The Unauthorized Trekkers’ Guide to the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine

Patrick Stewart moved up to directing in The Next Generation in the fifth season, and his work includes the excellent episode “Hero Worship,” as well as ‘In Theory.”

After supervising producer Robert Justman saw Stewart onstage at UCLA, the actor was cast as Captain Picard. “A friend of mine, an English professor, was lecturing and I was part of the stage presentation,” he recalls. A few days later he was called to audition for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since then, he has become a well-known face, although occasionally fans get confused. One woman accosted him at a party and racked her brains until she recognized him. “You fly the Endeavor,” she told him triumphantly, when her memory finally clicked, “and you play William Shatner!”

But Patrick Stewart got his biggest surprise when the July 18, 1992, issue of TV Guide revealed that in a poll of readers, he was voted the sexiest man on television with 54% of the votes, beating out Burt Reynolds, A. Martinez, John Corbett, and Luke Perry. He responded to the award by expressing, “Surprise … puzzlement … and pleasure.” He said that it would have been nice had it happened when he was nineteen, which is when he lost all his hair and thought no woman would ever look at him again. Stewart had worn a series of wigs over the years and even wore one when he tested for the part of Captain Picard. The producers decided he looked fine without it. Apparently a lot of female viewers agree with them.

COMMANDER WILLIAM RIKER (#ulink_c2ca0447-87d0-5136-8f3d-bd7af7501908)

Not since the first starship Enterprise 1701 was under the command of Captain Christopher Pike has the executive officer been called “Number One.” William Riker has been given this honor by his commander, Captain Picard, to whom he is responsible for vastly important duties. When a landing team, or Away Team, is assembled, Riker is generally in charge of the team. Although it is not strictly prohibited for the starship captain to head up the team, Riker correctly recognizes that too much depends on the captain remaining safe to guide and protect his vessel.

Sending the most experienced officer down into an unknown situation is deemed too dangerous by Number One until he checks out the status of the planet and its culture for himself. Picard isn’t entirely happy being forced to remain behind, but he understands and respects his executive officer’s viewpoint.

Riker is also in charge of overseeing the condition of the vessel and the crew. When a Federation propulsion expert came aboard in “Where No One Has Gone Before,” Riker would not allow him to run tests on the system until they had been fully outlined to him and approved by the ship’s chief engineer.

“Number One” is an expression whose meaning has not appreciably altered since Earth’s seventeenth century, when the second-in-command of a sailing ship was generally known as a “first lieutenant” (hence “Number One” is used in the sense of “first”). The term also implies executive officer and captain-in-training.

THE CAPTAIN IS NOT EXPENDABLE

In those bygone days, the executive officer was also generally in command of shore parties for the same reason Riker takes such tasks upon himself now—the life of a ship’s captain is not considered to be expendable. But even though Number One is in charge of the Away Team on the ground, Captain Picard retains final authority over their actions.

William Riker joined the Enterprise crew when it picked him up at the Farpoint Station, which is where he also met some other crew members for the first time, including Beverly and Wesley Crusher, and Geordi La Forge.

Riker regards his captain with a mixture of awe and affection, but is also privy to Picard’s self-doubts, such as his annoyance at having to deal with children and families in a starship setting. As time passes, Riker has seen the captain adjust to this new situation.

While Riker has a lively interest in women, he considers it a point of honor never to let it come between himself and his duty. He is intellectually committed to sexual equality and tries to live up to that. This was put to the test in “Justice,” in which the people on Edo proved to be extremely affectionate and greeted the opposite sex with deep hugs and kisses instead of a bow or a handshake. The whole truth is that, at thirty, Riker is still young and hasn’t learned yet how completely different the two sexes can be.

Number One was surprised to see Deanna Troi after beaming aboard the Enterprise. They had been in a previous relationship and had a strong attraction for one another. Riker is slightly uncomfortable thrown into a situation where he deals with Troi every day, but each treats the other with respect, and they seem to have put their past relationship behind them.

ACCEPTING DATA

While Riker can accept Troi, and even the Klingon Worf, Lt. Commander Data posed some problems at first, but Riker has come to accept the android as an equal. He agonized when he was obliged to act as prosecutor in “The Measure of a Man,” but carried out his duty, perhaps too well for his conscience. Data helped him cope with this by pointing out that if he had declined to fulfill that duty, the judge would have made a summary judgment against Data, but the full hearing gave Picard a chance to mount his most persuasive arguments.

