Phantasms
Data's having bad dreams, while Picard has a nightmare of his own: an invitation to the annual Starfleet admirals' banquet!
It’s an episode of nightmares - Picard has to go to the interminably boring admirals’ banquet, LaForge has to deal with an Ensign who has a crush on him, and Data is just having regular nightmares. It’s all rather odd, but where else will you find Data cutting a slice out of Counsellor Troi or Dr Crusher drinking Riker’s brains!
Words
You may recall that one of the ideas floated for the season six finale was that Data’s dream programme would start giving him nightmares. At this point in the show’s run, the writing team was so short of inspiration that no half-decent idea was ever thrown away, so Brannon Braga was given permission to develop this one into a screenplay. It’s largely a cost-saving bottle show, although it has some SFX in it, but even those are mostly cheap practical effects (as discussed below).
This is another episode directed by Patrick Stewart, and he seems to have hit his stride on this one!
Braga's script has plenty of humorous moments, and this saves the episode from being a complete dud. It’s far from a classic, but it’s entertaining, and Braga’s character work carries it all through, even if it is something of a grab bag of ideas banging around together in search of a satisfying resolution.
Not only does Braga throw in Sigmund Freud, he also snuck in a Freudian reference: when LaForge says that the conduit was manufactured on “Thanatos Seven” (which LeVar Burton oddly pronounces ‘Than-AT-os’ despite the pronunciation guide saying ‘THAN-uh-toes’), this is a reference to Freud’s death drive, which he named ‘Thanatos’ after the Greek god of death. This was also where Jim Stalin got the name ‘Thanos’, by the way, which is funny because to the Greeks, Thanatos was a chilled out winged dude who ferried you to the underworld with a pat on the back and a cheery ‘good game, dude’.
Despite the focus on humour, this is one of a small set of Star Trek episodes to be edited for violence when it was shown in the UK: the scene in the turbolift where Data knifes Troi was censored to remove the actual stabbing, which I reproduce in all its ferocity:
This seems a shame, since no such cut was made when Picard was stabbed by the Nausicaan in “Tapestry”, and there's plenty of other violent moments that were left intact. I guess it was too much to show one of the regular crew acting so viciously to another…?
Acting Roles
The star of the episode is, of course, Spot.
Weirdly, Spot is no longer a long-haired Somali cat, as previous animal performers Monster and Brandy were, but has become a regular orange tabby, played here by Bud. The transformations of Spot will take upon a surreal moment later this season when Spot not only changes his genetic structure but also changes sex from male to female - he is expressly called “he” in this episode, but gives births to kittens later this season. Only on Star Trek, I suppose!
Brent Spiner did not enjoy working with the cats and jokingly called the animal performer playing Spot “the stupidest actor I’ve ever worked with”, complaining that he “never took a piece of direction, ever.” The one exception was when the writers wrote in a scene where ‘Spot eats tuna out of a can’, about which Spiner said: “And he did it on the first take. Otherwise, we were there all day with that cat.”
Hot on the success of casting Einstein, the show now brings in Bernard Kates as Sigmund Freud (below left). You can tell that Freud is a source of humour by the 1990s, because this scene is entirely played for comedy. It can be hard to remember that Freud’s work was actually a significant contribution to psychology, not least for the conception of the unconscious that is now so prevalent that we all use it, well, unconsciously. Kates manages to render this role quite amusing here, so it’s rather surprising that this actor, whose career started in 1949, didn't get cast in a comedic role until this episode in 1993! Afterwards, half of the remaining roles in his career were for comedy.
Rather less successful is Gina Ravarra as Ensign Tyler (above right) who has to torture LeVar Burton’s LaForge with her luvvy-duvvy eyes... I’ll admit, it’s not that easy to pull of that sense of besotted devotion when you only have a couple of scenes, but this for me is the weakest part of this episode. However, on the back of this role, Ravarra earned a recurring role as Dr Diana Roth in Silk Stalkings, which also helped her get speaking roles in movies, having been largely an extra beforehand. She eventually landed the recurring roles of Dr Bettina DeJesus in ER and Irene Daniels in The Closer, which have been far her biggest gigs so far.
Far more enjoyable is Clyde Kusatsu, returning as Admiral Nakamura for the first time since “The Measure of a Man”, nagging Picard about his failure to make the admirals’ banquet.
Kusatsu is great here, playing the straight man, and he has a seriously huge career with more than three hundred roles, albeit mostly bit parts. He gets cast as a doctor fairly often, but it's a judge that he thrives on being cast as, and Kusatsu has played twenty four different judges including - you guessed it! - on L.A. Law prior to appearing in TNG.
Only one of the three workman who tear Data apart gets a credit (the one with their only speaking line), and it’s David L. Crowley (below, centre of left image).
The role here doesn’t require much of him, but you might well have seen him playing the security officer Lou “The Ghost” Welch in seven episodes of Babylon 5 (above right), a role he presumably landed on the back of this gig.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Data’s severed head is back! You knew after crafting it for “Time’s Arrow” they’d want to get value for money. Here’s hair stylist Patricia Miller trying to get the hair on the prop looking right!
They do a nice job compositing the telephone into Brent Spiner’s belly too, which made use of a custom prop.
In the close up, the prop of Data’s torso (right) is what you see, and in the long shot the bulk of the shot is Brent Spiner with just the open section composited over the original imagery (left).
But my pick of favourite special effect is rather brief, and its the mouth on LaForge’s neck!
It looks great, and it’s suitably freaky, much more threatening than the blobby aliens that we later get so see stuck to the crew’s skin.
All in all, it’s great fun that this episode has practical effects like ‘Troi as a cake’, and even more fun that Data gets to go all Psycho on Sirtis’ Troi in the turbolift. If the overall episode is a bit of a spaghetti tangle, it’s a fun pile of pasta all the same.
