Time's Arrow, Part II
Time-travelling fun in 1893 San Francisco as Mark Twain tries to stop the Federation invasion
Mark Twain is mouthing off to a reporter in old timey San Francisco, while the two dodgy aliens we saw last week are acting suspiciously. Twain AKA Samuel Clemens is convinced there’s a time travelling conspiracy that he can expose, and is eventually cornered in Data’s hotel room by our android and young Guinan. He is soon caught up in the intrigue himself, spouting off homilies and attempting to prevent the aliens from invading. Meanwhile, the main crew (less Worf) are trying to find Data and the monsters-of-the-week, whom they confront just before being threatened with arrest - whereupon they are rescued quite randomly by Data. Can they stop their android pal from being destroyed in the past...? Answer: no. But we can rebuild him!
Words
From what they had discovered about previous season finales, the writing staff learned their lesson and planned ahead for this one. Ha ha! Only kidding. No, once again, they wrote the first episode without any plan for how to tie it up in part two - and they really struggled with it. Jeri Taylor, who got the writing credit for the teleplay remembered it darkly:
This one was a nightmare. It was just awful to try to get the story going. Even when we finally went to script, we kept changing the story so it was a matter of going back and wrenching out sections and restructuring and plugging in other things and then taking all that away again. It was probably the most troubled episode of the year.
René Echevarria also remembered it being a tough episode for the writing team:
We basically boxed ourselves into a corner with Part One and it prompted very hilarious arguments about time travel and how it worked (“That's not how time travel works, you idiot!”) with huge accusations and people falling back on primary sources like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. “That’s the way it works, you can go meet yourself!” and all sorts of preposterous stuff.
Mindful of the excess of technobabble in the first part, Taylor made a concerted effort to keep it out of part two - with the unfortunate side effect that instead of lots of things being explained badly (as in the first part), pretty much nothing much is explained at all in the conclusion.
It seems that although there were several attempts to get into exposition and explanations, every time the writing team uncorked the big bottle of what, why, and how, they just decided to “go with the fun”, as Taylor later put it. Michael Piller was not unhappy with how this played out: “Any time you deal with time you’re going to have complexities that are hard to grasp. But if you really look at that closely I think we got them all nicely stitched.”
It seems from the draft screenplay, Guinan was at one point going to be an Ashanti Princess, an idea that fell out somewhere along the line. The scene where Twain confronts Data and Guinan was shortened in editing, and the following did not make the final episode:
CLEMENS: Shame, madame? I think not. I find no shame in my efforts to uncover your plot.
GUINAN: I keep telling you, there is no plot --
CLEMENS: Yes... you do keep telling me that. (a beat, as he regards her) Mister Data, did you know that Madame Guinan here is from a renowned Boston family... a close relative of Judge Truman Williams? (to Guinan) I believe that's what you said...
GUINAN: Yes.
CLEMENS: Then... I wonder... why the Judge says he's never heard of you? That's what his telegram to me indicated...
GUINAN (unfazed): There's been a blood feud between two branches of the family. He doesn't acknowledge me.
CLEMENS: Ah. That must wound you deeply.
He circles the room, eyeing Data and Guinan up and down.
CLEMENS: What an interesting pair you are... an Ashanti princess... and a Swiss. Where in Switzerland are you from, Mister Data?
Not everyone was happy with how the episode turned out. Ronald D. Moore felt that the 1890s setting was underused, and that not enough was done with Mark Twain:
To take that sort of historical figure and put him on the starship for an episode felt like there should be more than just one walk through the corridor with Troi. Unfortunately, there was so much story to tell that the needs of the show forced you into really moving that into a sidebar and just playing a scene here and there.
Whatever the flaws, it's a fun romp, and gets season six off to a spirited beginning. It’s a slow starter, this season, but boy does it hit the mark once it gets going. It’s also nice to see them paint in the backstory between Guinan and Picard that had been implied in the previous episodes “Booby Trap” and “Ensign Ro”. Both original references are so vague that they could mean anything, though, so it’s only really by retrofitting the later episodes to the earlier that it seems like they fit. Still, any continuity that lines up is better than continuity that doesn’t!
Acting Roles
Lots of fun for the main cast this week, especially in the costumes!
Marina Sirtis had a hoot:
It was nice to use the corsets, things that we were so uncomfortable in, since I would imagine someone coming back in time from the 24th century would be. It’s always playtime when we have to do these things.
I’ll skip over the guest stars who were in part one, or I’ll run out of space (check the previous WAM if you’re interested), but there’s some new faces here.
The reporter was played by Alexander Enberg, who is actually Jeri Taylor’s son. They get him back in TNG next season, and plays a recurring character (Vorik) on Voyager across several seasons. Other than that, his career is mostly bit parts, although he had a small role in the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Junior.
You might have noticed James Gleason in the cast list and got excited (he played the doctor - Apollinaire according to the screenplay), but this is not the famous James Gleason who was in Night of the Hunter and Arsenic and Old Lace but someone else with the same name, whose career is pretty much all bit parts, including on Quantum Leap and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Much fun is had with Pamela Kosh’s character, Mrs Carmichael, who calls the captain ‘Mr Pick-erd’ to great amusement (the screenplay intended this, mentioning in the stage directions: “She pronounces it PICK-erd.”) They get Kosh back in the final TNG episode too. Her career is all bit parts, although I note that unlike anyone else this week, she was in L.A. Law a few years before appearing here. I love her performance in this episode - its a little hokey, but feels very much a fit to the tone of this episode.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Originally, the location shooting would have taken place in part of Universal Studio’s backlot. However, during the show’s hiatus Paramount had rebuilt their old timey New York street set for some reason (I’m not entirely sure what film or TV show prompted this), so the producers were asked to use that and save some money.
The horse-drawn fire engine that Data rescues the crew with belonged to a museum in Los Angeles, and according to Production Designer Richard James it had never been loaned out to anyone, until the museum creators were seduced by “the power of the words ‘Star Trek’...”
You can clearly see from this still that a stunt man dressed as Data, and not Brent Spiner himself, did the actual cart riding!
Finally, the SFX of the D&D Snake Staff magic item is hugely improved for part 2. Check it out! Here’s how it looked in the first episode and in the recap for this one:
And here’s how it looks after it was souped-up:
Much fancier!
This episode won two Emmies, something only four other episodes of TNG managed. As you might well guess, these were technical awards to do with the period setting: Outstanding Individual Achievement in Costume Design for a Series and Outstanding Individual Achievement in Hairstyling for a Series. This is the only hairstyling Emmy Award that TNG ever won - almost all of the other episodes to pick up a double got it for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. Congratulations to Joy Zapata, Candace Neal, Patricia Miller, Laura Connolly, Richard Sabre, Julia L. Walker, and Josée Normand, the hairdressers behind the awesome hair this episode, which includes this reworking of Gates McFadden's real hair:
Yup, that’s not a wig (as it usually is whenever you see Dr Crusher) they curled and pinned her hair just for the scenes in the hospital. Now that’s commitment to your art!