Relics

One Dyson sphere, excellent condition, only one previous owner... tell you what, I'll throw in Scotty for free

Space telescopes and gravimetric interferometry having become much less reliable in the 24th century, nobody has noticed a giant Dyson sphere large enough to engulf an entire solar system before. Makes sense. After this leap of faith, throwing beloved mock-Scottish engineer Montgomery Scott into the mix is a piece of cake. Scotty is feeling his age, which is not surprising since he's 147 years old and feeling completely useless because technology has left him behind. Fortunately, LaForge’s inordinate patience pulls him through and together they save the day.

Words

Some time before this episode went into production, freelance writer Michael Rupert had pitched a story idea in which someone survived by being suspended in a transporter loop for decades. Not much else seems to be remembered about Rupert’s except for the fact that it was rejected. However, Ronald D. Moore was intrigued by the ‘transporter loop’ plot device, so they paid Rupert for the story and began working on ways to make use of it. It was Michael Piller who proposed using it to bring back a character from classic Trek. As Moore later recalled:

Michael said, “That’s a neat gag. I wonder if we could use this to bring back an original series character?” Everybody started to prick their ears and we started going through who it could be... McCoy is old, Spock’s playing James Bond on Romulus – and we couldn’t do Kirk; it would raise too many other things. Nothing against the other characters, but Scotty seemed like the one with the most fun quotient.

On another occasion, he expanded on the reasons for their choice:

It seemed like Scotty was the best choice. We’d seen Spock and then you look around and realize Scotty was the character that you could have the most fun with because you knew a lot about him. Sulu, Chekov and Uhura are fine characters, but they don’t have a lot of the qualities Scotty did: the obsession with engines, the drinking. We knew we could do a relationship between him and Geordi. He was sort of ready-made to do this kind of a show.

Having had Sarek name Spock in season four, and Spock himself appearing last season, the prohibition on using classic Trek characters was long over, but it was still important to the production team that such episodes were not merely novelties. As Piller later put it:

One of the great things about “Relics” is that it wasn’t a Scotty show. It was a concept about an engineer or a captain being caught in a transporter beam that we came upon. I thought we were going to have problems with Mr. Berman who generally doesn't like to do that gag but oddly enough he was in a good mood that day. Rick has opened up his mind in a lot of ways. When I came onboard you could not mention the old Star Trek in an episode. You couldn’t make a reference to a character without making major problems. When we brought Sarek onto the show it was like, “My god, we had to march across the street and pay homage.” But now because we are firmly established I think everybody feels a lot more comfortable that we have proven ourselves. We don’t owe anything to the old Star Trek, except like the guys who went to the moon, the Mercury guys had to go up there first. And we respect them for that, but we’re not depending on them anymore, so we don’t have to bend over backwards not to mention them.

Originally, Brannon Braga was slated to write the episode, but he was keen on “A Fistful of Datas”, and besides he didn’t know classic Trek very well. Moore on the other hand was an avid fan of the original series, and lapped up the opportunity to write an episode that would tie into all the lore - the script is peppered with references to classic episodes. Even Data’s “It is green” originated in a classic episode (“By Any Other Name”).

The other guest this week is the Dyson sphere, named after physicist Freeman Dyson who thought up the concept in 1959. He never imagined a solid object, however, but more like a fleet of satellites, and he never really considered it a serious project. He lived long enough to see this episode, however, and while admitting that the physics behind the concept was “nonsense”, he thoroughly enjoyed himself watching it all unfold on screen!

Freeman Dyson, looking very much like an ancient elf sage

The writing team had circulated the idea of a Dyson sphere B-story for many years - indeed, it had been kicking about for so long it had become a running joke! This episode provided a vehicle for the idea to make its way into a story, and Moore turned to the show’s scientific advisor, Naren Shankar for advice, so Shankar ran the numbers:

I originally thought the interesting thing would be to make it a partially complete Dyson’s Sphere. It ended up being a completed Dyson’s Sphere that was uninhabited. When Ron had written about the Dyson’s Sphere in the teaser, he wrote “tech” and I gave him the numbers for the size of it. He was shocked that it was so big. It was like the equivalent of four million earths. It’s huge. If you build something the size of the sun’s orbit, you’re talking about a sphere with a diameter of two hundred million miles.

