Timescape
One more Mindwarp for the road as season six's final standalone story shatters the space-time continuum just for a lark
Troi, LaForge, Data, and Captain Picard are on a Runabout (yes, the Enterprise-D magically received one for no good reason in this episode) when Troi suddenly watches everyone around her frozen in time. Encountering all sorts of strange and bizarre time effects, some faster, some slower, they navigate the treacherous path back to the Enterprise - only to find it locked in battle with a Romulan Warbird! Digging out the plot device from “Time's Arrow”, Data makes some magic armbands to let them all go aboard the Enterprise and look for clues. What nefarious scheme are the Romulans up to this time, and who are the weird timey-wimey aliens caught up in this mess...?
Words
This one began as a one-sentence pitch from Mark Gehred-O’Connell for a “ship trapped in time like amber”. Gehred-O’Connell didn’t get a credit for this episode, but it opened the door for him as a Trek writer, and he picked up four credits on DS9. Apparently, his pitch set Brannon Braga thinking:
In my original idea, neither ship was the Enterprise. My story involved the Enterprise coming across two other ships in this situation and having to diffuse it because it endangered the whole sector. But when I pitched the story, Brannon blurted out, “Oh no, one of those ships has to be the Enterprise!” The minute I started in, I could tell the wheels were already turning in his mind.
Originally, Gehred-O’Connell would have developed the screenplay, but when another script had to be beamed out into space to die the writing team had to quickly rush something into production. Braga could taste an opportunity to out-do his previous story, “Cause and Effect” with an even more drastic time loop tale:
This is “Cause and Effect” times ten. Time is not only looping, it’s moving backwards, accelerating and stopping and moving backwards... I wanted to do this as ‘man against nature’, or ‘man against time’. What The Abyss was to deep-sea diving, this would be to ‘deep-time diving’.
Indeed, Braga’s original title for the episode was “Deep Time”.
Right from the start, everyone recognised this was going to be a remarkably complex production. Braga began to doubt it was possible, and Jeri Taylor considered it “absolutely bizarre”, full of complicated sequences and major challenges. Rick Berman decided to invite Adam Nimoy, who had debuted as director on TNG with “Rascals” to take this one on, later noting:
My feeling was that nobody should be asked to be judged on a work that was so unusual in terms of having to come in and direct these kids. I basically said I would like to give him another shot to work with adults.
This is weird to read, because I rate “Rascals”, which has to have been a very difficult episode to direct, and I cannot shake the feeling that Adam Nimoy is being brought into episodes that nobody in the regular directorial rotation dares to direct! But Nimoy threw himself into this one with gusto - and as David Livingston was later to remark, he provided unbelievably detailed instructions!
I think this is the longest optical memo we have ever had. It’s over six pages long. Adam was very specific about what he wanted and I knew he was going to do great on it. He’s got good genes.
Nimoy described Braga’s script as having an “eerie ambience”, and was inspired by the 1924 German impressionistic film The Hands of Orlac in shooting this episode.
Working on this one really buffed up his skills as a director:
It was very different. I relied a lot on the special effects guys in an attempt to keep what I thought was the drama of the scene and deal with the restrictions that special effects put on you in terms of what you can do with the actors while also using those effects to maximum dramatic capacity to make it work with the scene. It’s a whole different mindset. I’m learning a lot from these guys.
Finally, a few throwaway references that Braga snuck into the script are worth mentioning. He has the first mention of Parrisis Squares since season four’s “Future Imperfect” in the first scene of the teaser, while the names of the conference speakers in the second teaser scene are references to Braga’s own life. Wagner was named after someone Braga dated, while Vassbinder was one of his high-school teachers. Incredibly, Dr Vassbinder is mentioned again by Wesley Crusher in Will Wheaton’s season seven appearance, and the unseen character even gets a nod in a Voyager episode - not bad for a throwaway mention!
Acting Roles
I very much enjoy the little character vignettes in the teaser and the epilogue, which add some much needed character to an otherwise rather dry story. Everyone acquits themselves well with the material given to them, but it all takes something of a back seat to the gratuitous volume of SFX in this one.
But it’s the guest cast that interested me most about this episode, not least of all because it’s so bizarre how it all plays out.
