Sarek
Want to see Spock's father drive the Enterprise crew completely bugnuts crazy? Why not!
It’s one of those episodes that starts with a walk-and-talk exposition dump in the corridor, only this time Picard and Riker are in dresses because ambassadorial duties require silly outfits. Who should beam aboard but Spock’s Dad - wow! What a teaser… if you ignore that we close on Picard reacting to nothing much in particular. After the credits, everyone starts moaning and bitch slapping each other - it’s like the Enterprise-D just overdosed on testosterone and went off the psychological deep end. We eventually learn that Sarek has Vulcan telepathic Alzheimer’s, which eventually builds to a moving climax.
Words
To say that this is another season three episode that utterly smashes down walls that Gene Roddenberry built up is an understatement. Although neither gets a credit on the show, Ronald D. Moore and Ira Steven Behr were script doctors taking what was a promising draft and bringing it up to the standard required for third season TNG. Behr claims responsibility for opening the door to directly linking classic Trek into TNG after merely dancing around the issues up until now. Behr states:
I broke open the barrier and made it possible for The Next Generation to use names like Spock on-screen. That was a major taboo when I got there. No way could you mention the original Star Trek characters. It took days and days of arguing to slip in a single reference to Spock. So I like to think in my own sort of incoherent way I helped start to push open the door to what was a very, very closed and narrow franchise.
Marc Cushman and Jake Jacobs came up with the concept for the episode, which was scripted by Peter S. Beagle. He was also responsible for the screenplay of the Ralph Bakshi animated version of The Lord of the Rings, without which Peter Jackson could never have butchered The Hobbit.
Putting Jackson’s crime against adaptation aside, this is a classy screenplay. Cushman allegedly pitched the idea of Sarek going through senility somewhen in the first two years of the show, but Roddenberry was resistant, and made him draft a story with a new Vulcan character instead. But by season three, Roddenberry was not only coming around to the idea, he was no longer in charge of the day-to-day production.
Oddly, though, Michael Piller’s account contradicts this story, suggesting that the germ of the idea started as a powerful member of Starfleet Command having problems with age-related issues, and it was the drive to turn it into a sci-fi story that opened the door to it being a Vulcan. This clearly doesn’t track with Cushman’s account, as Piller was not aboard when Cushman would have pitched to Roddenberry. What is very clear, however, is that as this episode was moving into full production, Piller saw an opportunity for the show to reflect on screen what the production team were facing behind the scenes:
In a very real way it reflected what was going on with the show at the time we wrote it. Gene was beginning to go into decline. Not that he was completely uncommunicative, but it was clear that he was not the same man that he had been. We all respected him so much, and he had been such an important, strong leader of the franchise and everything it stood for. But here is this great man – and I’ve only known him for less than a year at this point – here is this great man going into decline, and I immediately felt a very strong connection to the premise of “Sarek”, because I could see that it really was about the universe that we lived in on a daily basis. If you go back and look at “Sarek” closely, what that character is, is Gene Roddenberry.
This gets to the heart of why this episode is so powerful.
Acting Roles
Although it is redundant to say that an episode named “Sarek” is about Mark Lenard’s Sarek, there’s no avoiding it.
What we have here is a vehicle to get Lenard - who plays a Romulan and a Vulcan in classic Trek and reprises his Vulcan in nearly all the associated movies - into TNG.
Lenard’s performance here is wonderful - perhaps the finest of his long and distinguished career. He seems to have just abandoned himself to the performance and ridden through on his intuition. As he remarked in 1994:
The script dealt with a Vulcan with a very rare disease, kind of a version of Alzheimer’s. I knew something about that. We used to call it ‘senility’ when I was a kid. So I didn’t consciously do a lot of stuff. Part of it was what the script demanded and the other part was instinct.
He was also full of praise for Patrick Stewart:
Patrick was young and professional, and his acting was simple, pure and clean. There’s a great confidence in Patrick that’s very important for an actor. When he had that emotional scene, he did it with great skill. And when he was just behaving himself, he did that with great skill, too.
There's solid Vulcan support from William Denis as Mendrossen and Rocco Sisto as Sakkath, but the real star of the supporting players is Joanna Miles’ Perrin.
She has the toughest job - those are new Vulcans, while Miles has to step into the borrowed boots of Emmy-award winner Jane Wyatt, who played Sarek’s first wife, Amanda, in “Journey to Babel” and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
But Miles delivers, her performance is entirely heartfelt and convincing throughout. She is pivotal to making the episode work, and to raising the emotional stakes.
Speaking of Miles, do you want to see Colm Meaney’s Miles O'Brien in a bar brawl? Of course you do!
Finally, this episode has a major debut of a minor character you've probably never noticed: Joycelyn Robinson’s Ensign Gates.
She appears in a whopping forty six episodes of TNG, and is one of very few people to appear alongside the classic Trek crew as well, since she’s on the Excelsior in Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country, although missed out on being in that bridge crew shot as Captain Sulu waves goodbye.
Look out for her next time you’re watching TNG from this point onwards! You’ll find her mostly at the conn looking serious.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Amazing performances, a great script, maybe it was inevitable that something has to fall down. The dud in this episode is the Legaran slime pit, which looks like it escaped from season one.
They couldn’t even spring for a proper matte painting of Vulcan, which of course ought to be red based on previous appearances. They just recoloured Deneb IV from “Encounter at Farpoint” into brown!
But who cares! This is one of the greatest bottle shows in the history of Star Trek. Enjoy it for everything it does so brilliantly well, and know that it’s only three weeks until a spectacular SFX-laden season finale.