The Wounded
Cardassians! O'Brien in a starring role! Two new studio miniatures! Rousing songs! This one has it all!
Captain Picard is wistfully recalling war stories from his days on the Stargazer, but Worf isn’t having any of this ‘peace with the enemy’ malarkey. “Trust is earned, not given away”. Wow, that might almost be the theme for the episode, Worf, what an astonishing coincidence that you said it right at the start... We cut away to Miles O’Brien who apparently is “not a fish”, and is threatening to inflict Irish cuisine upon his replicator-dependent wife. Suddenly, domestic bliss-slash-strife is disrupted by... well, disruptors. There’s a warship firing on the Enterprise - and claiming that the Federation is at war with the Cardassians. It seems there’s a rogue Starfleet captain out to kick ass and take names. It’s up to Captain Picard to enlist the help of Transporter Chief O’Brien so they can try and stop the Chief’s former Captain, all while sparring with the new aliens on the block.
Words
This is the first time Jeri Taylor gets her own ‘teleplay’ credit, having previously worked with other writers on her earlier season 4 episodes, “Suddenly Human” and “Final Mission”. The story itself was a spec script from husband and wife team Stuart and Sara Charno (who later contributed the story ideas for “New Ground” and “Ethics”), along with Cy Chermak, whose involvement in this episode is something of a mystery to me. My best guess is that Chermak, a veteran TV producer and screenwriter, wrote the spec script that the Charno’s had the original idea for, but honestly this is just a wild stab in the vast darkness of space.
Taylor’s take on the episode sees it as a kind of reworking of Joseph Conrad’s most famous novella:
It was sort of Heart of Darkness with the rogue captain out of control. It started with the idea that if you had been at war with a country and now you are not at war with them anymore, you can’t just immediately become friends. If you’re trained to look at people as the enemy, it’s hard to now be their friends. While in the 24th century people have a much more expansive view of the galaxy and are able to do it a little better, we planted the idea that some people had just a little more residual problem with that sort of thing, and harboured some resentment.
She considered it provocative, and thought this story to be something of an epic tale, with the core of the tale being the sparring between Picard and Captain Maxwell. But director Chip Chalmers has a very different take on what this story is about:
This episode aired during the Gulf War and was about Picard doing everything he could to prevent a war, happening during a time when the United States of America was doing everything it could to start a war. I thought it was a real interesting dichotomy of ideas.
As well as the debut of the Cardassians, this is also the first appearance of the Cardassian drink ‘kanar’, and the first mention of ‘Setlik III’, which O’Brien isn’t going to shut up about in DS9. Little details travel many light years in Trek!
Acting Roles
This is the very first time that Trek decided to hand itself over almost entirely to the guest stars. I have to stress what a monumental break from traditional practice this was, as it was unthinkable to have a network TV show episode about characters who were not the main cast. Even by the time this situation recurs in DS9 (“It's Only a Paper Moon”), there was significant pressure against letting it happen. Here, Patrick Stewart’s Picard is the link to the main cast that allowed the episode to get made, although it is a huge part of the circumstances that facilitates this that the production crew had (understandably) fallen in love with Colm Meaney.
To say that he's on fine form here would be an understatement - this is this character’s finest moment in TNG, and never more so than the scene that culminates with him and Bob Gunton’s Benjamin Maxwell singing “The Minstrel Boy”, which Michael Piller seems to have picked up from the 1975 Rudyard Kipling film adaptation of The Man Who Would Be King. Rick Berman later remarked on how great this scene was, and Jeri Taylor was utterly spellbound by it.
Gunton’s performance here is strong, and it needs to be, although he is really only granted a relatively small slice of the screen time and doesn’t even appear until Act IV.
I like the way this character is described in the screenplay:
Riker and O’Brien wait as a figure MATERIALIZES on the pad. Seconds later, CAPTAIN BENJAMIN MAXWELL steps off. He is not at all what one might have expected. Slight of build, short greying hair, chiseled, angular face -- he could be Lenin. Or Lennon. But in the eyes there is warmth -- and humor. Creases at the edges testify to a lifetime of smiles and laughter. He is genuinely at ease with himself, and consequently puts others at ease.
