Future Imperfect

It's the future... or is it? Well, everyone's got different haircuts so it must be

It’s all fun and games in Ten Forward for Riker's birthday party - he’s even got his trombone out for the occasion! But unfortunately the Enterprise has detected some unusual fluctuations in the technobabble, and off we go to a matte painting of an alien cave. Suddenly there’s a deadly build up of methane gas, something we’ve all suffered at one time or another, and the next thing we know Riker is being woken up by Dr Crusher with a different haircut. Indeed, everyone’s got new hair because it's the future. Or is it? Well of course not, because there’s clearly a twist coming and so nobody's surprised when the boot eventually falls. Except this story has another trick up its sleeve because it’s secretly a double-twist. Yes, it turns out that it’s not the future, nor a Romulan holodeck, it’s the personal holodeck of an unconvincing looking alien child.

Words

Although there is a fair amount of love for this episode among fans, I am a bit of a curmudgeon about it. Already by 1990 I was getting pretty sick of the ‘it was all a technological dream’ plot twist, so you can imagine how unimpressed I was by The Matrix when it belched into cinemas at the end of the decade. On the plus side, it’s nice that this story has the double twist, but on the minus side it undermines the Tomalak guest appearance by making it all into a meaningless fantasy. This is the sort of issue that either affects you or it doesn’t, but personally I find it very difficult to set it aside. When it’s obvious a twist is coming, I can get very impatient waiting for it to land.

This story was pitched to the writing room by the two screenwriters, J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carren, and was enthusiastically received. Brannon Braga remembered it well:

We’ve had some amazing pitches, but the most notable we ever heard was in “Future Imperfect”, where the team came in and said we have a story where Riker wakes up from an accident fifteen years in the future… Riker has a son, is the captain of the Enterprise and has no idea what happened. Mike Piller said, ‘Stop, we’ll buy it.’

The one change to the story was the addition of the Romulan ‘dream within a dream’ i.e. the double twist. It seems Michael Piller had something of a similar problem to the one I have with these kinds of stories:

You had a situation where you are into it and something strange is happening and yet it can’t just turn out to be a dream at the end of the show because it’s not satisfying. What you do is you get to the third act and you need to do something that moves the action forward. This is one of the best examples of the notion that you shouldn’t censor yourself. I just talked and David Carren said, ‘You mean that he thinks it’s a real Romulan plot for an act?’ and I said, ‘That’s not what I mean at all’ – then I said, ‘Stop, wait a minute, what if that’s exactly what we do and play it out as a Romulan gag for an act.’ That’s what I think made that show work.

The two writers were picked up as script editors, and remained in that role until the end of season four, but they never wrote another episode for Trek.

Acting Roles

I may have my issues with the screenplay, but there's a lot of fun to be had here with the acting roles. That’s because all the regular crew get to play different people - well, themselves in the future... well, a fake version of themselves in a fake future that is fake in a different way to the one we’re expecting. Of course, they’re still essentially the same characters, so it doesn’t exactly push the boat out very far, but it seems like the cast are having a good time with it all the same.

However, Andreas Katsulas did not enjoy returning as Tomalak in this episode:

I felt much more comfortable when he was an incredible giant on the screen, just a face. Suddenly when I had to account for everything else, I didn’t feel support and nothing was supporting what I was doing. I was happy not to recur unless it would have gone back to a screen character.

He got his wish in the final season.

A fair amount of the weight of performance is put on the shoulders of child actor Chris Demetral as Jean-Luc Riker.

Demetral had a major recurring role as the son in 90s comedy show Dream On, and later got to play Jules Verne in The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. Here, he’s fine in the three roles he plays, with a suitable level of vulnerability in the climax. It helps that they have Andreas Katsulas on hand to add gravitas to everything that's going on.

April Grace is back, and this time she is named in the screenplay as ‘Transporter Chief Hubble’ (it appears as Hubbel in the closing credits), which means no Colm Meaney this week.

But there’s still something incredible happening below decks as the role of ‘N.D. Nurse’ is played by none other than Patti Yasutake, who will swiftly be given the name and role of Nurse Ogawa, which she played in sixteen TNG episodes and two of the movies.

But can anyone tell me what the N.D stands for...? There’s another one in the screenplay, an ‘N.D. Transporter Chief’. For the life of me I can't work out what this abbreviation stands for - if you know, please let me know in the comments!

Oh, and hat tip to Carolyn McCormick returning as Minuet in the fake family home movie.

It’s not much of a role for her, but it’s fun for us to see her again.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

There's a matte painting when we first beam down to the planet, which while not the finest in the show is still a pretty cool thing to get in the teaser.

But it’s especially great when we see it again for the reveal of the alien holodeck in the final act.

There’s a lot of shuffling around of the set components to make new places in this story, but to make the Romulan holodeck appear convincing required an actual model, which was custom made for this episode.

But of course, the heavy lifting on the SFX this week falls to the make-up team, who have to make all the regular cast look sixteen years older - not to mention rustle up a new Ferengi to sit on the bridge, and a rather disappointing looking alien kid in the climax.

Make-up supervisor Michael Westmore remembered the challenge well:

Each member of the TNG cast was supposed to have aged sixteen years. The producers decided that rather than having each actor sit in a makeup chair for two or three hours, it would be a better idea to suggest their age by changing the hairstyles, and maybe doing a little rubber stretching around the eyes. I thought it was a sensible approach, because most of the actors were in their thirties, and even aging them sixteen years would only put them somewhere in their forties. Most people don’t look dramatically different at that age, and it would have been a waste of time and energy using prosthetics to achieve that effect.

The hair really is my favourite aspect of this episode.

It’s so good, that they're going to do it again for the show’s ultimate climax at the end of season seven. And at least for that one, it’s not just a holodeck fantasy.