Man of the People
Troi finally gets some great episodes in season six. This is not one of them
It’s one of those openings that namechecks a lot of cultures we've never heard of and promises us a fight that we don’t get. What we get instead is a man beaming aboard with a wrinkly crone, who immediately lays into Troi with a vicious tongue. Next thing we know, the old biddy is dead and Troi is getting roped into a weird ritual that leaves her behaving very strangely indeed. She even annoys Riker, and he can usually smile and laugh off anything! Before we know it, she’s the old crone acting crazily and aging disgracefully - she even gets to stab Captain Picard, which must be a dream come true! Can her crewmates save her from an untimely death? I’ll bet you can guess the answer.
Words
It will come as no surprise whatsoever that this episode was written in a rush. The next episode, “Relics”, was supposed to air in this slot but guest star James Doohan wasn’t available and so the writing team had to cobble together a replacement in a hurry. The inspiration for the story is evidently Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the title character maintains his youthful appearance (despite his wickedness) because there’s a painting of him hidden away that collects all the psychic scars of his debauchery. This episode simply makes Troi into the painting. It’s not the worst thing the writers have done to her.
A different member of the writing team wrote each act, and newly recruited producer Frank Abatemarco edited them all together, and took the bullet for the writing credit. Scientific advisor Naren Shankar was asked to come up with an idea for how Troi could break the telepathic link, which must have been a trip as I doubt Shankar considered this to be a very scientific concept! He later remembered it being a struggle:
It was a difficult script and there are things in this that changed a number of times. My original idea was that this psychic link had set up some kind of conduit between the two of them, and my idea was to have them do something that wasn’t mental, but something that was physical like his basically charging her up. If this was a one-way pathway from this guy to Troi, the idea would be to put so much energy into Troi that she could force it backwards in the direction of the power transfer and overwhelm the guy and get rid of all that energy in her body.
The idea that this would kill Troi was proposed by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, which tells you everything about what the writing team thought about the character!
The production team was not very happy with how it all turned out. Jeri Taylor felt they’d thrown Abatemarco off a cliff in handing him this one. He was an experienced TV writer and producer, having worked on three shows in executive producer roles prior to this (one of which was the revised Mission: Impossible), and written for high-profile shows like Cagney & Lacey. But TNG is really not like other shows in so many ways, and this was a tough introduction.
Brannon Braga was less sympathetic to Abatemarco, whose took the screenplay in a direction he didn’t like:
I would have done it differently. I would have made it darker and much more a story about Troi’s dark descent from the psychological point of view. A scene we all wanted to see was Troi giving counselling to a young ensign – but make it twice as long and twice as dark as the one that was filmed, and make it much more of a Hannibal Lecter thing. This was a case where Frank Abatemarco saw a different show. He was focusing in on the show as a Prime Directive issue and looking at the character of the guy who was using Troi as a receptacle. To me, that was the utterly incorrect instinct. After six years, who cares about Prime Directive issues? It’s a Star Trek cliché. It should have been all about Troi...
I have to say, it’s amusing to hear the writers admit that they’ve lost interest in the Prime Directive! However, I do like that they reiterate the always important point that the goodness of ends does not excuse terrible means (this cropped up a great deal when Roddenberry was in charge of TNG). Very few people seem to have this vital ethical concept straight in their heads these days.
Acting Roles
This one falls almost entirely on Marina Sirtis’ shoulders to deliver a darker version of Troi.
She seemed to enjoy herself!
I played it like these were underlying parts of Troi that she controlled or managed to suppress. And just looking in the mirror was all I needed to change. When I look in the mirror and see Troi, it’s a very soft and gentle look. In the scene in Ten Forward where my hair was up, I saw Anne Bancroft in the mirror. I saw Mrs. Robinson and that’s what I played. Basically, a lot of the performance is governed by the way that one looks. Some actors say they put the shoes for the characters on first and figure out the walk. I look in the mirror and play whatever I see in the mirror – especially when it’s a make-up thing like in “Man of the People”, where the old person was a witch and that’s who was in the mirror, so I played a witch.
Despite acknowledging the problems in the script, director Winrich Kolbe was pleased with Sirtis’ performance:
Marina was really terrific. She knew it was her show and was prepared for it. I think the only thing that I occasionally did was push her a little bit harder to be a vamp.
Both Michael Piller and Ronald D. Moore felt her “sexy but scary” performance was the one thing that saved the episode from being a complete dud.
Although Michael Dorn’s Worf has very little to do in this episode, it’s nice that they get him back to teach Klingon Tai Chi. This still doesn’t have a name, though, and the script just says this:
A soft-form martial arts class is in progress (like the one in “Clues”); the group wears a form of gi.
It’s amazing to me that they still resisted giving this a name!
Chip Lucia plays the villain of the piece, Ves Alkar. Here he is freaking out and trying not to say “foiled again!” while twirling an imaginary moustache.
Sometimes credited as ‘Charles Lucia’, he has plenty of experience playing bad guys - he was one of the mutant Rippers in the Tank Girl movie adaptation, played a villain-of-the-week on Walker: Texas Ranger, and perhaps most memorably of all played Jim Whitney in the creepily brilliant movie Society. He was also in L.A. Law a few years before this episode, and they get him back for both Voyager (as a villain) and Enterprise (as… well, who cares). He’s fine here, but he doesn’t really have much to do since the story almost entirely focusses on the main crew.
His ‘mother’ was played by Susan French, whose career is full of old woman roles.
Her acting career started in 1965 when she was 53, and you may have seen her as Grandma Viola in Moonlighting, ‘Old Woman’ in Fists of the North Star, and ‘Terminal Patient’ in Flatliners. She was also in L.A. Law a few years before this episode. I like her over-the-top performance here, and it must have been fun to play!
Oh, and you may have heard ‘Ensign Janeway’ namechecked in this episode (no relation to a certain Starfleet Captain).
That’s Lucy Boryer, whom Troi hilariously savages in a therapy session. She’s most famous as medical student (and later doctor) Janine Stewart in Doogie Howser, M.D., whom she played in over sixty episodes, a role she was already playing when she was cast here.
And below decks, let’s point out Dru Wagner, who is our Transporter-Chief-of-the-Week.
She has actually already been in eight episodes up to this point (all uncredited), all but the first two as a Transporter technician, who in this screenplay alone is named as ‘Chief Daniels’. It’s her last appearance… she just got a name, and now she’s gone. Do look out for her next time you watch season five, as I missed her completely until this episode where she gets to help prevent Troi stabbing Picard to death!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
It’s not about the special effects this week, which reuse those dreadful aging make-up effects that we thought we'd seen the end of with season two’s “Unnatural Selection”. This time, they add some morphing effects, because it's now 1992 and morphing is mandatory.
There’s one reused studio miniature: the transport in the opening shot is borrowed from “The Hunted” and named the Dorian as an on-the-nose reference to the episode’s inspiration.
And talking of reused props, it seems that the Rekag-Seronia get their uniforms from the Talarian thrift stores, as they are identical to those in “Suddenly Human” - check it out!
All in all, this episode is a dud, but it is great fun hearing Troi tell someone she’s supposed to be counselling “How do you think it feels to sit and listen to someone whine about themselves all the time?” It almost makes up for the dreary and predictable resolution to the story.