The Masterpiece Society

It's the perfect human community with perfect nineties shoulder pads and a perfect piano - until the Enterprise-D arrives and ruins everything but the shoulder pads and the piano

A stellar core fragment is wending its way through an uninhabited star system when - oh dear! It seems one of these planets is secretly home to a colony of arrogant blowhards who think they know everything. Picard wins their trust by beaming into their sealed environment and showing that they are entirely inadequately defended from unwanted intrusions. Worse, they bring Deanna Troi, who forges a romantic relationship with the leader of the colony. But it all turns out fine… Only kidding! It nearly tears their sheltered little world apart because, of course it does. But at least they don’t get smashed to pieces by the super-dense remains of a star.

Words

This is another of those stories that began as an outside pitch, and then struggled from there. The original pitch, entitled “The Perfect Human”, was from Melrose Place producer James Kahn, who earlier wrote the novelisation of Return of the Jedi and later would write some episodes of William Shatner's TekWar. Somewhere along the line, another TV producer, Adam Belanoff (producer on Murphy Brown, and also a writer on Wings) became involved, and it was he along with Michael Piller who was responsible for the final screenplay. Belanoff recalled the transformation of Kahn’s story:

Not many elements from “The Perfect Human” ended up in “The Masterpiece Society”, but one of the things that did make it was the genetically engineered society. In Kahn’s conception, it was an idyllic community that contained, essentially, a hundred Dolph Lundgrens and Paulina Porizkovas, romping around semi-clothed, Adam and Eve-like. It was a beautiful Blue Lagoon colony.

Five writers tried to make this work before Michael Piller took over, and everyone struggled with how to define a genetically-engineered society. Which is fair, because this is an incredibly dangerous concept (as Star Trek repeatedly recognised) and in order to make it work here and ensure the colonists might be a little sympathetic, it became necessary to bend the concept into a pretzel. Piller was ready to throw away the whole idea when Belanoff proposed a twist: what if the colony had people with different appearances and talents, each of whom was their own ‘masterpiece’. Then, they could set it in an artificial biosphere (like the then-contemporaneous Biosphere 2 in Arizona). As Belanoff later put it:

People need obstacles. In a place where everyone is an Einstein or a Mozart, there’s nobody to perform for, everything is provided for, and life is quite easy. Things would tend to stagnate. So we created a biosphere where everything was so finely balanced that even one person’s departure could harm it.

Welcome to Premise Beach. Apparently, Michael Piller later remarked that this was the point he began to feel better about season five, but he seems to be the only one who was happy about this episode. Rick Berman was displeased with the final result, bored by how slow and chatty it was, and also unhappy with the casting. Jeri Taylor hated it, the director Winrich Kolbe bitched that “the people were too damn perfect” (while also moaning about the casting), and Ronald D. Moore summarised his dissatisfaction by suggesting that when watching this episode “you can’t wait to up and get a beer”. Quite.

Part of the problem is the utterly implausible combination of genetic perfection on the one hand, and the literally black-and-white composition of that community. If these people are interbreeding, how do they keep such distinct and unblended skin tones...?

This is part of the whole issue with choosing the genetically engineered society as a positive theme in the first place - eugenics is anything but a positive concept, and the idea you can have your diversity cake and eat it feels utterly false here. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll listen to Adam Belanoff’s genetics teacher. He called him after the episode aired, praising the drama while calling the scientific aspects of the story “terrible”. I have to agree.

Oh, and the Prime Directive crops up, but we just don’t care, because this is an Earth colony and if Troi wants to date its boring administrator so what? It certainly doesn’t seem to warrant an anguished turbolift confession to the captain. Nobody cares, which is a great summary of the entire episode really.

Acting Roles

This is a double header for the main crew, with two pairings between crew member and guest star. Marina Sirtis’ Troi is paired with John Synder’s Aaron Conor.

This casting seems to have been the one that Berman and Kolbe were most unhappy with, and I can see why. There’s no spark here. Snyder was great as Centurian Bochra in “The Enemy”, but he’s just all kinds of wrong here. He also had a weird career, because along with his screen roles (including playing Vito in Sid and Nancy) are dozens of voice roles in anime productions including cast iron classics like Mobile Suit Gundam, Akira, Fists of the North Star, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell - not to mention videogame classics like Grandia III and Final Fantasy IV.

The other pairing is between LeVar Burton’s LaForge and Dey Young’s Hannah Bates.

This one works a little better, in that they have a comfortable working relationship on screen, but Young’s performance doesn’t really bite. Still, talk about having some classic bit parts! She played the infamous ‘snobby saleswoman’ (actual role title) in Pretty Woman, and even more awesomely she was the waitress in Spaceballs when the alien came singing and dancing out of John Hurt’s stomach. Alas, those really are the high points, although they do get her back for both DS9 and Voyager in more interesting roles.

However, I tip my hat gleefully for Ron Canada as Martin Benbeck.

I love Canada, he’s in everything... mostly as judges. Don’t believe me? Well, working backwards through his career he played Judge Miles Skurnick in Bull, Judge Marcy in Crown Heights, Judge Polk in The Affair, generic ‘Judge’ in Ted 2, Judge Gerald Blake in The Closer, Judge Willard Resse in Boston Legal (8 episodes), the Judge-like Under Secretary of State Theodore Barrow in The West Wing (10 episodes), Judge Anderson in Frasier, Judge Henry Griffin in Philly, Judge Orrin Bell in Murder One (6 episodes), Judge Herman Brodax in Grace Under Fire, and finally, he was in L.A. Law as... David Ellis. Yup, he too was in L.A. Law before TNG, and it was the only law show he was in where he didn’t play a judge, go figure.

Of course, he doesn’t play a judge here, does he. Well, let’s quote the actual dialogue shall we:

CONOR: I apologize. But he is performing his function as he is designed to do.

GEORDI (a poor opinion): What “function” would that be?

CONOR: He is the interpreter of our founders’ intentions for this society.

RIKER: A judge.

He also pops up in Babylon 5, The X Files, Stargate SG-1, and they get him back for Voyager, and also DS9 where he plays the Klingon Advocate Ch’Pok - amazingly, his first role since L.A. Law to put him into the courtroom as something other than a judge.

And below decks welcome back Sheila Franklin as ‘Ensign’ (left), whom the screenplay helpful names “an ensign”, and Joycelyn Robinson on the conn in the teaser (right), both of whom do nothing much of anything. But that’s okay, because that’s also a great summary of this episode.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The big contribution from the effects team this week are the sets, which are actually very cleverly put together.

I’ve had some difficulty working out how this was all done, as the image in the top left looks like a location shot apart from the lighting, but I suspect it’s just a lot of rented greenery, as was done in “Data’s Day” for the Arboretum. Talk about renting, how about that grand piano! As for the lower two images in this montage, the lab on Moab IV is partly made up from the pieces of the old Enterprise bridge from the first three Star Trek movies, with a few bits and bobs borrowed from elsewhere.

Let’s take a moment to enjoy that opening shot...

That’s as good as it gets with the stellar core fragment footage as far as I'm concerned. And of course, it’s utterly outclassed by the Syd Dutton matte painting of the colony.

It’s not clear to me whether or not Dutton created another matte to go in the background of the composited shots, or if the actual matte painting was much wider than we see in the shots with the city, or if someone else knocked one out to match the style of Dutton’s painting. Whatever the true story, the compositions with this other matte painting are all reasonably effective.

So, a mediocre episode that at least has the good graces to have brought Syd Dutton in to create an awesome matte painting. When all else fails, at least the TNG special effects department always has something for us to enjoy.