This was director Alexander Singer’s first episode, and he was nervous about working with it. He had worked on the original Mission: Impossible, which was being shot in the same lots as classic Trek:

I met Gene Roddenberry and, for one reason or another, it hadn’t worked out. So the aspect of the Scotty character and his resurrection had a kind of multiple resonance. Having Jimmy Doohan there, I felt I was in the middle of some kind of mythic experience myself.

Much that was planned for this episode didn’t work out - there were plans to use clips from the original show and cut in ‘old Scotty’, which proved too expensive (but was later revisited in DS9). There was also a scene with Troi that ended up on the cutting room floor since the episode was running 8 minutes long, and this in fact was the inciting incident for Scotty deciding to go and get drunk. But despite the bumpy road to get there, the production team were immensely proud of the final episode.

Acting Roles

Apart from poor Marina Sirtis, whose is left on the cutting room floor, and Michael Dorn’s Worf, who appears only briefly, there are scenes for all of the rest of the crew with James Doohan’s Scotty, but it is his partnership with LeVar Burton’s LaForge that the entire story hangs upon, and the two deliver. There is one line that I am unhappy with (Doohan’s “you soured the milk" doesn’t land for me), but there's great charm in their relationship here, as LaForge goes from impatient with Scotty to admiring him.

Behind the scenes with the two iconic engineers!

Doohan’s appearance here was so highly rated that it was even suggested that he might be added to the cast of Deep Space Nine, which needless to say did not happen!

Don’t miss the below decks fun this week, though! We get two ensigns named in the screenplay - Lanei Chapman as Ensign Rager, who we see on the bridge (left), and Erick Weiss’ Ensign Kane, who we saw unnamed in “Conundrum” (right). They have very little to do, of course - that’s the curse of the below decks characters! - but do look out for them next time you see this episode.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

There’s a huge amount of special effects this week, starting with the studio miniatures for the Dyson sphere, which were built by Greg Jein’s company.

Visual effects supervisor David Stipes (black shirt) and .head of VFX Dan Curry (blue shirt) inspecting the merchandise

CGI was considered for the Dyson Sphere in long shot, and for the interior shots, but at this point in time that would have been extremely expensive. In the end, they used some excellent matte paintings by Eric Chauvin - I bet you didn’t realise they were painted!

The USS Jenolan was actually a shuttle model designed and built by Bill George and John Goodson at Industrial Light and Magic.

It would have been a shuttlecraft in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. This was never used, but of course TNG snapped it up, and had Greg Jein’s company touch it up to become the downed vessel. (They spelled ‘Jenolan’ wrong, as you can see from this close up, but it’s all but impossible to see this in the final episode!)

But the SFX stars this week are the attempts to recreate elements of the original series. The original transporter effect was brought back in style by visual effects lead Dan Curry - a huge classic Trek fan! - using the actual materials from the original show which survived in the archives of effects company Cinema Research.

We used the original Star Trek transporter sparkle. I used to work at Cinema Research, and I remembered that in the bowels of their stock footage storage room was an old box labelled “Star Trek Transporter Sparkle”. We blew the cobwebs off, dug through, pulled out the strip of film, and discovered it was in perfect condition.

Co-producer Wendy Neuss - another classic Trek fan - managed to locate the audio effect in the Paramount studio’s archive to complete the effect. Nicely done!

But even more impressive is the recreation of the original USS Enterprise bridge for the holodeck sequence. When you can see the entire bridge, this is a straight up blue screen superposition…

…but they still needed a set to shoot in. Rebuilding the entire bridge set was unthinkable, so they instead made a narrow cheese wedge that represented about a third of the original set - if the camera moved just an inch either way, you’d see behind the scenes!

A beloved Trek character, charming dialogue, and brilliant SFX. Season six is only four episodes in, and it already hit its first home run.