Identity Crisis

LaForge's body is going through some changes...

We open on Federation archive footage from the USS Victory - look, there’s LaForge in among all these strangers, dressed in red like he was in season one! Cut to the people viewing the footage, who are worried because everyone who was there has disappeared, except for LaForge and Lieutenant Commander Guest Star. Looks like we’ve got another mystery to solve. The Enterprise tracks down one of the Starfleet nobodies in the archive footage, just in time to watch him re-enact the shuttle scene from “Coming of Age” - only this time it blows up! Down to the planet we go, where there must be something dangerous about because the music is all 80s horror movie string sections. What is going on...?

Well it turns out that the away team in the archive footage all picked up a parasite that is transforming them into invisible aliens that glow-in-the-dark whenever they happen to walk into a 1970s disco. Can LaForge save his friend - and himself! - from literally disappearing? The answer, as it happens, is no. But she will save him from vanishing into the background, which to be fair is a threat LaForge has been facing since the pilot episode.

Words

This is another one that began life as a spec script. Timonthy De Haas’ original version had two guest stars transforming into alien glowsticks, with a tale relying heavily upon point-of-view and stylistic devices that Michael Piller didn’t think would fit in with the way that Trek works in practice. So he assigned Brannon Braga to rework the screenplay, which he did as soon as he’d finished working with Ronald D. Moore on his Klingon epic “Reunion”. Braga was drawn to this project because he was a fan of LeVar Burton’s acting, and felt he wasn't getting enough screen time.

Braga initially remade this story in an even more horror movie style than the final version, with a great many aliens lurking unseen on the planet, and no LaForge transformation. But this didn’t quite work either... Braga eventually realised it was essential that LaForge himself would be affected by the change, which resulted in dialling down the terror to what he later called a “restrained and psychoanalytical” style. During these edits, a romantic subplot between LaForge and Leijten was cut out, largely because the writing room felt the Chief Engineer deserved a break from failed romances.

The most iconic scene in the script is the holodock investigation, which Braga wrote as a tribute to the movie Blowup, an aspect of the story that Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor really liked.

If the script as a whole feels a little limp and loose, it is still a striking episode. Nobody thought this was the best screenplay written this season, but this is one of those cases where the magic comes elsewhere in the production and not from the words.

Acting Roles

LeVar Burton really does have to carry this episode, and he acquits himself admirably throughout. It’s one of my favourites of his performances, frequently understated yet always entailing a quiet intensity.

Slightly less successful is the pairing of him with Maryann Plunkett’s Susanna Leijten. Plunkett was early in her career here, fresh off a single episode role in recurrent poaching ground L.A. Law. (Her most recent role, incidentally, was as Priscilla Landon in Manifest, which at six episodes is the longest role Plunkett has ever had). Her performance here is fine, but her friendship with LaForge doesn’t quite feel convincing, which is unfortunate as that’s a large part of the job here. Part of the problem is that when she appears we are already dealing with the crisis, and there's no screen time for us to see the two old friends outside of that context.

Lots of lower decks fun this week! Firstly, we get another dose of Patti Yasutake as… (drumroll please)… Nurse Alyssa Ogawa.

Okay, she doesn't get this name on screen for quite a while, but the screenplay does now provide a name for this character, and behind the scenes she is now clearly woven into the tapestry of the show. Congratulations Yasutake! Not bad for a role that began in a pseudo-holodeck fantasy.

There’s a new Ensign Disposable at the Conn, and this time its Miss Universe 1990(!) Mona Grudt as Ensign Graham (according to the screenplay).

I really hoped to find some behind-the-scenes chatter about casting Miss Universe into Star Trek, but nobody even mentions it, alas, and after also appearing in daytime soap Santa Barbara as ‘Mona the waitress’, Grudt soon returned to Norway never to be seen again.

Two of the USS Victory crew turned aliens are played by LA radio DJs Brian Phelps and Mark Thompson, and while filming their scenes they also interviewed the cast for their show. Here’s a photo of them interviewing Jonathan Frakes on the bridge set!

And finally, Dennis “Danger” Madalone appears here as ‘Transporter Technician’ (so no Colm Meaney). Madalone had been stunt coordinator for the show since the last season, but they frequently put him in shot too. Here’s a tableau of some of his appearances in TNG, along with his role as in this episode (main image).

He was a terrified crewman in “Where No One Has Gone Before” (left), a security guard in “Heart of Glory” (second from left), a terrorist in “The High Ground” (not pictured), one of Kivas Fajo’s henchmen in “The Most Toys” (centre), and soon after shooting this episode he was one of the Klingon officers killed in zero gravity in Star Trek VI: The Undicovered Country (second from right) - all uncredited. I also found a great picture of him monkeying around the cast trailers in a Borg outfit (right). He would continue in the stunt coordinator role for DS9 and Voyager too. It’s quite the career!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Let’s start by admiring what the sets team did to Sound Stage 16 this week, with a quite impressive fake outpost, where much of the story takes place - I thought it was a matte painting at first!

The final set looks quite close to the original sketch, too.

The director, Winrich Kolbe, recalled that “it was a hell of a set, but a technical nightmare.” Here he is with Brent Spiner, looking like his patience is wearing a little thin.

But the big SFX triumph this week are the aliens. Co-producer Peter Lauritson proposed the idea of using ultraviolet light to Supervising producer David Livingstone, and the concept took off from there. As Livingstone later recalled:

We used heavy blue light for the set lighting, and it’s different lighting than you see elsewhere, because all of the source coming from behind the camera is blue light. That’s a decision we made and it should look harsh, and unrealistic and not well lit because it’s not lit from one single blue source. It’s basically a beacon shining out. It looked different than anything else and that was intentional. What I was surprised at was how powerful the UV reflected back, and MTV is using it a lot now. I liked our use because it was integrated into the story. We used it to make it work dramatically rather than doing it as an effect. To me, that was a major accomplishment. We didn’t do it to just be glitzy, we did it because it tied in dramatically with the story.

Indeed, the make-up was so effective that the episode was nominated for an Emmy in Outstanding Achievement in Makeup for a Series.

Sadly, as we know, the Emmy committee don’t like to give awards to Trek, and eventually gave the make-up award that year to Quantum Leap. TNG would eventually have its moment in the Emmy sun - but not until the final season in 1994, when they finally took pity upon the show and let it win some technical awards. For 1991, however, the production crew had to make do with the praise of Michael Piller, who said of this episode: “it's a great example of how those guys in production can really turn out a helluva product.” I couldn’t agree more!