accept the burden of command. The writers really are making good use of Sirtis and her character at long last.

Jonathan Frakes’ Riker and Brent Spiner’s Data make a very unusual double act - we actually don’t see them together very often, and it’s lots of fun having the first officer carry around Data’s head! That Jeffries Tube junction set, incidentally, was brand new in this episode.

Rather less successful is Gates McFadden's Dr Crusher paired with LeVar Burton’s LaForge, not because of any fault of the two of them, it’s just their subplot is markedly less interesting than all the others - and let’s face it, there’s a great deal going on this week so somebody had to draw the short straw.

And let’s not forget two more lower decks co-stars! Firstly, Jana Marie Hupp’s Lieutenant Monroe - who’s dead by the end of the credits - and Cameron Arnett’s Ensign Mandel. Hupp had quite the career, including a bit part in Independence Day and a recurring role as Nancy Burton in Ed. This is actually her second lower decks appearance, as she was in the background of “Galaxy's Child” too. As for Arnett, he’s had a long career of bit parts, and unlike most of the people I’ve mentioned so far is still performing now, and has enjoyed some success playing roles in Christian dramas.

Phew! That’s a lot of guest stars. They sure had fun in casting this week.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

This is mostly a bottle show, but there’s still some SFX to enjoy! Firstly, there's that turbolift incident.

Weeee! This is a studio miniature shot, and they liked it so much they reused it in Voyager. Not only that, but the production crew do a great job creating the impression that Picard’s posse are climbing up many decks, and not just using the same six rungs over and over again.

There’s also some clever composition work in the cargo bay, along with a glowing green plasma fire, although there’s not much to talk about.

Also, of course, we get the fun of Data’s severed head. They don’t actually build a prop for this (it’s just Spiner under the table, naturally) but they will be making a prop of it before the season is out!

All in all, this may suffer from being a ship-in-jeopardy plot in a season that’s full of them, but it’s a long way from being a disaster. I enjoy it more and more with each revisit.