Time's Arrow

It's a season finale, in a season that ran out of budget a while back. Does anybody have a concept for a cheap cliffhanger...?

Data's severed head is discovered buried a mile under Starfleet command in San Francisco - what a teaser! There follows lots of hand-wringing and self-doubt about how to prevent Data from being sucked back in time to old San Francisco, before inevitably Data is sucked back in time to old San Francisco. There he meets Samuel Clements (that’s Mark Twain, dont’cha know) and Guinan, because why not. Meanwhile, back in the 24th century, an older Guinan who looks exactly the same tells Captain Picard that he better go through the time portal too or he won’t have anything to do next episode. So off the Enterprise crew go to join Data on his time travelling romp. Dress warmly, it gets windy in San Francisco!

Words

Originally, Rick Berman and Michael Piller were not planning to end season five with a cliffhanger. However, the forthcoming arrival of the newest member of the Trek franchise family changed that:

Because of all the attention DS9 was getting and the rumours that TNG would be shutting down, we wanted to send a message that this show was alive and well and continuing to grow.

All through this season, the writing team had been throwing around a concept for a story where Data has to pass himself off as a regular humanoid for a long period of time. But they never quite managed to justify the Enterprise being absent for long enough to make it work. Nobody seems to know who first suggested time travel, and even after it was mentioned it was a problem. ‘When’ do you go that Trek hadn’t already gone but that wouldn’t be wildly expensive…? Eventually, Rick Berman threw out the idea of Data meeting Mark Twain, and the nineteenth century was swiftly locked in.

It was Joe Menosky who proposed getting Guinan involved:

I said if she was alive, what if that’s where she met everybody and what if that’s where the relationship with the Star Trek group started and she met Picard. Ultimately that’s where Picard helped her out of trouble back then and she came back to find him before he met her, knowing she was going to be on the Enterprise to complete the circle.

Goldberg loved the idea and thankfully was available to shoot both episodes.

Unfortunately, co-writer Menosky was not happy with how it turned out, suggesting it “was a bit of a mess, but I was happy with the Mark Twain stuff.” Other members of the writing team such as Ronald D. Moore and Jeri Taylor were also unhappy, particularly in the amount of technobabble. But it’s mostly just ‘triolic waves’ doing the job of setting up the time travel storyline, and ‘synchronic distortion/phase discriminator’ for revealing the invisible aliens.

I personally don’t think this is the biggest problem with the screenplay... it’s rather that it’s the setup for part two, and so there’s a lot of wandering around Sound Stage 16 wagging tongues and waiting for us to get to the good stuff. It’s arguably the opposite of the problem with “The Best of Both Worlds”, which has all the fun in the first part, but then has to find its way down the mountain. But since both stories exist as cliffhangers, it’s a genuine failure of this episode that the teaser has more impact than the finale.

Acting Roles

Oh my goodness, there’s a lot of guest stars, with the most significant to the story being Jerry Hardin as Samuel Clemens AKA Mark Twain.

He’d already had a TNG role in “When the Bough Breaks”, and they get him back in Voyager too. As I mentioned back in season one, he’s most famous as Deep Throat in The X-Files (follow the link to discover a more obscure role of Hardin’s you might not have noticed). He so enjoyed playing Twain in these episodes that afterwards he created a one-man touring show about him!

Hardin is good fun playing off Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan, although it does rather feel like it’s slowing down the pace of the story unfolding. Data’s arrival fixes that, since his scenes with Goldberg are great fun, and throwing in Hardin’s Twain adds to the mischief.

This is Marc Alaimo’s final TNG appearances, as the poker player Frederick La Rouque.

He’s rather good fun here, and of course the reason he doesn’t appear in TNG again is that they move him over to DS9 to play the wonderfully villainous Gul Dukat - a career highlight role that he excels in.

Then there’s Michael Aron with his charming performance of a young Jack London (although not identified as such in this episode - they save the reveal for the concluding part).

Aron is most well known for the role of Pete in teen soap opera Tribes, in which he appeared for more than ninety episodes. But he only had ten roles in all, after which he founded a multimedia agency that doesn’t seem to have gone very far. I do enjoy him in this, it’s a shame he couldn't make a go of the acting career.

But my favourite guest star in this episode is Jack Murdock as the Forty-Niner begging on the streets who gets chomped by the alien bad guys.

Okay, it’s a stereotype, but he plays it so well, and Murdock adds a lot of charm to the role. The odds are you don’t know him from much else, but his career was long-lasting. He had a recurring role in the 70s military sitcom Operation Petticoat, a series spun off from the 1959 movie. He also had small roles in the movies Rain Man, Psycho III, Altered States, and Blue Thunder, but nothing that you’ll likely have noticed.

Guest stars aside, there’s also plenty for the main cast to do, and everyone gets a chance to do something with, unusually, Michael Dorn’s Worf having the smallest role here. He doesn’t get to fight anyone in this story, and indeed gets ignominiously given the boot by Picard at the end. However, since it’s the end of the season, we can at least see how he did in his Worf versus Aliens stats for this season.

Well, astonishingly, it’s a definitive winning season for our beloved Klingon security officer! He finishes Worf 8, Aliens 5, his first winning season since season two, when he finished with a miserable one point lead, 2-1. This one is a definitive, no-nonsense winning season for Worf, bringing him to 17-18 overall since the show began, just one point down on the aliens and robots. It’s going to make the last two seasons very exciting! I for one cannot wait to find out if he finishes the entire show’s run with a winning career. It’s certainly not the default impression anyone has of Worf’s TNG warrior achievements.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The Starfleet Academy matte painting returns - but this time the flag is at full-mast.

The glowing aliens in the cavern were shot in Sound Stage 16, of course, which is quite used to be turned into a big cave.

It wasn’t easy to put together the creepy alien SFX for these sequences, though:

In order to photograph them with our people, it’s a three-stage process. We shoot our people on the set, we have to shoot plates and then we have to shoot the aliens. Then Rob Legato has to matte all that stuff together, and the process of shooting something sometimes takes two or three times longer to do than it normally would, because there are so many layers to the process.

Among the production materials, I found a sketch by Rick Sternbach for a biomechanical lump (below right) that I at first thought didn’t make it into the episode. But when I looked again more closely, there it is in the shot where the aliens were revealed (below left)! You can also see it right before they go through the portal at the end of the episode (below bottom)

As for the scenes shot in the streets of San Francisco, these were filmed on location at the historic Pico House near the first mission in old Los Angeles, about six miles from the Paramount Studios. I told you it was a cost saving episode! Other than the sequence on Sound Stage 16, it’s just some rental costumes and the guest stars’ paycheques.

To be honest, this is probably the least thrilling of the TNG end of season cliffhangers, but then there are only actually four of them, and one of them is “The Best of Both Worlds”, so I guess I cannot be too hard on it. At the very least, the episode has a little something for all the regular cast to do, even if poor Worf is shuffled off to the sidelines. Still, the entire cliffhanger last season was about him, so it seems only fair that he should sit on the benches for the resolution of this one. Roll on season six!