Second Chances

It's Riker versus Riker when the Enterprise discovers he was accidently photocopied eight years ago

Didn’t they Mindwarp Riker enough in “Frame of Mind”?! Well apparently not, because he’s about to get another giant mental shock. As the episode begins, Riker is blowing his own horn in Ten Forward, along with a jazz quartet. Troi challenges him to play “Night Hawk”, a song he’s been trying to master for ten years, and is thus immensely relieved when Data calls him up to the bridge for an infodump about this episode’s premise. Apparently, the Federation abandoned an outpost on a remote planet eight years ago, and Riker was only just beamed out in time. They now have a means to get down and retrieve the logs, so off they pop only to discover... Riker is living in the outpost. Two Rikers? Yup, told you it was another Mindwarp!

Words

Do you recall how Jonathan Frakes decided he wanted to become a director, and then Patrick Stewart thought that was a jolly lark...? Well now it’s Levar Burton’s turn! This is Burton’s directorial debut, the first of two TNG episodes, and of 29 directorial outings across the original franchise run. It’s no disrespect to Burton to say that learning to direct at this point in TNG’s run is to have an enormous built-in boost. The production crew are so tight, so in sync, the cast so marvellously simpatico, it’s the perfect environment for a directorial apprentice.

Burton does great here, precisely because he lets the cast perform and doesn’t get in the way of the good material he’s serving up, but there were significant technical complications such that he considered it “a real baptism of fire”:

I had one actor playing two different characters, and those characters continually interacted throughout the course of the story. It was incumbent upon me to figure out how to accomplish that. I felt that if I could pull this off without sinking the ship, I really had a possible future as a director.

He succeeded admirably! Part of this success is the support of the incredible VFX supervisor Dan Curry. These WAMs have talked a lot about Curry, and it is no exaggeration to say that Curry (the first person to hold the title ‘VFX Supervisor’ on a Trek show) gave as great a contribution to TNG as Berman and Piller. Helping Burton take the helm? Not a problem.

LeVar Burton (left) and Dan Curry (right) filming “Second Chances”

This material began as a pitch from Michael Medlock, allegedly at one point called “Too Many Rikers!” (undoubtedly a writers’ room gag). It was Medlock’s fourth writing credit but his first experience of live action television. All of his other credits but one are for animated TV shows. It must have been a great thrill for him to land this gig, for which he earned his only live action fiction writing credit.

However, the production team very nearly rejected his concept of duplicating Will Riker - which I can understand, as this is one of two ways of breaking the entire mythology of Star Trek. While a duplication akin to this had already happened in classic Trek’s “The Enemy Within”, it was always a problematic concept. Using the transporters as duplicators is categorically not ruled out by anything we know about physics, which makes them extremely disturbing (if you’re interested in this, try Derek Parfit’s philosophical epic Reasons and Persons, which is also a Mindwarp!). The other notable abuse of transporters is using them as a weapon, which Voyager broaches in its early seasons, but which had already been done by the boardgame Starfleet Battles - a franchise spinoff for which I very nearly got to have a published boardgame, which would have been my first game credit had it proceeded.

So why did they decide to open the transporter-as-photocopier rabbit hole after all? Amazingly, it’s because they wanted to give Marina Sirtis’ Troi something to do, namely reawaken the romance between her and Frakes’ Riker - that is, the newly minted Thomas Riker vs the original Will Riker (finally establishing what the ‘T’ in ‘William T. Riker’ stands for). René Echevarria remembered it well:

We’d always talked about the fact that they used to be involved, and now they weren’t. And “Second Chances” was our chance to tell a story about them, and what a big love this really was for this man and woman. Tom is Riker. He’s spent the last eight years thinking about being reunited with her.

Okay, you can moan about reducing Troi to a love interest if you are so inclined, but Sirtis has no such complaint, and frankly this is the confrontation of the issues that was needed (and would later, in my view, be undermined by the movies).

