The Mind's Eye

LaForge is a secret Romulan assassin as Klingon skulduggery returns!

Risa’s back! Or at least, it’s namechecked in the teaser. LaForge is off to an AI seminar there - but he isn’t going to make it, because out pops a Romulan Warbird, right in the middle of his game of ‘name that nonsensical technobabble’! The Romulans brainwash LaForge to make him into an assassin-on-demand, returning him to the Enterprise in jolly spirits to join their subplot about escorting a Klingon ambassador to a rogue colony that’s trying to cede from the Empire. It seems that the Federation is funnelling phaser rifles to the rebels... or is it? Intrigue abounds as we try to work out exactly who it is that LaForge is supposed to kill, and how our beloved Enterprise bridge crew are going to stop him. It all builds up to Data in a race against time to solve the mystery and prevent the assassination - just in the nick of time.

Words

There’s a thin line between tribute and rip-off, and this episode is balanced precariously upon it. It owes an immeasurable debt to the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate (originally a 1959 novel, but the film is far, far more renowned).

Supervising producer David Livingstone - a veteran on the production crew since the pilot, he whom Picard’s lionfish is named after - has his directorial debut on this episode. He was a huge fan of the movie, and delighted at getting this episode as his first at bat:

I couldn't ask for a better episode to do as my first directorial assignment, since it didn’t have scenes with eleven people in the observation lounge talking for ten minutes. Every scene had something going on, some action. They were all short scenes and I could do some weird stuff and was thrilled.

This is the third screenplay by René Echevarria, and his only one in the entirety of season four. It seems odd to me that he was part of the regular writing team and only got one screenplay credit in a season - although this is misleading, of course, because a lot of the writers chipped in to work on aspects of stories that they never got a credit for. I do enjoy his work on this episode, but it draws so heavily from The Manchurian Candidate that it slightly undermines it for me. It’s missing that little spark that brings it into its own, but is still a jolly slice of intrigue.

The title, in case it seems odd (as it frequently does to me), comes from a quote from the opening scene of Shakespeare's Hamlet: “A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye”. It’s a metaphor suggesting that just as we get dust caught in our eyes, so our imagination may too be disturbed. Is it a good title...? It certainly doesn't work for me, although it's interesting that backhandedly connects to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell’s 1974 novel The Mote in God's Eye.

Acting Roles

Once again, LeVar Burton’s LaForge has to do a great deal of the heavy lifting in terms of the acting this week, and he’s absolutely brilliant here. The music actually provides a great deal of the context to make his performance so sinister and unnerving, but it’s all Burton in those final scenes with Marina Sirtis’ Troi, which make for such a powerful bookend to the show. Great to see Sirtis’ Troi doing some actual counselling, and being allowed to do so in the final bookend, which is usually stolen by Patrick Stewart one way or another.

Larry Dobkin’s Ambassador Kell makes for an enjoyable villain, and the screenplay conceals his motives and villainy very well by making us focus on the Romulans instead.

Dobkin actually directed the classic Trek episode “Charlie X”, and had an extraordinarily long career, starting in 1947 and featuring an awful lot of Westerns both on TV and on film - he had three appearances in Have Gun - Will Travel, for instance. His longest role, however, as was the narrator on police procedural show Naked City. I note that he also had an uncredited role in the classic sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, as an army doctor.

John Fleck is electric as the Romulan brainwasher Taibak, the first of a long career of Star Trek roles for Fleck, who appears as a variety of aliens throughout this production run - most notably as Silik in Enterprise and as another Romulan, Koval, in DS9.

He later said of his time with these shows:

I played so many species. I made a nice living playing non-human beings. I called it ‘torture pay’, sitting in the makeup chair for hours getting glued and painted and then hours taking it off. But hey, I’m grateful Rick Berman kept calling me back to play different characters on all the Star Trek series - it segued into me playing Gecko on HBO’s Carnivale - and I’m forever grateful for the residuals that still trickle in from all the streaming still going on.

Edward Wiley’s Governor Vagh has a smaller role, but he plays it well, and they’ll get him back in DS9 as well.

Wiley had an interesting career, including small roles in Chariots of Fire and the marvellous slice of hokum that is 1986’s Highlander.

Colm Meaney’s O’Brien is back this week - and gets blasted by LaForge in a simulation, which Meaney seems to enjoy!

But of course, there’s one more guest star of note this week, a shadowy figure on the Romulan warbird and a familiar voice...

Yes, let’s meet body double Debra Dilley as Sela, voiced of course by Denise Crosby (without credit in this episode, to help maintain the surprise still to come). It’s a nice touch that they foreshadowed this reveal, which they’re saving up for the climax of the season.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

There's much to see in the special effects this week, including a revisit of the Klingon ships from “Reunion” and the familiar footage of the Warbird uncloaking in the teaser, albeit nicely superimposed upon LaForge’s shuttle set.

The Romulan Warbird sets are great, though, and the props to make up LaForge’s mental torture device are wonderful (see above). Also, let’s not lose sight of how wonderful the Klingon make-up is, just because we’ve seen it so often. The team do a great job making Ambassador Kell look old too.

I especially love in the visuals this week the way we revisit ‘LaForge Eye View’ for the first time since season one, this time hacked by Romulan mind-control.

But of course, my SFX star this week is the return of the Syd Dutton “Angel One” night time matte - here wildly modified to ‘Klingonify’ it.

As well as making it darker, the key alteration is that one of the buildings is replaced with a pyramid resembling the buildings in the matte painting for the Klingon homeworld (complete with Klingon empire logo), with some additional tweaks to the hills in the background. You can have all the nail-biting climaxes you like, but it will never be as enduringly beautiful as a good matte painting.