The Royale: What if it was a different book?

Discussion in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' started by Trekker4747, Feb 11, 2012.

  1. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jul 16, 2001
    Location:
    Trekker4747
    In Season 2's "The Royale" the Enterprise comes across the remains of a 21st century manned space vessel that has somehow found itself light years further out that it should have been able to reach -or gotten to in the elapsed time. Turns out the vessel was pulled by an alien race, in inadvertently destroyed and the sole survivor of the craft, Col. Richey was set-up on un-inhabited/able planet by the aliens and given a representation of what the aliens thought Earth was like out of a sense of remorse or guilt.

    The simulation Richey was set-up in was from a novel he had on board that a was a poorly-written pulp-trash novel filled with cliches and badly written characters, Rchey in his own journal writes that he feels no ill-will towards the aliens but will welcome death when it comes.

    The events of the novel play out in the episode and includes a young bellboy and his love for a woman belonging to a mobster (who ends up killing the bell-hop), a woman plotting with another man to kill her husband (we learn about this through Data's recounting of the novel) and 3 businessmen who come to buy the hotel (which ends up being the Away Team.)

    Anyway, what if another novel had been on the NASA craft and the aliens had built a simulation of that novel for Richey. Say if the book has been one of the Twilight novels?

    How do you think things would have played out in the episode with the Away Team in that novel? (Yes, the episode would be named something different.)
     
  2. 22 Stars

    22 Stars Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Nov 25, 2001
    It might have been a better and creepier episode!
     
  3. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jan 30, 2001
    Location:
    America, Fuck Yeah!!!
    Poor bastard wouldn't have died in his sleep, he'd have hung himself.
     
  4. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 20, 2009
    Location:
    T'Girl
    The title of the episode would be: "L. Frank Baum's Original Oz Series". Which I saw just the other day down at University Book Store.

    The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
    The Marvelous Land of Oz,
    Ozma of Oz,
    Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz,
    The Road to Oz,
    The Emerald City of Oz,
    The Patchwork Girl Of Oz,
    Little Wizard Stories of Oz,
    Tik-Tok of Oz,
    The Scarecrow Of Oz,
    Rinkitink In Oz,
    The Lost Princess Of Oz,
    The Tin Woodman Of Oz,
    The Magic of Oz,
    Glinda Of Oz.

    Oh, just think of the fun Riker, Data and Worf would have had figuring this episode out.

    :)
     
  5. Tina Lawton

    Tina Lawton Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Jan 8, 2012
    Star Trek meets Twilight? Perish the thought.
     
  6. Alrik

    Alrik Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Feb 11, 2003
    Location:
    Alrik is on A deck chair, somewhere....
    Thanks Bill. Had to damn near bite through my lip to keep from waking the missus. :guffaw: :guffaw: :guffaw: You couldn't be more spot on!
     
  7. You_Will_Fail

    You_Will_Fail Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Sep 1, 2010
    Location:
    Trill, Federation World and Proud
    It was a nice idea for an episode but I actually feel if the book had been Twilight, the episode probably would have been better. The novel we got was just lame.
     
  8. SonicRanger

    SonicRanger Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Feb 17, 2001
    Location:
    Minneapolis, MN
    Part of the joke is that the novel is terrible. The poor guy or one of his shipmates brought along his favorite guilty pleasure, a tacky pulp novel, to pass among the crew for a laugh on their long voyage. The aliens mistook the bad novel as everyday life on Earth.

    That said, we know which 20th-century authors are remembered by the time of Kirk and Spock: Jacqueline Suzanne and Harold Robbins.
     
  9. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jul 16, 2001
    Location:
    Trekker4747
    Well, that was sort-of the point it was a lame, crappy, novel.

    Allsaid, though. The episode itself is a guilty pleasure of mine. :)
     
  10. Ar-Pharazon

    Ar-Pharazon Admiral Premium Member

    Joined:
    May 19, 2005
    Location:
    Far North Chicago Suburbs
    The Kama Sutra.

    Of course, it was a G rated show, so not so much.
     
  11. RAMA

    RAMA Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 13, 1999
    Location:
    USA
    What if it was a "futuristic" TOS novel? Now that might have been a good crossover episode instead of the lukewarm episode we got.

    RAMA
     
  12. SonicRanger

    SonicRanger Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Feb 17, 2001
    Location:
    Minneapolis, MN
    Naw. I think episode was very "Twilight Zone"/"Outer Limits" for TNG, and I love it for that reason -- making the novel too futuristic would have ruined that feel, but it would have diluted the "fish out of water" part for our characters.
     
  13. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jul 16, 2001
    Location:
    Trekker4747
    No, I agree. It's a fun episode with that odd feel. Just wondering what some would think the episode would be like if the aliens found a different book with Richey.

    I do have to chuckle when Worf finds the book in the hotel nightstand and expect him to say, "Who are the Gideons, sir?"
     
