Samaritan Snare

We look for things... Things to make us go

Wesley is off to Starbase Five-One-Five, and so is Picard. Six hours in a shuttlecraft with Wesley... that kind of puts the incident with the Borg into perspective, doesn’t it! After they leave, the Enterprise gets a distress call from Rhomboid Dronegar Zero-Zero-Six (which presumably has a License to Kill). Off we zwoosh to meet Trek’s least popular species, the Pakleds. They seem awfully stupid, so LaForge beams over to help them fix their ship, but Troi bursts dramatically onto the bridge and manages to resist telling us they’re hiding something, opting instead for “LaForge is in great danger”. Meanwhile, Wesley is annoying Picard into revealing some backstory about a bar brawl with some surly Nausicans, while Picard is giving the young Acting Ensign sandwiches. So the story builds up to its double jeopardy climax with Picard dying on the operating table and LaForge having to execute his own Corbomite Maneuvre to escape the Pakleds.

Words

Robert McCullough worked as a producer on the last ten episodes of season two, and wrote this screenplay, as well as contributing to “The Icarus Factor”. To say that this is not a popular episode might be an understatement, but it is still a highly memorable story. The basic problem with the plotting is the essential ambiguity about the Pakleds: are they stupid or do they, as Data suggests, “merely have poorly developed language skills”...? Up to a point, it could well be that the Pakleds are cunning without being intelligent - but the story depends upon a clumsy ruse to trick them, which undermines that interpretation. It’s difficult to reconcile these competing liabilities without a massive suspension of disbelief.

There’s also all sorts of clunky words in the scripts, from technobabble like ‘parthenogenetic implant’ and ‘heterocyclic declination’ to the repeated use of three digit designations. None of it helps with anything, and the story never manages to fire on all cylinders.

Acting Roles

Although this is an episode that gives the key role to LeVar Burton’s Geordi LaForge, the story doesn’t give him much to do in real terms, with the big scene being the climax where he has to implement the ruse devised by the Enterprise bridge crew... Burton delivers it well, but the material is not that great, and the deception too silly for it all to land convincingly.

Marina Sirtis’ Troi is actually fairly useful in this episode, which is a pleasant change, although the story limits her role to little more than exposition. It is enjoyable to see her seething in the conference room, seemingly livid at Riker for being taken in so easily.

The exchanges between Patrick Stewart and Wil Wheaton on the shuttlecraft come across nicely, even if Wheaton’s Wesley Crusher is exceptionally annoying in poking Stewart’s Picard with a stick until he reveals everything.

Lycia Naff is back as Sonya Gomez, and she has more to do as well, because with LaForge off the ship suddenly there is nobody else available who can do anything useful in Engineering. What happened to the big lucky dip of Chief Engineers we used to have in season one…?

Anyway, we’ll never see Gomez again in the original production run, she’s off to wherever the disposable Engineering staff hang out when their single episode tour of duty ends.

Pulaski has less of a role in this story, and more of a silly hat. Fortunately, it’s very, very silly.

But the star of the episode is Christopher Collins, who we last saw as Captain Kargan of the Pagh in “A Matter of Honor”.

The vast gulf between that performance and this one is so impressive you could be forgiven for not realising we’re dealing with the same actor. As frustrating as the Pakleds are, Collins’ Captain Grebnedlog is brilliantly delivered, and one of the most striking alien performances in the whole of TNG.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The Pakleds have a very distinctive design, looking as they do like beige Teletubbies from space. And if they are annoying in this episode (and successfully discourage any future writer from doing anything with them ever again), they nonetheless crop up in the back of crowd scenes many times, especially in DS9.

Welcome back to the “Angel One” matte painting!

To make it look different there are several changes, allowing us to play Matte Painting Spot the Difference! Take your time... there are at least six major changes.

Spot the difference! Samaritan Snare (left) vs Angel One (right)

Did you spot the three additional rounded-top buildings, the tower shaped like a helix, the extra leaves on the tree, and the addition of birds in the background...? You may also notice in the episode (but obviously not in the stills) that the human figures that were originally just painted on are now seen to be moving, as well as the shuttlecraft Einstein landing on a convenient platform. Oh, and they modified the night version too, see?

There’s also plenty of good footage of the shuttlecraft - the curvy kind, since we don't need to have any of the performers standing next to it.

Finally, let’s meet the Mondor, the Pakled’s ship, which is an all new studio miniature created just for this episode.

But of course, no miniature goes to waste on TNG, and we’ll see this one again six more times in TNG (and once in DS9). It gets repainted and relit in a variety of different ways, but the basic design remains unchanged. In October 2006, this model was one of many included in a Christie’s auction that across all lots brought in $7,107,040. (Christie’s incorrectly listed it as Kivas Fajo’s ship from “The Most Toys”, but it’s clearly the Mondor).

The highest selling model in that auction was the Enterprise-D herself, which sold for a whopping $576,000, setting a new high watermark for Trek memorabilia. And the Mondor? Lot 700, it sold for $3,360, the same price as Q’s Starfleet uniform. I guess they needed things to make them going, going, gone!