Liaisons

Worf gets fury, Troi gets gluttony, and Picard gets Stephen King's Misery

May 21, 2025

Everyone’s putting on their best dresses to meet the Iyaaran ambassadors. Everyone except Picard, who’s going for ‘smart casual’ (see above), because he’s running away on a swanky diplomatic vacation to Iyar (‘ee-YAR’ according to the pronunciation guide, no relation to Tasha). Not that he gets there. Instead, he crashes on Sound Stage 16 (set up as a rather low-budget ‘Hell Planet’ this week) where he has a weird relationship with an absolutely bizarre woman.

Meanwhile, Counsellor Troi is being driven crazy by a food-obsessed Iyaaran (‘ee-YAR-un’ according to the guide), while Worf is treated like dirt by the Iyaaran who expressly asked to be handled by our beloved Klingon grump. Everyone can tell that it’s only a matter of time before Worf snaps and clobbers the guy, which of course he does (Worf 23, Aliens 22). To absolutely no-one’s surprise at all, there’s a twist: the aliens are messing around the crew to learn about human emotions. At least, that’s what they say. Personally, I think they’re just mischievous pranksters.

Words

We’re only on the first full story of the seventh season and already we have a really weird production history to deal with. This was originally pitched by Roger Eschbacher and Jaq Greenspon, who are an odd team to be pitching to a sci-fi show. Eschbacher's first gig was as head writer on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! and he later worked on America's Funniest Home Videos and Candid Camera before making this pitch. His partner Greenspon had worked in props - and as a zombie extra - on low budget movie Frankenstein General Hospital. I have to say, it is to the credit of the show that it accepted pitches from all comers - this is not the direction TV production has gone since! But this is a weird pairing of writers however you look at it.

The story they pitched was called “The Journey” and was a homage to Stephen King’s Misery. René Echevarria was in on the meeting and recalled being amused by it:

It was actually pitched very slyly by the writers, who pitched it as a kind of a take on on Star Trek-obsessed fans and that’s what made me smile and at least pass it on.

Jeri Taylor liked the fact the pitch could be developed into a two-header like “Chain of Command, Part II”. Needless to say, this particular episode did not turn out to be anything close to being in the league of that classic!

The first draft of the screenplay was prepped by two interns, Jeanne Carrigan Fauci and Lisa Rich, who indeed got the teleplay credit. An uncredited rewrite was provided by Brannon Braga, which took about eight days and made him rather grumpy. He leaned towards Fatal Attraction:

I was not a fan of this story. Lisa and Jeanne’s first draft had some very nice things in it, but the relationship wasn’t working between Picard and the woman. The woman was a Starfleet woman who was very together and they had a very normal relationship and really did kind of start to be interested in each other. When it turns out that she’s actually an alien trying to figure out what love’s all about, I had asked the question, “Well, she did such a good job emulating the Human female falling in love, why would they need to learn anything?” What I did was make it a darker story and made the relationship much more sinister and disturbing.

It was Braga who added all the material on the Enterprise, which frankly provides the only fun we get from this story.

The intern’s original draft had a subplot in which Troi was promoted to the rank of Commander, but Taylor felt the two parts didn’t fit together very well:

We felt that there needed to be something that was more organically linked to the Picard story, and that’s when Brannon came up with having the other diplomats from the same race of people.

Troi thus had to wait fourteen further weeks for her promotion.

While Taylor was very pleased with Braga’s additions to the story on the Enterprise, Braga himself was less content:

Was I happy with the script? Yeah. Was I happy with the episode? I don’t know. I had a lot of fun writing it, and a lot of it was cut for time, mostly the more fun moments. Whether or not they actually ended up being funny is another story. It’s a matter of opinion. At the end, I give Picard a speech about people who take things to extremes to experience them, and that’s what these people do. I thought that was very interesting. In order to understand the culture, you must immerse yourself in that culture. It's still a little scattered, though. In the end, even though it seems redolent of Misery and Fatal Attraction, the Star Trek twist was, it wasn’t at all.

Likewise, director Cliff Bole was unhappy with how it turned out, and blamed the near-constant rewrites. When your A-plot is a dud and you have to rely on hastily written B-plots to rescue you, this isn't a great situation.