Gunton had a stellar career, and his casting here came on the back of a gig with L.A. Law (notice how this keeps coming up...?). You are most likely to recognise him was Warden Norton in the twee adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption, or perhaps as stuffy old Dean Walcott in Patch Adams, and if not then you probably saw him as Secretary of Defence Ethan Kanin in 24. Honestly, I could go on forever picking out choice parts in Gunton’s repertoire, but we have so many more guest stars to get through this week!
Let’s not wait any longer to address the Cardassians, making their impressive debut in this episode!
Marco Rodriguez appears as the shifty Glinn Telle. Rodriguez had a decent career as a jobbing actor, but it’s all small roles (including three separate appearances as different characters in L.A. Law). Of course, we’d already had him in TNG before, as he played the hologram of Captain Paul Rice in “The Arsenal of Freedom”! This is a far meatier role for him, though it’s still pretty scant, but nonetheless he acquits himself well.
Then there’s Time Winters as Glinn Daro, another solid jobbing actor who has done a lot of voice acting, and had several recurring roles, although mostly in shows you might not have heard of. However, he did have a bit part as Dr Overheiser in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where he got to remove a chip implanted in Spike’s brain. Here, he gets to play the Good Cop Cardassian, and plays it very well indeed. His scene with Meaney and Rodriguez in the turbolift is great, as is the touching conversation between him and Meaney’s O'Brien in Ten Forward, although Meaney does all the heavy lifting.
But it’s all hopelessly overshadowed by the (re-)appearance of Marc Alaimo as Gul Dukat... I mean, Macet.
It’s hard after watching DS9 not to see Alaimo as Dukat, but the overly jowly make-up here does help to create some distance between these two roles. He’s electric in this episode, and even better as Dukat - he’s so mesmerising that he manages to stand out despite Colm Meaney hogging most of the screen-love this week.
While we're digging through the guest stars, did you notice that John Hancock is back as Vice Admiral Haden, reprising the role he played in “The Defector” as ‘man looking very serious on a rather small screen’? No? Well, to be fair, there’s a lot going on this week, although very little for the main cast. Gates McFadden’s Dr Crusher doesn’t even appear in this episode!
Finally, hat-tip to Rosalind Chao’s Keiko O’Brien, making a back-to-back appearance following her debut last week.
Always great, although this story line is so domestic it would fall flat were it not for the way it carefully sets up the pieces for the climactic scene later on.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Fantastic work by the SFX team this episode, starting with Michael Westmore’s enduring design for the reptilian Cardassians:
I created a twin row of bony ridges, which started from the peak of the eyebrows and ran all the way back into the hairline. Then ridges went down the sides of the neck and flared out to the shoulder tips, giving the Cardassians a strange, menacing appearance, like a praying mantis, or a king cobra.
Apparently, the infamous spoon-like indentation was inspired by a weird abstract painting of a woman with a spoon in her forehead. It takes all sorts! I also like the silly headwear the Cardassians have in this episode but that we never see again.
I'm guessing it was bad enough in the prosthetics without having to wear braces on top of them.
Although a blatant cost-saving move, I love the way they have an entire ship battle plays out by okudagram. Stewart and Alaimo make it work.
And we get not one but two new studio miniatures. Firstly, the Nebula-class ship (named on screen as such), the USS Phoenix.
I find this a deeply silly design, but it works to capture the general feel of the Enterprise-D, like a ‘little cousin’ to it. The model was originally built - and smashed - for “The Best of Worlds Part II”, but this is its first appearance as anything other than a wreck.
The Cardassian warship (no, not Galor class until next season) is a Sternbach design inspired by the Egyptian ankh, the full story of which is in “Top 40 Studio Models: 11-15” if you're a paid subscriber.
I love it, it has a scorpion vibe that apparently was even more pronounced in the draft sketches. To say the least, we’re going to see it a lot going forward, although there’s absolutely no sign whatsoever that the writing team knew this was going to become such a perennial classic. I suspect the original plan was to modify it for other purposes, as happened to so many other models commissioned for the show.
The Cardassians were to leave such a mark on the imaginations of Rick Berman and Michael Piller that this episode becomes merely the start of one of the most epic storylines in Trek history, one that will eventually lead to the first ever spin-off Trek show, Deep Space Nine (unless you count The Animated Series, of course). But we are still many episodes away from that story reaching warp speed and escaping from the gravity of TNG.