The Hunted

It's a paradise with a beautiful matte painting... I'm sure they're not hiding a terrible secret

Riker and Picard are getting lectured about how awesome the Angosians are, and Picard is just about to hand them a ticket to join the Federation when suddenly a prisoner escapes from one of their penal colonies. Riker says Starfleet can bring ‘em in, but the escapee successfully gives the Enterprise the slip by ducking behind a convenient asteroid. Apparently, this wily jailbird is Roga Danar who is prone to extreme bouts of violence. But let’s not just say it, lets beam him aboard and watch him beat the snot out of Chief O’Brien and a couple of security officers!

Riker turns up with Worf, and they subdue him (Worf 4, Aliens 5). However, he later escapes and beats the crap out of Worf (Worf 4, Aliens 6) as part of an elaborate escape plan that takes up most of the episode. It all builds up to a dramatic confrontation on Angosia. But the show runs out of budget, so there's no climactic battle and the Enterprise and the crew shuffle off stage to leave the Angosians to sort it all out on their own. As for joining the Federation? Don’t hold your breath, Angosia.

Words

This screenplay is by Robin Bernheim (later credited as Robin Burger), who would go on to be part of the writing staff on Voyager and Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict, having previously worked as a writer and producer on Quantum Leap, not to mention the adaptation of William Shatner’s TekWar. The theme of the episode is much edgier for 1990 than the story itself, since it reflects upon the way societies treat their returning veterans, and is expressly intended as a commentary on the poor treatment of Vietnam veterans in the United States. It’s a bold topic, dressed up in the entertaining sci-fi trappings of high tech super solider, but it’s mostly the ‘Rambo on the Enterprise’ aspect that comes out on screen.

The finale was supposed to be rather different, as it was intended to end in a big battle scene. But all the cat and mouse antics aboard the Enterprise had taken most of the week to shoot, and so the screenplay was rewritten to include the cheaper-to-film ending we actually got. Director Cliff Bole was disappointed by this, as he felt it would have given the episode a much more satisfying conclusion. I’m not certain myself. The stakes for the crew would have been low in that kind of firefight, and there’s already a lot of fun to be had in watching Damar run rings around the crew in the main body of the episode.

This is the first mention of a ‘Jefferies tube’, a plot device named after Matt Jeffries, who designed the original USS Enterprise and was art director on classic Trek. Behind the scenes, this name had become something of an in-joke on Trek, but it is this episode that makes it officially part of the lore. Unlike any other Jefferies tube you’ll ever see again, this one is large enough to walk down.

It’s only later that the production team decide that they’d be much more fun if they were more like the air vents you see in action movies.

Acting Roles

There’s a little something for everyone in this episode, but none of it creates an exceptional role for the regulars. This is Worf’s first battle of the season, and he is initially victorious, taking him to 4 wins against 5 for the aliens since the show began, even if he ends the episode at 4-6. He finished season two with one win (admittedly against a Klingon) and two draws, which is basically a winning season for Worf. Michael Dorn gets to perform a lot of security chiefery in this episode, but it’s not exactly an acting challenge for him. Here he is getting crushed by a box, for instance…

Much of the work is done by two guest stars, primarily Jeff McCarthy as Roga Danar.

He’s okay in this role, suitably intense, but the performance lacks a little gravitas. I find it hard to believe in McCarthy as a war veteran. He somehow fails to project a convincing sense of his inner pain and thus comes across more as an action hero than troubled soul, which is slightly fatal for the story attempted here. It’s not his only Trek appearance, though: he also played the (unnamed) Chief Medical Officer of the USS Voyager in that show’s pilot episode. His job in that role? To die. He does it well.

The other major guest star is James Cromwell, who would go on to fame as the corrupt police Captain in L.A. Confidential and the Warden in The Green Mile.

This is his first Trek role and it doesn’t require that much from him to be honest. He’s just the all-too-generic administrator. He’ll be back in heavy prosthetics in season 6’s “Birthright”, as well as appearing in a later season episode of DS9. But of course, the role veryone is most likely to recognise him for is Zefram Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact (which he reprised in the pilot for the final Trek show of the original production lineage).

Cromwell is a great actor, who doesn’t really get the material to do much in this episode, but will certainly leave his mark upon Trek as Cochrane.

And of course we have Colm Meaney’s O’Brien, who not only gets to do some transporting with speaking lines, he gets to tussle with Danar, fire a phaser, and then get shot by one.

This is O’Brien's first action scene, and if it doesn't require an actor like Meaney to pull it off, it’s still fun to see him getting to do something more than pretending to be pressing buttons.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The extremely boring Angosian transport ship is a heavily modified version of the Straleb security vessel from “The Outrageous Okona”, while the asteroid it hides behind is a physical model built for this episode.

I personally think the entire sequence of it hiding behind the asteroid is extremely silly, but your warp speed may vary.

Last, but by no means least, we have the marvellous matte painting that opens the episode, and which appears nowhere else in Trek for some reason.

Jeffries Tubes, studio miniatures, an all action plot with Worf both winning and losing a fight, and a matte painting? I admit it, this episode has a lot more fun stuff in it than I originally remembered.