Acting Roles

“I am going to kill him! With my bare hands, I will take him by the throat and I will rip out his oesophagus…”

Michael Dorn partially adlibbed this line, easily the most fun moment in the episode, and gets by far the best value out of his assigned material. He’s paired with Michael Harris’ Byleth, whose role is easy to play since he just has to act like a dick while Dorn’s Worf simmers and eventually explodes.

Debuting as a drug dealer on 21 Jump Street in 1989, Harris’ career spans some sixty odd roles, including appearing in L.A. Law prior to landing this role. Worf’s victory against Byleth in single combat raises him to 2-0 this season, and 23-22 overall. Looking good, Worf!

Marina Sirtis plays Troi with a delicate hand this week. I very much enjoy her performance in this episode, and pairing her with Paul Eiding's Loquel works very well indeed.

Eiding is really rather amusing as the food-obsessed alien, and the two share a number of charming scenes together. Eiding’s career of nearly three hundred roles is packed full of voice work for cartoons and videogames - perhaps most prominently as Colonel Campbell in the English versions of the Metal Gear Solid games. He does sometimes appear on screen, though - including in L.A. Law, again before landing this role.

The third and final Iyaaran ambassador, Voval, is played by Eric Pierpoint, the only performer who wasn’t also in L.A. Law. He was no stranger to latex, though, having played the key role of George Francisco in Alien Nation (below right).

He doesn’t give a great performance here, but its not his fault that his material sucks. They get him back as a legendary Klingon on Voyager, which turns out rather better.

Then there’s Barbara Williams as Anna, our completely off-the-wall bonkers crazy person.

I’m really not sure anybody could have sold this role as-written, so I’m not going to hold it against Williams, who at least does come across as dangerously unhinged. She had a minor starring role as the wife of the corrupt Secret Service head in White House Down, and an absolutely fabulous schlocky role as Shana in 1981’s Firebird 2015 AD, a shoestring Canadian sci-fi movie which featured the king of low budget movies, Doug McClure, as a villain.

But let’s not miss out on the Star Trek debut of Rickey D’Shon Collins as ‘Boy’ (later ‘Eric’) whose eyes say it all in this still!

Here is a child star who didn’t crash and burn, but actually did incredibly well for himself! With more than forty roles to his name, he’s had his most success in voice acting, playing Vince LaSalle in Recess as well as Tucker, the technically-minded best friend in Danny Phantom. Not bad!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

I find it hard to be thrilled with the ‘slap on some latex’ design of the Iyaarans (see above): at this point in TNG, you have to accept it’s going to happen, but I’ll wager good money that no fan can correctly distinguish which is which between (say) a Ktarian, a Tilonian, and a Zalkonian without cheating.

And guess who’s back?

Why, it’s the Zibalian shuttle from “The Most Toys” and its studio miniature from “Final Mission”, where they collectively represented the Nenebek. Both props are slightly altered here, but you can definitely tell it’s the same studio miniature. We’ll see it one more time on TNG, in a mere three weeks time.

We also get a kitbashed crashed spaceship, which looks cool but sadly I haven't been able to learn anything about it.

Finally, it is my sad duty to report that this episode has the final Syd Dutton matte painting from TNG. While Dutton would go on to contribute wonderful matte paintings to the other shows in the original franchise run, as well as some stonkingly good establishing shots for the movies, this is his final matte painting on TNG. Trouble is, I don’t actually know which one it is! Is it the background to the image above…? Or the background of the image below...?

Or maybe its the one in the bottom left… or the one in the bottom right! Frankly, those last two cliff mattes look more like the work of Dan Curry, who was becoming a dab hand at creating rocky paintings at this point in TNG’s run, when every other week has a cliff edge or a cavern to add a pinch of peril. So I rather suspect it’s the first one with the crashed ship, which being Syd Dutton might not even involve a model at all - he’s that good (he completely fooled me in “Home Soil” too). Scroll back up and check it: is it a matte painting, a model, or a combination of both…?

It has been a consistent delight to pick out Dutton’s work as we’ve made our way through the shows. There’s no more to find in TNG, but look out for his name in the credits to all the classic 1980s and 1990s fantasy and sci-fi movies when you rewatch them! With nearly a hundred and fifty VFX credits, this legend had his fingerprints all over some of the greatest matte paintings ever created. Syd Dutton, we salute you!