The Host
Dr Crusher has an affair with an alien... then Riker as an alien... then regrets getting involved at all
Once again, you can tell it’s a Dr Crusher episode because they have her give the opening log entry. She’s in love... with an alien worm. But when it gets transplanted into Riker, she’s not sure whether she still loves her little wriggly paramour. Fortunately, it eventually gets transferred into a woman’s body, and she is forced to conclude that loving a worm is far too complicated for her.
Words
Yet another spec script submission, this time from Michel Horvat. It’s his only writing credit on anything as far as I can tell, although he worked in various capacities on a few other productions, and achieved some success with a documentary he later put together entitled “We Are Dad”. The original pitch for this one was all about the symbiote and had no romantic element whatsoever. Staff writer Brannon Braga even described the high concept as “the most repulsive story ever pitched to us”, noting that “it was pitched as a squirmy worm who’s really the intelligence”. But this wasn’t enough. Another staff writer, Ronald D. Moore recalled:
The addition of Beverly to that story is the vital component. A lot of freelancers would take that premise and say this is a show about the ambassador and the struggles of the parasitic creature and the war negotiations. No one really cares about that. But when it becomes a Beverly problem, who’s in the position with the problem, and to some extent Riker, that’s how it became a Star Trek story.
The screenplay was originally entitled “E Pluribus Unum”, the Latin motto on the great seal of the United States that translates to ‘out of many, one’, but this fell by the wayside as the story was developed. Much changed along the way. Indeed, although Horvat gets the on-screen writing credit, it seems that behind the scenes the final pages were substantially re-written by Jeri Taylor between the final draft screenplay and shooting. She was pleased with how it came out, later remarking that “I poured a lot of good stuff into it, and everything came together. It became a wonderful, memorable episode.”
This was the first Star Trek episode directed by Marvin V. Rush, who had been a director of photography on TNG episodes since season three. He returned later to direct some Voyager and Enterprise episodes, but this is the only time he sits in the big chair on TNG. A great deal of his attention during filming was spent trying to hide the fact that Gates McFadden is heavily pregnant!
Jonathan Frakes later noted:
The episode had to be shot in such a way that we couldn’t see her stomach. They would not address the fact that the actress was pregnant. It was an interesting problem. You really found yourself more concerned with hiding her with furniture or with your body, and shooting from her boobs up. That was very restrictive.
Rush also had a rather interesting take on the ending:
I felt that it was more about the nature of love, why we love and what prevents us from loving. To me the best analogy is if your beloved turned into a cockroach, could you love a cockroach? It’s the same person, if the person is the personality and core within, but can you get past the outside…? We as humans are affected by the whole package, including the outside shell, and Gates in her last scene talks about maybe someday our ability to love won’t be so limited. She says mankind may one day be able to deal with this, But I can’t. To me that is about the nature of love and I think it’s an interesting, worthy discussion. Rather than deal with the fact it was because of any homosexual bent per se, it’s just that in our culture and our society people who are heterosexual who want the companionship of a male because they are female, wouldn’t be able to deal with that opposite situation.
Gates McFadden noted that some people were quite outraged by even approaching issues of homosexuality (this was, after all, the early 1990s), but she herself adored the final episode - even if she wished Dr Crusher’s first romantic adventure could have been delayed until after her pregnancy!
I suppose I should comment on the fact that almost nothing of the Trill concept in this episode survives in the DS9 version. The make-up changes, the symbiotes can be transported at will, and Trill is a Federation member. They took the inspiration from this story, but they reinvented the species entirely. Of course, this is hardly the first time Trek has remounted its world. Let’s face it, the Klingons are radically different in TNG than they are in classic Trek! It’s part of the writing game - to treat all the previous material as if it was slightly out of phase, echoes from a parallel universe. Continuity is a game for fans - writers play it only when they are in the mood, and they cheat more than you can possibly imagine!
Acting Roles
As a Dr Crusher episode, Gates McFadden has to do quite a lot of the heavy lifting here, and she is quite charming in her performance, even if her acting remains fairly unremarkable. She’s given great assistance by Marina Sirtis’ Troi.
The writers have played up the relationship between these two characters before, but here it feels very warm and authentic. Undoubtedly, it helps that the actresses are friends, but I don’t want to knock the resulting performances, which work very well indeed, if you overlook that yet again the only reason to show them together is so they can gossip about boys, or at least worms-in-the-bodies-of-boys.
Jonathan Frakes, however, has the toughest job as he has to play Odan and capture some of the character of Franc Luz’s Odan from the opening acts and teaser - which he does a great job with.
Like so many guest stars this season and the last, Luz seems to have got this gig on the back of an appearance on L.A. Law, although before that he had a recurring role on the short lived witch sitcom Free Spirit. He is most associated with his recurring role as Dr John Bennett on the daytime soap The Doctors. He seems to be that rarest of performers, one who managed to pick up a lot of recurring roles, but never quite achieved much name recognition.
There’s several other guest stars, but they all have small roles, and most of them are playing Pelians.
Barbara J. Tarbuck’s Leka Trion has to set up the political backstory to the dispute Odan is negotiating, and she does a fine job with what is basically a straightforward role. She played Jane Jacks on General Hospital over more than forty episodes. William Newman’s Kalin Trose has a wonderfully deep voice that feels familiar, although his long career of most film and TV bit parts doesn’t really ring any bells with me. And poor Robert Harper plays Lathal Bine uncredited for some reason - and he also seems to have got the job after four episodes playing Brian LaPorte on L.A. Law, although you are probably more likely to recognise him as Sharkey from Once Upon a Time in America.
Lastly, Nicole Orth-Pallavicini plays Kareel Odan, the final trill host in the episode.
I find her performance before and after implantation to be sadly flat. Although she has several other acting roles, she seems to mostly be part of the behind the scenes voice crew - she has nine ‘loop group’ credits, which is a bizarre acting job in which you have to ad lib background voices to match the lip movement's on screen - strange but true!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
The Bolean make-up is back, with yet another actor (Buddy Daniels Friedman). It’s almost as if the Boleans are a species that exists solely to cut hair!
Actually, though, Friedman had appeared as a Bolean archaeologist in “Qpid”, so they probably shot this footage during the time he was made up for those scenes.
As mentioned above, the Trill make-up in this episode is nothing like what we come to know in DS9, being the now-standard ‘add some latex to the face’ alien design. Of course, there’s more to the Trill SFX than the face, there's also the belly:
...and for that matter, the symbiote itself, which pulses in a jar rather pleasingly.
But check out the ambition on the Pelian make-up (see image above)! It’s really quite impressive, especially because they have to apply it to three different performers.
Finally, we welcome back two of our most commonly used studio miniature starships. Firstly, the Mondor from “Samaritan Snare” is used as a Trill vessel…
…and secondly the Merchantman from Search for Spock, which is restored to its original configuration here. It’s always great to see this model, and for once they really put it through its paces with a bit of a space battle with one of the Enterprise’s dumpy shuttlecraft!
For an episode that is basically a messed up love story, they sure kept the SFX crew busy this week!