Face of the Enemy

Troi is involuntarily recruited to spy on the Romulans... by the Romulans

Ominous music plays as we watch a Romulan get out of bed... only to discover it's Counsellor Troi - what a teaser! We swiftly discover that Troi has not only been captured and surgically altered to look like a Romulan, she’s going undercover in a Romulan intrigue that takes us deep into the tensions and politics of a Warbird’s bridge. Can she pull the wool over the eyes of the canny Commander Toreth and somehow escape with her life...? Well of course she can, but what fun we’ll have along the way!

Words

How on Earth did the production team end up giving such an awesome episode to Marina Sirtis’ Troi? Well you’ll be unsurprised to learn that this contribution to the Mindwarp season was originally conceived of as a Dr Crusher story, until somebody on the writing team (nobody seems to remember who) suggested this would work even better with Troi’s empathic abilities, which frankly everyone seems to have forgotten for the last year or so of the show!

Topping up Sirtis’ make-up behind the scenes

There had been a number of attempts to pitch an episode with a premise along the lines of The Hunt for Red October, but it took a long while for Rick Berman to be persuaded. The original pitch for this episode came from Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who had proposed an episode in which Q sends Picard, Data, and Troi onto a Romulan starship where they would be seen as Romulans. This pitch was ultimately unsuccessful, but it eventually became the germ of this episode by discarding Wolfe’s core idea:

The reason it didn’t go is the way I had them do it; there was no Romulan make-up involved, they weren’t possessing their bodies. The visual gag was the same as Quantum Leap, where we would look at them and see them as themselves and maybe in a reverse shot we might see them as other people completely, but they didn’t want to step on Quantum Leap's toes.

The eventual screenplay was written by Naren Shankar, a huge step up from his previous “The Quality of Life”. When he started work on the script he was technically still not part of the writing team:

I wrote the first draft of the script in six days because we were really under a time crunch. I was assigned it as a free-lancer and halfway through I was brought on staff. The rewrite helped smooth out a lot of things and we had to change the ending a couple of times. The action in Act Five didn’t work initially. It was harrowing but it came out well.

There was some uncertainty as to what the precious cargo was going to be. In early discussions it was going to be a Romulan ship, but this was soon changed to frozen Romulans... At one point, it was suggested it might be Spock. As Shankar remembered:

We were sitting around talking about this show and about who this important person would be that's defecting and Michael got this look on his face and said, “We probably can’t do this, but what if the person is Spock? They’re getting out and at the end they open it up and it’s not Spock. The person we take out is defrosted and we ask him what happened to Spock and he says Spock didn’t make it.” I look at Michael like he’s crazy and he goes, “Nah!”

Shankar was still shocked that it was even suggested to kill off a major Trek character off-screen calling it “one of those craaaazy moments”.

This episode adds more texture to the TNG Romulans than any before or since. Shankar provides us with the Romulan intelligence service, the Tal Shiar, named as a homage to tal-shaya the Vulcan martial arts mentioned in “Journey to Babel”. He also invents the idea that a Romulan ship uses an artificial quantum singularity as their power source, a concept that will serve as a key plot point in Brannon Braga’s screenplay for “Timescape” later this season.

Ronald D. Moore considered this “probably the best Romulan episode we ever did.” It’s a classic to be sure, but I’d be hard pressed to decide between this one and season three’s “The Defector”.

Acting Roles

One of the greatest things about this episode is the sparks thrown up by Marina Sirtis' fake Romulan stasi Troi and Carolyn Seymour’s Romulan Commander Toreth.

Writer Naren Shankar had originally suggested casting Joanne Linville, who played the Romulan Commander in classic Trek’s “The Enterprise Incident”, but she was not available. Instead, they brought back the outstanding Seymour, who had played Sub-Commander Taris in “Contagion”. Why didn’t they make it the same character? As far as the writing team is concerned, Taris died at the end of that episode. That seems unnecessarily harsh to me, as we did not see it, and there’s no reason at all she couldn't have survived, but either way it doesn’t really matter: we get the brilliant Carolyn Seymour back as a Romulan.