While Riker is called Number One by the captain and crew alike, this distinction is reserved for starship personnel and not for people who are not a part of the ship’s complement.

JONATHAN FRAKES

“I knew this was a real part, a big one,” says Jonathan Frakes regarding the six weeks of auditions he went through for the role, “and I had to get it.”

The actor credits Gene Roddenberry with giving him the needed insight into the character that eventually became his.

“Gene was so very non-Hollywood and quite paternal. One of the things he said to me was, ‘You have a Machiavellian glint in your eye. Life is a bowl of cherries.’ I think Gene felt that way, which is why he wrote the way he did. He’s very positive and Commander Riker will reflect that,” states Frakes.

The actor sees Riker as, “strong, centered, honorable, and somewhat driven. His job is to provide Captain Picard with the most efficiently run ship and the best-prepared crew he can. Because of this he seems to maintain a more military bearing than the other characters in behavior, despite the fact that salutes and other military protocol no longer exist in the twenty-fourth century.”

While Frakes cannot help but regard this role as “a real step up in my career,” he’s had recurring roles on other series such as Falcon Crest, Paper Dolls, and Bare Essence. For a year he was even a regular on the daytime drama The Doctors. Other television appearances include a role in the made-for-TV movie The Nutcracker and critically praised roles in the miniseries Dream West and both parts of the extended miniseries North and South. The actor has also appeared both on and off-Broadway and in regional theater productions.

FRAKES’S ROOTS

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Frakes did undergraduate work at Penn State before going to Harvard. He also spent several seasons with the Loeb Drama Center before moving to New York.

“I gave myself a five-year limit,” he reveals. “If I wasn’t making a living at acting in five years, I would find something else to do. After a year and a half of being the worst waiter in New York and screwing up my back as a furniture mover, I got a role in Shenandoah on Broadway and then landed a part in The Doctors.”

Frakes spent the next five years in New York City and then moved to Los Angeles in 1979, at the suggestion of his agent. “I really have been very lucky. There’s a cliché in this business that says the easy part of being an actor is doing the job. The hardest part is getting the job.”

Jonathan Frakes resides in Los Angeles and is married to actress Genie Francis, who appears on Days of Our Lives. He’s also started directing episodes of The Next Generation, including “The Offspring,” “The Drumhead,” “Reunion,” and “Cause and Effect.”

LT. COMMANDER DATA (#ulink_c2b282ca-75a3-55c5-928c-8d1a8902a67c)

Data is an android so perfectly fabricated that he can pass for human. It was thought that he was the product of some advanced alien technology until the discovery of an earlier model, Lore, revealed him to be the work of Dr. Noonian Soong, a human cyberneticist believed to be dead.

Much of the information given by Lore may be false, as is learned in “Brothers,” when a homing signal brings Data face-to-face with his creator, who in fact created both of his androids quite literally in his own image, with his own face.

The only clues to Data’s true origin are his peculiar yellow eyes, pale skin, and encyclopedic memory comparable to that of a Vulcan, but actually more extensive. It takes a skilled biologist to detect that Data is composed of artificial tissues instead of real flesh and blood. Although he only uses it in extreme circumstances, Data also possesses superhuman strength.

Data was discovered by a Starfleet Away Team investigating the disappearance of an Earth colony. The colony was completely destroyed, but the android was near the site, deactivated, and programmed with all the knowledge and memories of the lost colonists—except for the memory of what eradicated them so utterly. All this was rediscovered later, when Lore was reassembled.

At the time of his discovery, Data had no memories of his own, and was impressed by the humans who rescued him. He chose to emulate them, hoping to become more human in the process. His remarkable abilities do not give him a superiority complex. In fact, he seems to feel a bit less than human, as he cannot feel emotions, but he seems somehow to overlook the truth that his loyalty and actions toward others would actually qualify him as an exemplary human being.

He excelled in the Starfleet Academy entry tests and has never received a mark against his performance. Data benefited from the Starfleet regulation that prevents the rejection of a candidate so long as it tests out to be a sentient life form. This was later put to the test by Commander Bruce Maddox, whose efforts to classify the android as a possession of Starfleet were thwarted by Jean-Luc Picard. Picard’s spirited defense of his colleague also served to strengthen Data’s rights and liberties.

