The Quality of Life

Data gets involved with yet another silicon-based lifeform - it's like he can't stop himself

We open on a poker game that has nothing whatsoever to do with the episode and everything to do with beards. It’s still a lot more fun than the actual teaser, about a particle fountain that apparently is the future of mining. Just before we doze off, there’s a malfunction - prevented just in time by a plucky little robot. Now this robot is just a robot and definitely not sentient but hey, the episode spans a few days time so maybe that will change...

Words

Now stop me if you’ve heard this before: there’s a new robotic technology, and it’s definitely not sentient but - oh wait! - now it is sentient, so let’s see what happens next. It happened in season one’s “Home Soil”, and in season three’s “Evolution”, and arguably in season five’s “Silicon Avatar” as well. I’m more than a little surprised that we’re still regurgitating this plot in season six, even more so that it began as a spec script. This particular slush pile submission was written by L.J. Scott and entitled “The Underground Circuit” and concerned household appliances and talking walls which were supposed to have “all the charisma of central heating units” eventually becoming fully cognisant of their tedious situation.

When it came into the hands of the writing team, it was picked up by scientific consultant Naren Shankar. It’s not Shankar's first script, as he worked with Ronald D. Moore on last season’s magnificent Wesley Crusher episode “The First Duty”, but it was Shankar’s first time flying solo, with Jonathan Frakes as director. Frakes is becoming an old hand by this point in TNG - look how laid back he is in this behind-the-scenes shot, taken during the filming of this episode!

Apparently, the original pitch had the writing staff pondering about:

...artificial intelligence, and what really defined something as a living being, even if it was a cybernetic organism. At what point would machine intelligence be described as ‘alive’? What we eventually arrived at is, it’s when something develops a survival instinct, showing that it is afraid to die. And that’s the point when Data decides that these widgets are a form of life that is worth saving.

At no point did they seem to realise that this was going down a line that was already terribly well-worn, which seems really surprising when judged from the outside. I suspect Shankar felt that he could pay off some high-brow ideas about the nature of intelligence and of life, but by his own admission is turned out as weak sauce. He later even admitted that Data’s arguments in this episode could be applied to bacteria and unicellular organisms, which rather torpedoes the whole story.

The exocomps started life as ‘metacomps’, which was contracted from ‘metamorphic computer’. However, the legal department found a company trading under that name, so it fell out. The design came from Rick Sternbach, who went through a huge number of concepts before settling on the one that was used. Shankar's original idea was that these would be modules added to tools “like a high-tech Transformer toy” and dreaded them ending up looking like a “cute R2-D2 type” robot. It was important to him that they were ugly-looking, since anything charming would already have the audience’s sympathy. The final design is apparently inspired by Nanmo from the anime show The Dirty Pair - a favourite of the writing team.

Director Jonathan Frakes was pleased with how it came out, but did admit “it was a little heavy on technobabble”. He was, however, disappointed that nobody came back to the poker game in the teaser.

As he later suggested:

We should have seen the result of the bet the characters made. Either Gates should have been a brunette or we should have been sitting in the chair about to be shaved. I don’t know why they would lay it out as a red herring and not have it pay off in some way – as if no one was watching the show.

Alas, I have to agree that the poker game is the most interesting part of the episode.

Acting Roles

Hair! This one’s all about hair. LeVar Burton’s beard came about because he was getting married, and wanted to have a beard for his wedding. As a result, the producers let him grow out his facial hair, and the writing team had to make it work somehow.

Also in hair: Marina Sirtis’ Troi has a new hairdo, which is finally achieved without a headband. She wears her hair like this for the rest of season six. She still doesn’t have anything to do in the episode, sadly, but at least she gets a new haircut.

The main guest star this week is Ellen Bry as Dr Farallon, who is named after the Farallon Islands which lie off the coast of San Francisco.

Believe it or not, buried under all that latex is the actress who plays Nurse Shirley Daniels in St. Elsewhere.

Ellen Bry (right) with Christina Pickles (left) in St. Elsewhere

If you don’t know her from that show, well, firstly shame on you for missing out on one of the eighties must iconic shows, but you might also have seen her as a nurse in Chicago Hope or in a bit part in Deep Impact, or just maybe in a recurring role in the 1970s live action version of The Amazing Spider-Man.

Frakes was pleased with Bry’s performance:

Unlike most of the actresses I read, she seemed to be able to handle the language which in other actresses’ mouths sounded dull. She somehow had passion about it and was able to deliver the lines with the same kind of alacrity as Brent and LeVar did on a daily basis.

So she literally got the role because she could wrap her tongue around the technobabble.

Transporter-Chief-of-the-Week is J. Downing’s Kelso, whom Shankar named after Lee Kelso in the classic Trek episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.

It’s Downing's only Trek appearance, but he does get to be named on screen by Frakes twice, and gets seven speaking lines (albeit several are just “Aye, sir”), so he should consider himself lucky!

With Colm Meaney now on DS9, expect a lot of disposable extras pretending to push buttons from here until the end of TNG’s run.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

This was not an expensive episode, and the budget only allowed for two exocomp models. Any time you see three, the third has been added in post-production.

For this shot, the two on the right were photographed together, and the one on the left was added in post-production

They were controlled by rods operated by a puppeteer who was ‘painted out’ in post. Frakes nicknamed the models “the little piggies”.

But the more impressive (and I use the word cautiously) slice of SFX in this show is the shot in the teaser of the particle fountain.

Woo. All in all, this is a budget-saving, concept-reusing, patience-testing filler episode. Season six has much more to offer than this.