Jeri Taylor was thrilled with the chemistry between Sirtis and Seymour:

I thought it was a great role for Marina. I thought it was well written for her. I loved Carolyn Seymour as the Romulan Commander, she was outstanding in it… I enjoyed seeing those two powerful women get a chance to sort of rise to the occasion and take off on each other.

Sirtis also has great screen presence with Scott MacDonald's Sub-Commander N’Vek.

MacDonald is the first performer to have appeared in DS9 before appearing in TNG! He played the alien Tosk in “Captive Pursuits”, which was his debut role. He would go on to don the latex for numerous roles throughout all the original production run. They even let him appear as a human in Voyager‘s pilot episode. His career outside of Trek is mostly bit parts and videogame voice overs, although you might have seen him as Captain Manning in Threshold, or as Burley in Carnivàle, one of many shows Ronald D. Moore worked on after TNG.

This episode marks the debut of the ponytail for Michael Dorn’s Worf, which he will keep for the rest of TNG and throughout DS9 and the movies too.

Both Dorn and hairstylist Joy Zapata had been lobbying for the change for some time, with Zapata later saying that Dorn’s hair “used to remind me of a Klingon that had gone to the beauty salon; it looked like Donna Reed!”

Another guest star this week is Barry Lynch’s Ensign Stefan DeSeve, the defector returning home from Romulus with news from the underground.

Lynch was in L.A. Law after this episode, and also appeared in two H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, as Professor Webb in 2005’s The Call of Cthulhu and as Henry Akeley in 2011’s The Whisperer in Darkness. He’s fairly unremarkable here apart from that awful pudding bowl haircut.

Below decks, we have Pamela Winslow back as McKnight on the Conn (below left), doing nothing much of anything as usual.

And who is our Transporter Chief-of-the-Week (above right)? I’m not entirely certain, but I believe this is Sissy Sessions, an extra who appeared in eleven episodes starting with last season’s “The Masterpiece Society”.

She was uncredited in all these appearances, which is why I’m not wholly certain that is the correct performer, but this seems to be the most likely suspect. Come back Colm Meaney, we miss you!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

This episode sees yet another reuse of the Straleb vessel from “The Outrageous Okona”, which they get to blow up this week! There’s some cool alien make-up for its Corvallen pilot too (played by Dennis Cockrum, who is back in latex for Voyager and without it for Enterprise).

We’ll see the Corvallen make-up quite a bit more in DS9, since one of the extras on that show came in repeatedly to play a female Corvallen in Quarks and on the promenade.

There’s also a great SFX shot as a disuptor disintegrates of N’Vek.

There’s also plenty of the sexy Warbird studio miniature this week, a mix of reused shots from “The Mind's Eye” and new footage shot for this episode.

Newly built for this one, however, are the Warbird interiors, created by set designer Richard James.

He worked hard on these:

We played off of Romulans having a motif represented by certain colours. We do that for identification so that certainly the Romulans would not have everything that would look just like Earth society. For us to graphically sell the idea of it being Romulan, we need to do it well with the sets, make-up and costumes which are Romulan colours. It helps to reinforce the idea that this is Romulan territory and it was not that much of a challenge because we played off of what's been established for Romulan ships.

James was also pleased to get into the backrooms, and tackle the question of “what would the Romulan plates and silverware look like?” Everything custom-made, since as James put it “It's not as though you could go out to the rental store.”

However, writer Naren Shankar was not pleased: “What we ended up with was Romulan Pizza Kitchen.” His disappointment with the set design lay primarily in the specifics of how he described the bridge in the screenplay, as follows:

Several N.D. ROMULANS attend various stations around the perimeter. A single PILOT sits at a console in front of the main Viewscreen. The Commander’s station is against the back wall. It is not a chair, but a raised platform upon which the Commander stands. It’s encircled by a railing to lean on and several command consoles. The entire room is forward of the Commander. Every inch of the Bridge is under her surveillance at all times -- and nothing goes on behind her back.

Shankar later lamented that this was ignored, saying “To me that would have been cooler.” Maybe so. But this is still a corking Romulan episode, another great Mindwarp for season six, and by far the best of the Troi episodes in TNG.