The Chase

It's Indiana Picard and the Interstellar Crusade as the Enterprise races to prevent Space Nazis beating them to the MacGuffin of Doom

The Captain’s old archaeology professor surprises him with a crudely carved artefact that he nerds out about embarrassingly. Professor Galen invites Picard on a treasure hunt, because for some reason on the Enterprise-D it’s always the captain who gets drawn into wacky adventures. When the professor is killed, Picard is drawn into a mystery concerning secret messages hidden in the DNA of dozens of alien species. But the Federation is not the only one on the trail! The Cardassians, the Klingons, and the Romulans all want a taste of MacGuffin. So off we go, zooming around the galaxy, collecting genetic clues in order to make a self-assembling computer programme so a generic alien species can brag about their magnificence to all their descendent species.

Words

This one started with conversations between Joe Menosky and Ronald D. Moore (who share the ‘story by’ credit) about Carl Sagan's novel Contact, in which a bunch of nerds uncover clues to the nature of the universe in the number pi. As Moore later recalled:

Joe Menosky was intrigued with this notion of why there’s a common humanoid ancestry for all the bipedal races we've encountered in Star Trek. Why was the show filled only with people with bumps on their foreheads? We looked to give that an answer. And I was fascinated with the notion of something being written into the very fabric of their genes, that there was a code in there waiting to be established.

However, it took them over a year before this premise became a workable screenplay. Moore described one early version of the story as follows:

Riker beams over into this cramped little tiny shuttle, where everyone’s yelling and trying to find things and the guy’s dead. And then they zip away, and we’re off and running with It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It would have been a lot more comedic.

Too comedic. This approach was nixed for being “too cartoony”. So what does Ronald D. Moore do when he needs to raise the stakes? He kills someone:

Michael Piller and Rick Berman felt this lacked sufficient character – that there was no real motivation for Picard to join in the chase. It was only with the addition of the death of Picard’s mentor that Piller and Berman were sold on the idea.

The two worked on the script together, with Menosky writing the scenes between Picard and Professor Galen, drawing upon memories of his somewhat complex feelings he’s observed in college between mentors and students. Menosky in the end got the ‘teleplay by’ credit on his own, but it’s not at all clear why Moore didn’t share it with him.

At one point, the episode looked like it was going to run short and so they added some additional scenes, such as one in which Mr Mot the barber is suggested as being one of the seventeen crew members from non-Federation worlds. This would have kicked the Boleans out of the Federation if it had aired! They did film the scene, but it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Moore considered at one point linking up the ancient humanoids in this story with the Preservers from classic Trek’s “The Paradise Syndrome”, but chose not to bake this into the screenplay for some reason. He kept this connection in a plausible state, but without expressly joining the dots.

The production team considered this the most “Roddenberry-esque” TNG episode. The director, Jonathan Frakes, was very pleased with this episode.

As he said of it later:

The speech that Salome Jens makes at the end would make Roddenberry very proud I think. It’s a great cast and it's wonderful to have all those villains and aliens in one place.

Rick Berman was less impressed, and felt that it channelled the original show’s vibes rather too completely:

Conceptually, it’s very interesting. I always had some problems with dealing with the whole idea of these kind of prehistoric creatures who are the fathers of us all. It’s not Roddenberry-esque, it’s very sixties Roddenberry-esque.

For myself, I have mixed feelings about these attempts to explain aspects of a fictional universe that are self-evidently the result of the production constraints. The reason that TNG has so many latex-on-the-face aliens is because this is a cost-effective way of depicting aliens. However, for the most part, it makes for a fun romp in this episode, quite unlike the ill-advised way that at a later point Enterprise attempts to explain why make-up on a sixties TV budget couldn't make Klingons that looked as good as they do on an eighties TV budget.

Acting Roles

Professor Galen is played by the brilliant Norman Lloyd, perhaps best known as Dr Daniel Auschlander on St. Elsewhere (132 episodes), which had finished airing not long after TNG began. You may also have seen him in Dead Poet's Society or in a variety of movie roles dating all the way back to 1939!

His performance here is fine, but they kill him off before we get any depths out of the role. Frakes was thrilled to have Lloyd on one of his episodes:

He was a wonderful storyteller and a brilliant actor. We were so lucky to have this guy on our show.