DATA CAN DO IT ALL

Data was created in the male gender, is fully functional (see “The Naked Now”!), and seems incapable of falsehood. While he speaks a more formal brand of English and does not use contractions, he tends to ramble on a bit because of his vast knowledge. He does learn and adapt, however, and discontinued calculating times to the exact second because he learned that this often annoyed humans.

He has difficulty understanding humor and idiomatic language, although he can learn vast glossaries of slang, such as that of the 1940s (“The Big Goodbye”), when he deems it relevant to the situation at hand. He also involves himself in amateur acting. Picard has shared his interest in Shakespeare with him, and Data’s researches in theatrical history have led him to become an adherent of Stanislavsky’s Method approach to acting, although his reasons are peculiar. The Method is rooted in drawing on deep emotions to bring characters to life; Data hopes to reach emotional depths through creating characters onstage, in essence reversing the original Method concept.

While Data appears to be an adult in his late twenties, he has probably existed a much shorter time than that. Because Data was never a child, he seems particularly interested in children such as Wesley Crusher, as they mark an aspect of existence he has never experienced and represent another example of his goal of being human.

In fact, his older “brother” Lore was given basic emotions, but Dr. Soong had overreached himself in this attempt and did not try to give emotions to Data after they went seriously awry in Lore. Years later, Soong developed circuitry to remedy this, but was fooled by the jealous Lore, who obtained the implant himself. Soong died soon afterward, leaving Data much the same as before. Data, despite his misgivings, continues to learn and grow as a sentient, and certainly very human, being.

BRENT SPINER

“I’m one of those people who believes that mankind will find all the answers out in space,” says Spiner, “but the first step is to get off this planet. The sun is going to burn out eventually and we better be somewhere else as a race of people by the time that happens. I think that’s why everybody digs Star Trek, because they know it’s a part of all of our futures and represents a vision of home.”

“As the series opens, we don’t know much about Data, only that he was constructed by beings on a planet which no longer exists. He’s the only thing left. His creators programmed him with a world of knowledge—he’s virtually an encyclopedia—but only in terms of information, not behavior. He’s totally innocent. However, he does possess a sense of question and wonder that allows him to evolve. His objective is to be as human as possible.”

Brent Spiner was born and raised in Houston, Texas, where he saw an average of three movies a day between the ages of eleven and fifteen. “At fifteen I was already a major film buff. I could quote lines from movies, tell you who was in it and in what year it was made. I always fantasized about being an actor. I was also lucky enough to have a brilliant teacher in high school named Cecil Pickett, who was capable of seeing potential, nurturing it, and making me aware of it.”

SPINER’S EARLY DAYS

Spiner did a lot of “gritty, ugly plays” off-Broadway after college. “The one that finally pushed me over into the serious-actor category was a Public Theater production of The Seagull for Joseph Papp.” The actor went on to roles in the Broadway musical productions of Sunday in the Park with George, The Three Musketeers, and Big River, based on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Since moving to Los Angeles in 1984, he’s appeared in such plays as Little Shop of Horrors at the Westwood Playhouse. His feature-film credits include the Woody Allen film Stardust Memories. On television he has appeared on such series as The Twilight Zone, Hill Street Blues, Cheers, and Night Court.

One could say that he was very well prepared for his role as Data by his belief in extraterrestrials. “Obviously I’m from another planet.” He laughs, but adds that he seriously does believe in beings from other planets and will continue to do so until such things are disproven.

LIEUTENANT WORF (#ulink_db3fc276-a90a-5df3-8361-f57af8c421c3)

The prediction made by the Organians nearly a century before has come to pass. The Klingon Empire and the Federation are at peace. Even so, Worf is unique as the only Klingon officer on a Starfleet ship. When his family was destroyed in a treacherous Romulan attack on a Klingon outpost, Worf was rescued and raised by humans of Slavic extraction, who did their best to keep their adopted son in touch with his Klingon roots. He joined Starfleet and is treated with the same courtesy and respect shown any other bridge officer—possibly even more, since the Klingons still have a remarkable reputation for violence.