First Contact

Ever wondered what happens before the Federation makes first contact? Probably not - but there's a lot of fun in this episode as we find out!

We open in the Crisis Room of an alien hospital as a patient is being wheeled in... except, the patient isn’t quite right. He has digits on his terminus! The teaser ends with the reveal that it’s Riker, and the story proceeds not from the perspective of the Enterprise crew at all, but through the eyes of the aliens upon the planet that the Federation is considering making first contact with - hence the title. After many adventures in the alien hospital - including Riker scoring another ill-judged notch in his intergalactic bedpost - our hapless First Officer is eventually rescued, and the aliens decide not to proceed with first contact after all. Amazingly, this ending isn’t a let down, but rather the logical conclusion of this wonderful interstellar yarn.

Words

This is a favourite of mine, and has a lot of love among fans - but it did not come about easily. It began as a pitch by Marc Scott Zicree that went down back in the third season... Zicree had struggled to get a story accepted for TNG for quite some time before this one scored a bullseye. He later recalled:

It’s very hard to sell to Star Trek. They’ve gone months without buying any stories. I had done up something like 50 or 60 stories in pitching to the show. Usually I sell on the first or second story. I must have run fifteen stories by them before we hit “First Contact”. Piller liked the stuff so he kept saying keep going. At one point Ira Behr was joking and said this guy is an idea machine, we should just lock him in a room and have him slip paper out from under the door. It was the day before Thanksgiving in 1989, and the meeting was at 5:00 in the morning. Everyone was sick of being there and wanted to go home, and it was a hard pitch for a while.

But Michael Piller could not resist the idea of showing how first contacts are dealt with, and snapped this one up. That explains the ‘Story by’ credit, but what about the whopping five names in the ‘Teleplay’ credit...? It seems this was another idea that proved difficult to get off the ground. “Tin Man” writers Dennis Russell Bailey and David Bischoff had the first at-bat, with Joe Menosky and Ronald D. Moore giving it another crack. But these stories were all written from the perspective of the Enterprise crew. Piller began to suspect that this was the problem, and went to Rick Berman for permission to bend the rules:

Our rules told us we never have open shows, and we wrote the first two drafts from our point of view and I realized it wasn’t working. The thing that was holding us back was a rule, and I’m very much a supporter of the rules of Gene’s universe, but I also love to break them if they’re in the interest of the show. I went to Rick and said that even though I know he doesn’t like to break format, this could be a special show if he would let me write it from the alien point of view. He did, as long as I let everyone know that we weren’t going to ever break this rule again. No other show in the history of Star Trek has taken the alien perspective of our characters, and I think that makes it very special and very unique.

Of course, Voyager later did the same in another brilliant episode, but this certainly was a ground-breaking moment in Trek at the time. Once he had Rick Berman’s permission to smash the rulebook, Piller was able to take the material from the previous two drafts and make it work. He wrote it as if it was a 1950s space adventure movie - The Day the Earth Stood Still was a key point of reference - with the twist that, for once, we’re the aliens.

The eventual screenplay Piller put together from his various sources is rather excellent, but I still have a complaint: Riker claims to come from ‘the southern continent’. This is a bugbear of mine (you can invent a thousand ludicrous minerals but can’t name a single continent…?), but it’s a very small complaint for a wonderful piece of storytelling.

Acting Roles

Because the story is told from the perspective of the alien species, we get a lot of guest stars! First and foremost is the indescribably brilliant Carolyn Seymour as Mirasta Yale, who we’ve already had in as Romulan, and will be getting back as one later on. She’s on sterling form here, which is just as well as the entire story depends on her performance.

Equally important to the story are George Coe’s Chancellor Avel Durken and Michael Ensign's Minister of Security Krola- the good cop, bad cop of Malcorian politics.

Coe gives a wonderfully measured performance, and his career is packed full of serious roles - yet he has a comic background. In fact, he was part of the original Saturday Night Live cast. But I’ll always remember him most fondly as Sterling Archer’s long suffering drug-addict valet, Woodhouse.

Ensign is an excellent and believable ‘villain’ as Krola, and speaking for myself I have a lot of sympathy for this character (even though from the point of view of the writing team, he’s clearly meant to be a stand in for American conservatism, and not supposed to be likeable).

Ensign had a great career, with a role in 1983’s War Games of particular interest to sci-fi aficionados, not to mention the odiously officious hotel manager in 1984’s Ghostbusters, as well as a recurring role in my beloved Boston Legal as a no-nonsense judge.

The rest of the guest cast are all in the alien hospital, where George Hearn does a solid job as Dr Berel, who has the meatiest role of them all.

However, he is upstaged by fellow Cheers alumni Bebe Neuwirth, who apparently begged to be included and had her part as the lascivious alien lover Lanel written in at last minute.

In 1991, it was hilarious that Riker was sexually harassed by an alien nurse... today, you would never see such a thing anywhere on television.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The Malcorian latex is typical of the mid to late season TNG make-up team, consisting of some random facial ridges. But it had to be modest, because so many of the cast had to be put into this make-up. However, it’s lovely that they also make literally fingerless gloves to emphasise the alienness of these people too.

The sets and props team deserve a special mention for creating so many unique locations that feel both familiar and alien at the same time, which is quite an achievement. Check out this stamp the Chancellor uses because of their big stubby appendages!

Of course it’s all overshadowed by the involvement of legendary matte painter Syd Dutton. The episode not only reuses the classic “Angel One” matte painting...

...they had Dutton create an entirely new painting to complement the original.

It’s a brilliant production decision, and recouped through the opportunity to reuse either or both of the paintings in future episodes (which they do, many times). It’s the cherry on the “First Contact” sundae that helps makes this such an enduring classic.