The romantic treasure hunt that Thomas sends Troi upon was a contribution by Brannon Braga, who had used the same cheesy setup in his own romantic life. As he later joked:

When all else fails, try the treasure hunt. It worked with Troi.

If you think this episode is a Mindwarp, get this! In the early stages of breaking the story Jeri Taylor led a faction of the writing staff that wanted to kill off William Riker and have Thomas join the Enterprise-D as his replacement. He would no longer be a commander, so he’d have taken over as helmsman, with Data promoted to first officer (although by some accounts, Taylor has said Thomas would have been operations officer).

Unsurprisingly, casual murderer of beloved characters Ronald D. Moore was part of the Taylor faction:

We thought it would be bold and shocking, and something for the fans to chew over. But Rick Berman, and to an extent, Michael Piller, didn’t want to make such a big change.

Actually, Berman had good reason to decline. He was already making plans to bring Star Trek: The Next Generation to the big screen, and tinkering this heavily with the chemistry of the show would have been a major risk. He said of this at one point:

Basically, you're putting a character on the ship who has not experienced anything of the last six years and doesn't know any of the characters.

You can see how this might get in the way of doing movies, especially since in the era of broadcast television the assumption was that the wider audience for your show will have seen some but by no means all of your episodes.

Michael Piller was the ‘Kill Will’ faction’s biggest foe:

Riker has always been a difficult character for writers to write and they said “Let’s get some conflict, let’s get some excitement and energy”, but the fact is he’s a pretty darn good character. A character that I relate to a great deal... I said everything about this story suggests that the new Riker comes onboard and he’s everything that the old Riker’s lost. I resent that as somebody who wrote in “The Best of Both Worlds” that he’s come to a place in his life where he appreciates what he has and is comfortable with his friends and has achieved a great inner peace. I don’t believe that the guy who is a loose-end six years ago is necessarily the good part of the man. I fought very hard to protect the Riker that we had on the ship.

Piller eventually resolved this conflict in the writing room by proposing the twist we eventually got, which is just as shocking: both Rikers live! As he said of this:

I mean, what other show could do it?

True enough!

Acting Roles

To say that Jonathan Frakes has to carry this episode is an understatement, but he does absolutely brilliantly, and Marina Sirtis is excellent in support too. The fact they already have such a great chemistry surely makes this easier to film, but that’s not to denigrate their actual performances. As Frakes later remembered out of this episode, the challenge was in making the two roles play out differently:

One of my fondest memories of “Second Chances” is how I was trying to find subtle differences between the two characters. And to this day, Marina always reminds me of that. She says, “I liked Thomas Riker better.”

And what about “Night Hawk”, the song Will Riker is afraid to play…? I half expected this episode to reveal that Thomas Riker had perfected the song during his time trapped on the planet, but no. This jazz composition by the legendary Coleman Hawkins does feature a trombone but it doesn’t feature a trombone solo at all, so it’s all setup and no resolution for this throwaway line, alas.

And who’s our Transporter-Chief-of-the-Week? Why it’s none other than Dr Mae Jemison, the first female African American to go into orbit!

Burton decided to cast Jemison in the bit part since he’d heard her credit Nichelle Nichols role as Uhuru in classic Trek as her inspiration to become an astronaut.

I knew how important seeing Nichelle in The Original Series had been for Mae. Just as it was for me, as a child of the fifties and the sixties, in formulating my own self-image. This was an opportunity that I didn’t want to pass up – to complete that loop and close the circle.

Burton even invited Nichols to visit the set while Jemison was filming her scenes!

Burton completely geeked out about it, as you might expect!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

It’s another supercheap show, which is just as well as the next one is going to be expensive. There’s a little stunt work in the final Act, though, for which I discovered a behind-the-scenes snap as they were setting it up:

The same sequence does, however, deploy a matte painting! Two in fact, to create the chasm that we almost lose Thomas into (and indeed, that my family were wrongly convinced he was going to fall into!)

Okay, it’s not exactly amazing but it does the job, and anyway, who cares! This is a great episode proving once again that you don’t need expensive special effects to spin a wonderful yarn.