Suspicions

After TNG's previous disappointing attempts at a murder-mystery story, here's one more that doesn't quite work either

Dr Crusher is relieved of duty following the death of a scientist in an experiment that she championed involving a bunch of extremely suspicious humanoids. The story unfolds in flashback. When a scientist dies testing a new kind of shield that allows a spaceship to fly through a sun’s corona, we welcome Beverley Crusher, PI, to the Enterprise. During her investigations, another of the researchers snuffs it, and when she performs an autopsy against the family’s wishes, she loses her posting on the Enterprise. She’s about to run away when Guinan persuades her that she’s now got nothing to lose continuing her investigations. Will she find the killer? Will more people die? Will anyone care? Find out in this unremarkable bottle show.

Words

This one started as a pitch by Joe Menosky, which combined the murder of a Ferengi scientist as per the final episode, but also the revelation that warp drive was tearing up the fabric of space-time. This latter idea was held back for next season’s “Force of Nature”. The story went through numerous iterations. It originally featured Worf and a lot of film noir elements like voiceover narration and flashbacks. Rick Berman wasn't keen on this, feeling that the voiceovers would undermine the Captain’s Log. Eventually, Worf was booted out for Dr Crusher because the writing staff felt that our Klingon Tactical Officer was getting a little too much action, whereas the Chief Medical Officer hadn’t had her own episode in a while. As Jeri Taylor later remembered:

What I really wanted was a vehicle for Beverly. I felt we had given Troi some really nice things to do, Beverly has had more to do within a number of episodes but she did not have one that was all hers. We wanted to give her something atypical and not a female role. The idea of her playing a Private Eye or Quincy was very appealing.

The twist - that the apparent victim was the killer - was the idea that finally got Michael Piller onboard. Soon afterwards, the production team learned that this would be show’s last opportunity to feature Whoopi Goldberg, leading to further rewrites in order to insert Guinan. The shifting sands of the episode frustrated the writing team. In the words of Ronald D. Moore:

It was just a never-ending, never-waking nightmare. Keep the murder mystery, lose the warp thing, move Worf out, keep the flashbacks, lose the film noir, insert Beverly – it was just arrgh!

Co-writer Naren Shankar shared this feeling:

It was a misery. It was a troubled script. There’d been two other attempts to do murder mysteries and they hadn’t worked out – then we tried to do this and the whole thing was a clusterf---.

This is another of those scripts that makes reference to Dr Selar, whom the production team steadfastly refused to give an on-screen appearance, having previously killed off Selar’s performer, Susie Plakson, while she was playing K’Ehleyr. The screenplay also invents ‘metaphasic shields’, which actually gets a callback at the start of next season. This is about all I can say about the screenplay, which is really rather dull. Coming immediately after “Frame of Mind” certainly doesn’t help, but no matter where you put this episode in the season’s line up, it would still be a clunker.

Acting Roles

This is Whoopi Goldberg’s final appearance as Guinan in the regular series of TNG, having been shoehorned into this story simply because it was the last chance to do so. Bottom line is that Goldberg’s career was on fire, and she was now tied up in a string of movie shoots including Made in America and Sister Act 2. She’s completely unnecessary here, unfortunately, and does nothing to rescue the episode from its own mediocrity.

Patti Yasutake gets more lines than usual as Alyssa Ogawa, but again there’s nothing much here in terms of material to make her performance interesting.

Peter Slutsker plays the Ferengi scientist Reyga. It’s not a remarkable performance, in part because there's nothing remarkable for Slutsker to do here.

Nip back to “Ménage à Troi” for Slutsker’s other roles and a behind-the-scenes image of him with Gene Roddenberry. Director Cliff Bole was asked to reshoot some of his scenes in this episode, because they made Reyga seem unlike the other Ferengi:

He was a scientist, so I said that means he’s got a little more compassion, maybe he’s not as oily as the rest of them. I think I went too far and the guys asked me to reshoot a few scenes. Rick Berman said, “Don’t forget, they’re still Ferengis.”

Frankly, the idea that scientists have a little more compassion makes me chuckle! History doesn’t really provide much support for this idea.

Trisha O’Neil returns as Kurak, having played Captain Garrett in “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. It feels like it was barely worth her putting on all that latex, given how tiny this role is in practice.

The director of the Vulcan Science Academy, T’Pan (which is what they make eggs and bacon with in Yorkshire), is played by Joan Stuart Morris, while her husband Christopher is played by John S. Ragin.

It’s extremely difficult to play a Vulcan in a bit part, as you’re basically asking the performer not to act, which Morris has no difficulty doing here. She only had seven roles including this one, although I note that she was in L.A. Law immediately before this episode, continuing the exchange programme between these two shows.

John S. Ragin, on the other hand, has had a long career, although his stand out role was as Quincy’s boss in Quincy, M.E. for 148 episodes (a role, bizarrely, he also played once on BJ and the Bear). His job here is misdirection. Like much of this episode, it feels like a waste of his time and ours.

Finally, the villain of the piece is James Horan’s Jo’Bril. He barely has anything to do here except reappear at the end to twirl his imaginary villain moustache before getting dramatically disintegrated.

He’s back in “Descent, Part II” as a Federation Lieutenant, appears in DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise, and despite several recurring roles early in his career he ends up settling into doing videogame voices, for which he has hundreds of credits.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

There’s not much going on here except for some shuttle flights in and around a sun.

Other than that, all that’s keeping the SFX team busy is the make-up. They have especial fun with the Takaran, Jo’Bril, who gets to be a mix of blue and green when he’s alive and rather more conspicuously green when he’s pretending to be dead.

They also blow a hole in his belly right before disintegrating him! The last shot in this sequence, as he staggers forward and you can see the deck plate behind him is a classy piece of composition:

Okay, that was a fun special effect, but it cannot save this episode from being unbearably dull and pointless.