Imaginary Friend
Another kiddie episode already...? It's time for the Ship-in-Jeopardy season to collide with season five's excessive interest with children
The last one felt like a refugee from season one, and now we have a mysterious glowing dot alien travelling around the ship... that definitely feels like a season one story. Except season one condensed all its horrible childrenyness into Wesley Crusher... season five, on the other hand, cannot seem to find anything for the crew to do and keeps drafting in more children instead. At least this week the ship is actually threatened by one of them, which is new.
Unfortunately, you can pretty much guess the whole story from the title and the teaser, which is not the mark of a great episode. Still, the ‘Imaginary Friend’ alien Isabella is rather creepy and there’s a mauve nebula, which is something you don’t see every week. Take your pleasures where you can!
Words
The story idea, originally entitled “Invisible Friend”, came from three freelancers: the mystery novelist Richard Fliegel who wrote nothing else for television that I know of, and the screenwriting team of Jean Louise Matthias and Ronald Wilkerson, who pitched four stories for TNG together (including one great episode). Nobody seems to know who gave the original pitch, but it’s clear that it eventually ended up on Brannon Braga’s desk. It was Braga who decided that having a friendly and curious Isabella was a snooze and took the story in a darker direction:
It wasn’t quite working in its original guise and Jeri Taylor and Peter Fields and I broke the story and tried to make the imaginary friend more of a bad seed. Before, it was more like Puff the Magic Dragon and it was that the alien was simply curious and didn’t have an evil intent. It just kind of laid there and was playful fluff. We decided to make the alien malevolent, where it’s mean to the kid.
This strikes me as a good call. But how on earth did the friendly version ever get put into production? It seems Rick Berman liked the concept:
Where else but in science fiction could you do an idea about an imaginary friend who turns out not to be imaginary? It’s a story about an alien who takes the form of a little girl’s imaginary friend and begins to perceive our world through the eyes of a child.
I don’t know, Rick, is Harvey science fiction? Is Pete’s Dragon? I think you might be wrong about that, bud…
Apparently, Braga enjoyed working on this screenplay more than any of the others he worked on in season five:
I’ve taken to calling it Romper Room: The Next Generation. Kid stories appeal by their very nature. There's an innocence to kids and kids can have conflict. The funny thing about kid shows in the Star Trek universe is you can get conflict with kids because they're not developed yet like our perfect adults. In a strange kind of way, kids can have more problems and conflict than our regulars. They can still be imperfect. It is a fun episode and hopefully people won't be so sick of seeing children on the show.
Dream on, Brannon. At least he appreciated that this was an unpopular story, and that it was too predictable. He thought perhaps it would have been a better half-hour Twilight Zone story... I do agree that shorter would have been better! Season five part-time producer and writer Herbert J. Wright felt that Michael Piller was trying to do ‘E.T. in space’, and this was redundant because Star Trek is already in space. This strikes me as a reasonable criticism.
Personally, one of my problems with this story is that we have both Troi and Guinan, who have empathic and gnarly wibbly-wobbly perception powers respectively, and neither of them even suspects that Isabella is an alien visitation. It feels like a missed trick not to use this aspect of the setup in some way in the story, although I do appreciate that the whole premise collapses if the grown ups are tipped off that Isabella is an alien psychopath before Troi gets blasted into the closet (see above). Great moment that, though!
In defence of this story, there is a great idea at the core of this screenplay - namely that an alien that experienced humanity via the life of a child would mistake us for an oppressive authoritarian regime. As governments everywhere are increasingly leaning in that direction anyway, it’s a painful reminder that the idea of autonomous citizens who can self-govern - which is the ideal of the Federation in Star Trek - feels increasingly distant. But then, dystopian futures are ten a penny in science fiction... what makes Star Trek unique is its boundless optimism. Especially now, there’s some desperately needed hope in these TV shows that still speaks to me, and to many other Trek fans as well, even if this episode isn’t perhaps the best example of that.
Acting Roles
Once again, the story focuses on guest stars... there’s been a lot of that this season. But here the focal characters are both child actors, Noley Thornton’s Clara Sutter and Shay Astar’s Isabella. Both their performances are great, this is really first rate work from such young performers, and the problem with the episode certainly isn’t with these two.
This was Thornton’s fifth role, including a guest spot on Quantum Leap. Uniquely among TNG child stars Thornton had appeared on L.A. Law too, a few years after filming this episode, and had a recurring role in Beverley Hills 90210, which was her only repeat gig. Trek got her back for DS9, though. After 1998 (when she was fifteen), she gave up acting but remained in showbusiness, working as production coordinator and a location manager.
Astar, on the other hand, kept acting into adulthood. She was in Quantum Leap immediately after this episode - the only case I’ve noticed of that show doing a cast swap with TNG! Her big recurring role was as August (Tommy’s girlfriend) on Third Rock from the Sun, although she also played Amy Madison in the motion comic version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Brian Bonsall is also back as Alexander, but just in a supporting role, which makes for a nice change, and they let Patti Yasutake’s Nurse Ogawa have an off-screen romantic relationship (she’s not ready for Risa, apparently - nudge nudge, wink wink...), which is a nice but unnecessary touch that contributes nothing much to the episode but some pleasing background texture.
Also back is Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan - who we have not seen since the second episode of this season, “Ensign Ro”. Where was she? It seems very likely that she was away filming the hit movie Sister Act, since this was shot in late 1991, when most of season five was shot. Principal photography was in the bag by the end of the year, though, so by February 1992, when this episode was shot, she was back in play. Here scene here with Data is great, and was originally intended for Dr Crusher and Troi, which would have worked but less effectively than the one that was filmed.
Speaking of Troi, it’s Marina Sirtis among the main cast who gets the most to do here, and she does it all reasonably well too. They pair her with recurring daytime soap actor Jeff Allin as Ensign Sutter (Clara’s dad), who is fine in this unremarkable role, and they get him back in latex for Voyager too. (And for those keeping score, Allin was in L.A. Law in two different roles prior to filming this episode.) Sirtis’ best moment, however, is the aforementioned scene where she gets blasted into the closet - a definite highlight!
Finally, below decks we get the final appearance of Sheila Franklin’s Ensign Felton. Five appearances, each one more forgettable than the last!
She had two further acting roles and then vanished off the face of the planet, never to be seen again.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
While the glowy ball sequence at the start of this episode is extremely well done, it loses a lot of its impact because we saw this all before in season one. I mean, this is literally the same basic choreography as “Lonely Among Us”, but without the fun guest aliens.
However, there’s a muddy mauve nebula this week, which is ugly as all get out, but it’s at least very different from what we usually find in space!
Later on it turns more red and sinister, which looks very cool and corresponds with the Ship-in-Jeopardy part of the plot. Red means danger, right?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the nebula because that’s all the SFX team have for you this week.