Shades of Gray - how would you fix the episode?

Stargate managed to make its clip shows engaging and entertaining. Figure out what they did right and that would salvage Shades of Gray.

 

How would I fix it? Disintegration.

 

Assuming the rule was, you had to change it, not merely annihilate it.

 

I think instead of Shades of Grey, just some new story....I think of TOS's Balance of Terror, where the bulk/most of the episode was on the bridge. no new sets, no outdoor scenery. Even along the lines of the episode Disaster, just say the ship is adrift, and just some touching shots in parts of the ship that was already built -- Sickbay, Bridge, Engineering.

 

Perhaps go the "voyager conspiracy" route ? One of the problems IMHO was that there was no overall structure to the fragments, other than that they contained 'happy memories' or 'frightful experiences' or such.

Select and arrange clips in such a way that say, Picard look suspicious in some way. Does he have a second agenda? Let Riker go paranoid, when he 'replays' those clips in his head. (and of course, in the end, we discover something has been wrong with Riker, not Picard) Only I don't know if the TNG show up until that point would have had the screen material from previous episodes to pull something like that off.

 

It's the only TNG episode that I've seen only once, so my memory of it is a little fuzzy. Even Genesis is not as bad, and that says something!

 

Clip shows can be done well.

South Park did an episode called 'City on the Edge of Forever' which although I'm not a fan as such was hilarious because they kept showing clips of things that never happened. Someone (Kyle or Stan) then brought up a memory of Kenny getting killed. Kenny of course objected as he was stood right there. ...and then got killed.

As someone has already said, Stargate SG-1 got it bang on the money with Politics. I think they did a couple of other clip shows too and they were pretty good.

Someone also said show the previous episode but change the ending. Lexx (yeah yeah, bad example I know) did something similar with a two-parter called The Net/The Web. The second of the two episodes was exactly the same episode but from a different perspective. To this day I still can't make up my mind if it was stupid or genius.

On a side note, I'm in the process of re-watching TNG by introducing it to my girlfriend. We're currently up to Timescape and so far, I've only allowed her to skip Code of Honor and Justice (dreadful, just dreadful episodes) but we're not going to skip Shades of Gray. I'm showing her Trek at her best so she's gonna have to see Trek at its worst

 

For some reason I've blocked the memory of Code of Honor and Justice out. I agree those two are just dreadful and even worse than shades of gray.

 

The problem IIRC was that they only had the budget for a three-day shoot, when even your typical all-ship-board "bottle show" for TNG would still require the basic six to seven day shooting schedule. They kind of had to pad the episode out somehow.

 

The problem is that even as a clip show, it stinks.

 

Yeah it does, but that isn't relevant to what Nathan seemed to be saying about shooting a 'minimal' episode on the standing sets instead, which still would've required more money than they had for this particular episode.

The problem with "Shades of Gray" isn't a lack of ambition from the writer... it's that they literally had a certain amount of money and a certain amount of time, and no more. And they used all of it filming what they did film. The reason they had to do this is because other episodes in the season went way over their budget allocation. The reason this didn't happen again is because in later seasons and shows they were much more equitable about how they spread the money across the year, so the "bottle-episodes" later on at least had enough money to tell a real story even if it were a minimal one. They learned their lesson on season 2 of TNG and made sure it never happened again.

 

You can't really fix something that terrible. You would just have to come up with a completely different idea. Since I have an immature sense of humor, perhaps the entire episode could have been a dream Riker was having. It looks like a soap opera and it's just Riker getting to first base several times. Of course, there would be cheesy lines he would use to seduce them. There's a strong possibility it could lead to some genuine comedy.

 

It's not even terrible for me. It's just a non-episode. It's like it never happened. It's not bad enough to scar the season, not good enough to appear on the radar. Skip it, you lose nothing, you gain nothing. If anything can be said of it, it's a flat way of dismissing Muldaur given that this is her final appearance.

 

Along similar lines, have the framing device be Riker having bad nightmares after the cheese he ate before bed. Then retcon the entire first two seasons out of existence by having him wake up at end saying, "And you were there, and you, and you, and there was this virus that made us act drunk, and there was this oil slick monster, and.... oh Auntie Em, it was the strangest dream...."

And then have Tasha Yar walk out of the shower, alive and well.

 

This is actually a great way to look at it. And I do always end up skipping this episode when I watch TNG.

 

I agree with the ideas already suggested. If budget were no issue and you could film new flashbacks that would be great, but I'd restrict it to ideas that only existed at that point in the show's production history, so no Pegasus or Pressman since they were only created in Season 7. So maybe stuff on Betazed or seeing Tasha Yar again. But if budget were an issue then as people said, Stargate SG1 was the king of the clipshows. Not only "Politics" but I really love "Inauguration" for how it gave us a different perspective on the world of Stargate and simply reused sets/actors that were already in use for "Lost City". I also think the Doctor Who Doctor-lite episodes were pretty great at this and we ended up with stuff like "Blink" as a result.

 

Clips shows are not inherently bad things.

We tend to forget that The Original Series had a clip show too.... it was called "The Menagerie", but at least they had the benefit of having footage from an entire unaired episode from which to pull clips. They got lucky, and the clever use of the unaired pilot was widely praised at the time.

Perhaps if there had been extensive trims of deleted scenes kept in TNG's vault, or even alternative takes that they could call upon to give the viewers something different to what we'd already seen, then "Shades of Grey" could've been touted as a tour-de-force for the series.

 

It might have also worked better if it had occurred later in the series' run.

 

^ Absolutely agree.

A big problem is that when you've only got 47 previous episodes of live-action material to choose from, then inevitably there will be a stale element that sinks in. Most of the episode's clips came from show's that were only months old. Something like this in Season 7, for example, looking back over the entire journey, would I think have been much better received (if not exactly liked. )

 

What ever changes are made, keep this.

Combine ST Enterprise's movie night with Mystery Science Theater 3000, the senior staff watch a classic movie while incessantly talking over it.

Inexpensive because mostly the actor would be heard in voice over which could be dubbed in.