Emergence
The Enterprise tries to birth a sentient tangle of wires by carrying a brick on the Orient Express in one final no-idea-too-stupid holodeck episode!
We’re back in the holodeck with Captain Picard watching Data perform Shakespeare, when suddenly a steam locomotive tries to run them down - that’s the intriguing teaser! Yes, it’s one last holodeck malfunction story before the curtain falls on TNG forever. We’re off on the Orient Express as the Enterprise-D tries to hatch a brick in order to give birth to a sentient tangle of coloured wires. Yup, set your expectations for wacky and let’s return to the holodeck for a final heaping helping of nonsense.
Words
This one began when Brannon Braga expressed his desire that there would be one last holodeck story before the show came to a close. After all, TNG had thrived on the holodeck in the early seasons, but apart from “Homeward” we’ve done nothing with the holodeck for quite some time. Braga’s original idea was to revisit Dixon Hill (last seen in season four), but then he began to think about how to crank the holodeck up to eleven:
I felt if we were going to do another holodeck show, we should do one like we’ve never seen before. It’s a bizarre amalgam of all the holodeck shows we’ve ever seen. I had in my mind this image of Dixon Hill crossed with King Arthur’s Court crossed with the Old West crossed with Modern Day New York – all thrown together and our people trapped in this adventure. I thought that would be neat and ended up coming up with the concept of the ship developing a psyche. These subconscious elements of that psyche would manifest themselves on the holodeck and we have to go in and interpret the symbolism and communicate to the ship through the adventures it’s portraying.
This desire to make the ultimate holodeck episode explains why it opens in a fashion inspired by one of my favourite episodes, “The Defector”, with Data performing Shakespeare to the Captain, this time with our android thespian as Prospero. The choice of The Tempest was presumably because this was Shakespeare’s final play, in which he was coming to terms with no longer being a playwright. Patrick Stewart was actually cast on Broadway as Prospero the year after TNG ended.
Despite this being Braga’s baby, he couldn’t actually write the screenplay as he and Ronald D. Moore were caught up cranking through the screenplay for the show’s double length finale. So Jeri Taylor got on the phone to France and called in Joe Menosky - the only TNG writer with an even greater penchant for offbeat craziness than Braga! Indeed, when Menosky’s screenplay arrived back in Los Angeles, director Cliff Bole’s eyebrows nearly caught fire:
I thought Menosky mighta had a couple of mushrooms when he wrote the first script. We all read it and thought, ‘Jeeesus, you can’t shoot this in thirty-five days!’ I mean, marvelous crazy ideas, but it had to be down-scaled.
Naren Shankar was brought in to provide an uncredited polish on the script, which largely pared back the fantastical elements to something that could be delivered on schedule, much to Bole’s relief. This was Bole’s final at bat as director, making a total of twenty five episodes - the most shows under any director’s belt. He continued to direct for DS9 and Voyager too.
While this episode isn’t very popular with fans, it does has its defenders - including Ronald D. Moore:
I think that holodeck stuff is a riot. The re-creation of the Orient Express alone is worth the price of admission.
For myself, I feel this story doesn’t quite work, with the characters just chewing on the scenery and spouting exposition, but it’s nice to give the holodeck a proper send off.
Acting Roles
“I think we should follow that man - that brick might be an important clue!”
This is one of those episodes that lacks a proper focal character yet doesn’t quite work as an ensemble piece because there’s no dynamic between the crew. Everyone’s there for exposition and nobody has a character reason for anything that happens.
David Huddleston plays The Conductor, and has good stage presence here, despite the ridiculousness of it all.
You can’t fail to recognise him, most likely as the wheelchair-bound title character of the Coen Brother’s The Big Lebowski, but perhaps also from Mel Brooks comedies like Blazing Saddles and The Producers. He was also the grandpa in The Wonder Years, although in nearly a hundred and fifty roles spanning film and television he never quite scored a proper recurring TV role.
Vinny Argiro plays the brick-toting Hitman (below left), a role that requires very little from him. He played the casino manager in Mars Attacks! and the debate director in Bulworth, as well as having a small role in Risky Business - plus, I’m pleased to report, he had a role on L.A. Law before landing this gig on TNG.
Thomas Kopache plays the Engineer (above right), who is shot after speaking his two lines. They get him back as a com officer in Star Trek: Generations, and played Major Kira’s father on DS9 and a few other roles on Voyager. He did the rounds on the sci-fi shows, appearing in both Babylon 5 and Stargate SG1. You may also have seen him as the ill fated boot salesman in another Coen Brothers movie, No Country for Old Men or as the Assistant Secretary of State in The West Wing - and he too had a small role in L.A. Law before appearing in this episode - he and Argiro are the very last representatives of the exchange programme!
Finally, there’s Arlee Reed as the Hayseed (above, centre bottom). I have literally no idea what part of the ship he is supposed to represent! We saw him before as an Arkarian waiter slash terrorist in “Starship Mine”, and he only had twelve roles in all, including these two on TNG. It’s hard to imagine this role would land him more work, and indeed he only had one more role in anything and that was ‘Drunk Hunter’ in the 1999 novel adaptation Charming Billy.
There’s some good performers in this week’s guest cast... to bad they don’t have anything to do but carry a brick.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
With a lot of money going into the series finale, there was a great deal of cost saving going on here. The train interior was not built for this episode - they built the set by modifying the Edwardian train interior from 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, slightly refurbished here to make it look like the 1920s. Director Cliff Bole was pleased:
That train was marvellous. If we’d built that there would have been another 120 grand that would have been subtracted from everything else.
Similarly, the Keystone City set might look familiar as its Paramount’s New York City set that was used in “The Big Goodbye” and several classic Trek episodes, not to mention popping up in both DS9 and Voyager.
The utterly unconvincing emergent lifeform was a CGI abomination created by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.
...while this shot of the MacPherson Nebula was actually something Visual Effects Supervisor Dan Curry had produced previously while experimenting with laser light on plastic objects.
Finally, to cheaply complete the suite of requisite SFX, there’s a shot of the Orient Express braking. Bole had to plead with Rick Berman for this! Berman insisted that it violates ‘point-of-view logic’ to show something that none of our characters could directly see, to which Bole replied that he just had to have a shot of the sparks flying: “Sometimes for drama’s sake you gotta break the rules, so I got away with it once.”
Where did this come from? They licensed it from the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express movie, which through a bizarre chain of possession had ended up owned by a French media company. I can’t help but wonder if Joe Menosky, who was working for a French television company and living in France at the time he wrote this episode, helped grease the wheels for that licensing agreement!
Fun episode - Brannon Braga always cooked up neat, weird stories.