TNG Flashback: Man of the People

Television production is a race against a ticking clock to get new episodes ready to be aired. As soon as filming on one episode is completed, the next one gets started -- sometimes even during the same day. This inexorable forward march means that sometimes, things that aren't quite ready go before the cameras all the same. So it was with "Man of the People."

Alien ambassador Ves Alkar comes aboard the Enterprise, to be escorted to a delicate negotiation between squabbling factions. When his old, malevolent mother dies en route, Alkar turns to Counselor Troi to help with a "funeral ceremony." In truth, he is using Troi as a telepathic receptacle into which he can shunt all his negative emotions. This method of calming him for his diplomatic work soon threatens Troi's very life.

For this third episode of season 6, the show had intended to film "Relics," the episode which brought original series character Scotty into the world of The Next Generation. But actor James Doohan's schedule forced a delay, which in turn forced the writers to put something in the empty slot. Drawing the assignment was Frank Abatemarco -- a veteran of other television series, but creating his first script for his new job on Star Trek. He no doubt needed guidance, the sort of direction that would normally come from the show runner, head of the writing staff. But having just been promoted to that position, Jeri Taylor was throwing all her efforts into polishing the script for the season premiere. She would in a later interview acknowledge that this wasn't a "fair introduction" for Abatemarco. But the real truth is, Abatemarco wasn't a good fit for Star Trek. He would be credited with only one more story for The Next Generation (the admittedly terrific two-parter "Chain of Command"), and would then leave the show.

All that said, "Man of the People" was not entirely Frank Abatemarco's work. The schedule was so tight on getting this script together that the entire writing staff (minus Taylor) bashed out the story together, then each took a separate act to write. With his name ultimately to be on the script, it fell to Abatemarco to do a quick polish, unifying the different writers' material. He also got to be the final arbiter of disputes between writers on just what direction the story would take -- and there was reportedly a lot of disagreement between him and the other, established Trek writers.

To hear Brannon Braga tell it, this episode could have been a truly dark exploration of Troi descending into the negative emotions inflicted on her by Ves Alkar. Where Abatemarco saw a comedic scene in which Troi councils a young ensign to stop "whining" (quite funny, to be sure), Braga instead saw Troi becoming a sort of taunting Hannibal Lecter. He claimed that Abatemarco wanted to do a Prime Directive story about Alkar's idea of "the greater good" vs. that of Our Heroes. The other writers apparently prevailed on Abatemarco enough to soften that "Star Trek cliché" (as Braga called it), as the words "Prime Directive" appear nowhere in the finished episode. Still, it ends up in this weird nether realm between ideas. Abatemarco seemed unsure enough in his role as "the new guy" to wholly force his own vision, but he was still stubborn enough not to give Braga and the other writers all they wanted either.

It might have been interesting to see if Marina Sirtis even could have delivered had the episode ended up "Hannibal Lecter" dark. I don't think many would dispute me saying she was sort of the weak link of the Next Generation cast. And her comments on making this episode are, I think, quite revealing as to why. She gave an interview talking about how much seeing her character's appearance in the mirror was enough to shape her performance. So far, so good. But she also said, "in the scene in Ten Forward where my hair was up, I saw Anne Bancroft in the mirror. I saw Mrs. Robinson and that's what I played." Also, "the old person was a witch and that's who was in the mirror, so I played a witch." Not to get all Method or preachy here, but the best acting generally comes from playing an action in pursuit of some goal, resulting in the behavior and emotion we see. To play "Mrs. Robinson" or "a witch" is trying to short cut to the result, and ignores the character's (actor buzzword here:) motivation.

If this truly is Marina Sirtis' process, it illuminates why she's strong in some kinds of scenes and weak in others. Roll your mind back for a moment to "Encounter at Farpoint," and the "great joy" and "great sadness" that Troi expressed. It came off hammy and overacted, because Sirtis was just trying to emote without any underlying context. (Though to be fair, the cheesy writing of those scenes would have been a challenge for any actress.) Now think of "Power Play," where Troi becomes possessed by a tough, brutal alien entity. In real life, many people who want to come off tough literally "act tough." This is a situation where one actually can aim for the end result, with less attention to the journey... and Marina Sirtis nailed it. (She would again "act tough" to good effect later this season, in the Romulan episode "Face of the Enemy.")

Here in this episode, when called upon to be flirtatious and sexy, Sirtis is quite good. (She was even praised by writers Michael Piller and Ronald Moore for her performance.) "Acting sexy" is something real people do when they're trying to pursue the action of flirting. But later in the episode, when Troi has aged into an old woman and is awash in a sea of negative emotion, Sirtis is lost trying to present the situation believably. She screams and rants, but it all feels over the top.

But lest it seem like I'm bagging on Marina Sirtis too hard here, it's not like she was getting a lot of help from anyone else this episode. The makeup department lets her down; in the first stage of her old age makeup, her face is swallowed by wrinkles while her neck and chest appear completely normal. The guest star lets her down; Chip Lucia is so smug as Ves Alkar, it's impossible to believe his character actually believes he's doing the right thing. The visual effects department lets her down; the sudden morph from emotionally corrupted hag to Troi's normal self is awkward and hokey.

And my, oh my, does the script let her down. So many holes in the plot. How does the empathic Troi, normally able to sense lying, not detect any of Ves Alkar's lies? (About the identity of his "mother," and the true nature of his "funeral meditation.") Why does Dr. Crusher, who normally fights for the life of a patient even when they don't want to live, all but jump at the chance to kill and revive Troi as a solution to her predicament? (Couldn't Crusher at least mention that she'll die anyway if they don't act first?) And the way this magically feeds back fatal emotion into Alkar is literally explained in the episode by Troi as being "reversed back to him somehow." Indeed.

What is good in the episode? Not much. But a little. I already mentioned that Marina Sirtis actually plays the sexy seductress well. The episode also cleverly tips its hat to its inspiration, Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray," by naming the alien spaceship in the teaser the Dorian. (If you're unfamiliar with that classic, it is -- in a nutshell -- about a man who sells his soul to preserve his youth and beauty through a portrait that ages on his behalf.)

There are other parts of the episode I'm not sure are bad or good, which I think I'll cover in my traditional closing section...

Other observations:

• I'm not sure about the decision never to show the squabbling aliens Alkar is supposed to be helping. On the one hand, the story is about Troi and not the diplomatic conflict. On the other hand, by not showing us what Alkar is actually selling his soul (and Troi's life) to obtain, he comes off even more cartoonishly evil.

• The scene where Picard confronts Alkar has me conflicted too. We get to see Patrick Stewart deliver Picard's aghast response to Alkar calling his victims "receptacles" -- a great moment. But then, when Picard proclaims that "you cannot explain away a wantonly immoral act because you think that it is connected to some higher purpose," it's a totally unearned speech. It doesn't even seem like Alkar tried to make that claim.

• At the end of that same scene, the alien bodyguards somehow manage to get right up on Worf and take his phaser right out of his holster, no problem. On the one hand, I'm certainly tired of "watch some alien beat up Worf" scenes. On the other, it can't be better to make him look incompetent instead of just plain weak, can it?

It took about 7 or 8 working days to film an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm honestly not sure that that much more time -- the time where "Relics" was meant to have been filmed -- would have fixed all that's wrong with this episode. "Man of the People" is marginally better than some of season 1 and 2's big dogs... but only marginally. I give it a D+.