And of course, as befits an episode about why alien species look just like humanoids covered in latex, this episode is packed full of performers covered in latex.

First on the scene is Linda Thorson as Gul Ocett, our first female Cardassian Gul (above left). She’s great here! She was also great as Tara King on The Avengers (not the Marvel version), replacing Diana Rigg after she left the show in 1968 after three seasons as Mrs Peel. Brits may also recognise her as having played superbitch Rosemary on Emmerdale between 2006 and 2007 (74 episodes), while Yanks might know her as Julia Medina from daytime soap One Life To Live (47 episodes), which was where she was performing regularly when cast in this role.

John Cothran, Jr plays the Klingon, Nu’Daq (above right). He has a fun scene with Data, but otherwise is largely just along for the ride. DS9 gets Cothran back as a Klingon later, and he also appears in heavy latex in Enterprise. He has a long career mixing TV bit parts with movie bit parts (he had a role in Boyz n the Hood the year before this episode), but the role that jumps out to me is ‘Gypsy #1’ in John Carpenter’s 1981 movie Escape from New York.

Meanwhile, Maurice Roëves turns up at the end as ‘Romulan captain’.

It’s a bit flat as a performance, although his delivery in the final scene where he acknowledges some commonality with the humans is strong. Amongst his unusual collection of movie roles are a British Major in The Eagle Has Landed and also in Who Dares Wins, a Colonel in The Last of the Mohicans, and Judge Miller in the 1995 Judge Dredd - although I note he also plays the first victim in the 1981 Space Western Outland. But the absolute star role for Roëves is as the mercenary Stotz in “The Caves of Androzani”, Peter Davidson’s regeneration episode in classic Doctor Who, and one of the greatest serials in that show’s long and storied history.

What fun!

Lastly, Salome Jens plays the Progenitor (as per the screen credit).

This would probably have been unremarkable casting if she had not gone on to play the female Changeling in DS9 - eventually becoming a major villain for that show. Now, that’s all that I can see when she appears at the end of this episode! She’s also the only guest star this week to have appeared on L.A. Law, where she played Beatrice Schuller for three episodes immediately before this TNG episode. The exchange programme continues!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The screenplay had a very specific request for the final location:

A dry, cracked, ancient seabed. Picard, Beverly, Worf and Nu'Daq suddenly MATERIALIZE. They spread out to search as Beverly quickly scans with her tricorder.

BEVERLY: There.

She indicates a rockface on the other side of the seabed, its surface mottled by a bright yellow-red-green lichen.

To meet this requirement, the production team searched for a salt flat devoid of rooted vegetation, but were unable to find one, so set designer Richard James had to dress up Sound Stage 16 instead...

Frakes was extremely disappointed:

I think it does look like ‘Planet Hell’, but that's the way it goes. The money was being spent across the street. I don’t think it’s a secret.

‘Across the street’ here means on the sound stages where DS9 was filming, since that show was getting special attention from Paramount. This was understandable: if the spin-off didn't land, that would be their Trek nest egg cracked open and oozing albumen all over their future fiscals.

There’s lots of reused footage - a nebula from “Pen Pals”, a planet from “The Hunted” and another from “Identity Crisis”, an atmospheric effect from “True Q” - but there’s lots of new stuff too. There’s new footage featuring the Cardassian ships, the Klingon battle cruiser, and the Enterprise-D, leading to a newly-shot skirmish between these same ships!

But this is all somewhat overshadowed by a new studio miniature representing the Yridian destroyer. Here it is in action:

The screenplay describes it as follows:

A Federation shuttle is close to a YRIDIAN ATTACK SHIP -- much smaller than the Enterprise, but wasp-like and deadly-looking.

This was a Rick Sternbach design inspired by dragonflies, and built from original components by John Goodson, who was moonlighting from his job at Industrial Light and Magic. It’s not bad, certainly distinctive, and we’ll see it again later as a Yridian freighter.

All in all, there’s a lot going on in this episode. However, despite my initial love for it, “The Chase” has gradually lost my support over the years. Most of what I like about it is the high concept not the execution, and it feels a little weak to me these days. I still enjoy it, it’s certainly fun to get all the recurring TNG species except the Ferengi together for a treasure hunt, but it cannot help but be in the shade of the episode that follows...