Michael Bofshever (left) plays the alien disguised as a male Romulan and gets an on-screen credit for it (appearing again in DS9 in a small role), while Patricia Tallman (right) plays the alien disguised as a female Romulan and doesn’t get credited at all, even though her scene actually has a little more impact! She has uncredited appearances throughout all the original Trek production run from TNG onwards, but is better known as the telepath Lyta Alexander from Babylon 5, who did give her an on screen credit!
John DeMita (above, left) gets an on screen credit as the Romulan who seems to be blasting Dr Crusher into oblivion, even though he has a tiny role here. As a voice actor he’s racked up more than a hundred and fifty roles (including Hiashi Hyuga in Naruto, Beerus in Dragon Ball Super, and small roles in nearly every English adaptation of Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki movies) but he only has a few on screen appearances including this one and - yes, you’ve guessed it! - L.A. Law just a few months after landing this gig (the exchange programme continues!).
While Joel Fredericks (above, far right) gets an on-screen credit as ‘Engineer’ (just ‘Ensign’ in the screenplay) on the back of his two lines exchanged with Brent Spiner’s Data, one of only four roles, his first being directly before this one on Cheers as ‘Sam II’, one of the members of the emotional support group Ted Danson's Sam forms when his car is stolen. The comparison between the two careers is striking!
And that’s just the start of the lower decks fun! Because time is frozen, we get to see a lot of people who don't usually get to do much more than walk down a corridor.
On the bridge (top left), Steve Blalock makes his uncredited TNG debut as an Ensign at ops, having previously appeared as an Enterprise crewman in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: Search for Spock, where he also played a Vulcan guard. A stuntman by trade, he appears throughout the original franchise in uncredited roles, as well as performing stunts for these shows.
Likewise, there’s Ericka Bryce (top centre) as a security officer. She’s also a stunt performer, but she also served as a set medic on a huge number of productions. We previously saw her in “Man of the People” as an uncredited extra, but here she’s in shot for a sustained length of time.
While at ops (top right) is a performer known only as ‘Kathy’ (as written on her casting photo, shown bottom right) who appears in four episodes starting with “The Chase”.
Elsewhere, we meet Steven Boz (bottom left) as a security officer in the corridors. He appears in twelve TNG episodes starting with “The Perfect Mate” (and Star Trek: Generations), but this is the only extended shot of him that we really see.
There’s also Kerry Hoyt (bottom centre), also as a corridor security officer. He has seventeen TNG episodes starting with “Realm of Fear” (and also appears in Star Trek: Generations), and once again this is really the only time we get a good look at him. Still, it could be worse: nobody seems to even know who that guy standing behind him might be!
It really is a goldmine for spotting lower decks performers this episode!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
This episode is packed full of special effects shots, but the most striking is the Enterprise and Warbird frozen in time, pictured above! And of course, this is season six’s time loop episode, so naturally we have to blow up the Enterprise!
Although actually, my favourite moment is where a delirious Picard draws a smiley on a warp core breach!
Elsewhere, there’s something very odd going on: Captain Picard and his companions are returning to the Enterprise-D on a Runabout, the class of Federation ship introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Why? Well, obviously in the first instance it was to save money by reusing stock footage from that show - but pragmatically they already had a new shuttlecraft added just this season, so that isn’t really an adequate explanation.
It turns out that DS9 had roared through its season one budget and had not managed to build an interior aft set for the Runabout. Since TNG had astonishingly not spent all of its budget yet (there is an impressive number of really great bottle shows in season six, including of course “Frame of Mind”), they offered to help out. DS9 had seven weeks to build the Runabout cockpit, but set designer Richard James and set decorator Jim Mees had to make the aft set in just nine days, requiring their staff to work around the clock to pull it off! But it looks great in the final episode, I’m pleased to say.
Ironically, in the end they never used this set on DS9 to represent any part of a Runabout! They did, however, break it out of mothballs for a room on a Federation starship in a season two episode, but for the most part all that hard work by James and Mees only made it on screen in this single episode of TNG.
One of my favorite TNG episodes. The whole bit on the shuttle is so well done, it always gets me even after multiple viewing. And the Picard and his smiley belong to rare enigmas of the ST canon.