Rascals

The Enterprise is full of kids! And yet the episode is still fun. Now that's what I call 'Mindwarp'!

A shuttle carrying the implausible roster of Captain Picard, Guinan, Keiko O’Brien, and Ro Laren is struck by a wibbly wobbly spatial distortion. Miles O’Brien beams them all to safety - but they are regressed to age twelve. Talk about Mindwarp! It really messes with everyone’s heads, so much so that the Captain has to step down, because the crew are all giggling at his teenage self behind his back. Fortunately, the Enterprise is soon taken over by a gang of renegade Ferengi, so the young ‘uns can gang together and rescue everyone. The experience is so distressing to Miles and Keiki O’Brien that they have to move to Deep Space Nine in order to move on from it.

Words

Now you all know I’m not a fan of the kid episodes, but for some extraordinary reason I love this episode. Partly, this is because it’s utterly mad! Indeed, when Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor purchased the story idea last season, the entire writing team thought they were crazy. As Ronald D. Moore later put it:

When Michael bought the premise I thought he was completely insane: An Away Team rematerializes on the transporter as children — with adult minds! I tried again and again to bury this idea, which of course meant that I would get saddled with the inevitable rewrite when the script came in. I just thought it was a ludicrous idea and wanted nothing to do with it. That said, once I got the assignment, the professional writer in me had to commit to the material and do the best with it that I could, so I tried very hard to bring humour and Humanity to the proceedings, chiefly through the Guinan/Ro story.

Moore found this story very difficult to work on, and did not get an on screen credit for his work. He did, however, name one of the characters (Langford) after a woman he was dating at the time - although they broke up soon afterwards and didn’t to his knowledge ever see the episode! One of his fingerprints upon the final show was the scene where Riker bamboozles the Ferengi with made up technology, which Moore later described as his “salute to technobabble”.

The writer was Allison Hock, an experienced TV screenwriter whose first credit was in 1981. She is also, to my knowledge, the only writer to have worked on both L.A. Law and TNG, but I might have missed someone. Reading between the lines, nobody on the regular writing team wanted to take this episode on, and so a freelancer was brought in to get it off the ground. I have not found any evidence to confirm this suspicion, but it seems plausible enough.

This is the first of two TNG episodes to be directed by Adam Nimoy, Leonard Nimoy’s son, who had won the gig as part of the deal Nimoy the elder made for appearing in “Unification” last season. It was a heck of a trial by fire! As scientific advisor Naren Shanker later put it: “For Adam, that was a helluva way to make a directorial debut. Directing kids is not easy under any circumstances.”

Jeri Taylor has explained that the Ferengi were chosen as villains for pragmatic reasons, stating: “Would you believe four little kids could retake the ship from the Cardassians…?” Can’t argue with that!

Acting Roles

This is another of those episodes that is carried almost entirely by guest stars - of course, they’re playing younger versions of characters we know well, but even then, only David Tristan Birkin’s Captain Picard is one of the core cast, the others are part of the periphery cast.

“He’s my Number One Dad!”

Birkin of course played Picard’s ‘uncle’ René in “Family”. He was fifteen when this was filmed, and went on to appear in all sorts of things, although mostly British TV shows. His most memorable other role is probably Corfeyrac in the 1998 film version of Les Misérables.

Young Guinan (left) is played by Isis Jones who had played the young version of Whoopi Goldberg's character in Sister Act (right), which had been shot before this season began but was released a few months before “Rascals”. These are her only two roles, which is a shame as she's absolutely brilliant here!

Young Keiko is played by Caroline Junko King, one of three child roles she played in the 1990s, which is the whole of her career as an actress. She’s paired here with Colm Meaney’s Miles O’Brien in his last regular appearance on TNG (although we do see him again in the finale). This side plot gets the least time in the final episode, and makes for a poor send off for Meaney.

Also popping up here is Brian Bonsall’s Alexander Rozhenko, who provides the Roomba that they use to distract the Ferengi. It’s his shortest ever appearance in a TNG episode!

Finally among the young stars is Megan Parlen’s Ro Laren.

I’ve saved her till last because - incredibly! - she actually appeared in a child role in L.A. Law before this episode! I couldn’t quite believe it. She also had the longest career of all the child guest stars this week, with more than twenty roles, including more than a hundred episodes as Mary-Beth Pepperton in NBC's teen sitcom Hang Time.

Remember that we don’t see Ro returning to adulthood in the episode? Believe it or not, the writing room was contemplating having her remain a child. Jeri Taylor was amused by this idea:

Where else but on Star Trek could you do something like that? But it seemed too drastic for us, and we were sort of squelched on that.

All the actors playing Ferengi this week had played Ferengi in earlier episodes…

…Tracey Walter (left) and Mike Gomez (centre) were in “The Last Outpost”, while Michael Snyder (right) was in “The Perfect Mate”. They all do a fine job here considering their role is basically to be the thieves in Home Alone.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

You may have noticed, this was a cheap episode! No new latex required, as the Ferengi guest stars had already been fitted for their make-up before. Even the appearance of the ‘one previous owner’ birds-of-prey is reused from “Yesterday's Enterprise”.

A little more work went into this shot...

...which is cobbled together from constituent shots from “Redemption” that were composited differently here.

So there’s basically one new SFX sequence of note, which is all the footage of the shuttle craft in the teaser. Commit this sequence to memory - you’ll see it again several times before the end of TNG. You know its a bottle show when the one new piece of special effects is generic enough to be reused!

All in all, this episode is a palpable hit - despite being full of kids. Another triumph for season six!