  14. MacLeod

    MacLeod Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2001
    Location:
    Great Britain
    My memory might be a lit out, but didn't this episode re-write the laws of physics and have a colder tempature than is possible -291C. When absolute zero is around -273C
     
  15. The Castellan

    The Castellan Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    May 2, 2004
    Location:
    The Plains of Cydonia
    When dealing with outside of Earth, expect the unexpected.


    What would have really stunk would have been a Steven King novel; Riker, Data and Worf would have found Richey's cut up body in that room's closet.:p
     
  16. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jul 16, 2001
    Location:
    Trekker4747
    Yeah, IIRC the line was supposed to be -291F but something got changed somewhere. In-Universe we could reason that "absolute zero" was redefined to a colder temperature after further study maybe at the "present" 0K there's still some activity on a quantum or even sub-quantum level (or in subspace) that stops at the lower temperature.
     
  17. Finn

    Finn Bad Batch of TrekBBS Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 30, 2006
    Star Wars; The phantom menace

    Worf strangles Jar Jar Binks
     
  18. Sho

    Sho Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Sep 8, 2006
    Location:
    Berlin, Germany
    The Royale is an episode that keeps following me, I am almost convinced there's a vast cosmic conspiracy going on. For years, whenever I spotted a Trek rerun in the program guide and innocently turned on the telly, it would be The Royale. Once a friend borrowed the TNG DVD sets from me, and when I went to visit him he had The Royale on pause in the living room. Another time I was flying from Berlin to Cologne, which is about a 50 minute trip, and the guy next to me popped on The Royale on his portable DVD player after take-off. It's the single Trek episode I've seen most often, at least ten times.
     
  19. MacLeod

    MacLeod Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2001
    Location:
    Great Britain
    No doubt somebody realised that like using km instead of miles they were supposed to be using C instead of F so changed the word without realising that a tempature of -291C is impossible.
     
  20. Tina Lawton

    Tina Lawton Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Jan 8, 2012
    OK, my two cents.

    On another website I have a thread running entitled "Star Trek The Next Generation - The Best and Worst Of". I reviewed this episode as part of that thread, and thought I would reprint that review here.

    For those interested.

    WARNING: Those of you who liked this particular episode....may not be pleased.

    And now my review of:

    THE ROYALE

    “You’re traveling through another dimension--a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. Only this dimension will ruin your sight, sound awful and fry your mind. A journey into a wasteland whose boundaries are that of someone’s witless imagination. You’re moving into a land of both dark shadow and no substance, of things without ideas. There is a signpost up ahead, your next stop, The Extreme Boredom Zone!”

    Apologies to Rod Serling.

    The Hotel Royale. Scripts check in but they don’t check out! If ever a Trek episode needed to be cast into the Sea of Forgetfulness, this was it.

    So, the Enterprise is in orbit around an uncharted planet named Theta Alpha Pi, rumored to be the last known location of an ancient Frat Party. Riker wants in, of course, so he goes to see Picard, and finds him engaged in trying to solve a mathematical puzzle which has been plaguing the Captain for hours and the best minds in Starfleet for over 800 years. The problem reads:

    “A train leaves Chicago at 8 A.M. heading West traveling at 53 miles per hour……”

    But their permutations are interrupted when Chief O’Brian calls and says they have intercepted some space junk floating past the ship. When they beam a portion of this junk on board, they find the NASA emblem painted on the side. Oh noes! Another mystery for Picard to send his minions off running around trying to solve by way of an improbable and at times impossible series of idiotic events leading to one of the worst, not to mention most boring, episodes ever to be produced.

    Data tells Riker that the atmosphere of the planet below is comprised mostly of methane, but this is simply the result of the emissions of the Frat boys after their extended party. But wait! There is one place the intrepid crew of the Enterprise can safely beam down to, a structure built on the frozen Frat boy methane but which mysteriously is surrounded by breathable oxygen. That is all Riker needs to hear, and he, Data, and Worf are off to see if the party may still be going on.

    At this point, dedicated fans knew there would be no real conflict in this episode, because Ensign Ricky was not assigned to the away team. Therefore, no one was going to die. Except perhaps the viewer, succumbing to the effects of the Extreme Boredom Zone.

    The away team materializes inside a ZONE OF DARKNESS. Oooooh! They see a revolving door in the distance, and Doctor Who steps out and invites them inside, where they find the Frat boys have all grown up and are now shooting craps and playing blackjack in a casino. The Enterprise three join the fun, until they find out they are trapped, get this now, in a dime-store novel the events of which cannot be escaped until they play out the novel’s sequence of events.

    Wow. Now there was an original idea. I kept waiting for Alice to run by, looking for the Queen of Hearts. Or perhaps Bugs Bunny poking his head up through the floor saying he must have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The “plot” of this episode certainly would have been right at home in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

    During one scene on board the Enterprise, Picard is reading the actual novel the events happening below are based on. He comments on how badly the novel is written. So I guess that is the excuse for the entire episode. Counselor Troi, attempting to display some optimism in the face of the intense boredom threatening the entire ship, says that maybe it will get better. Picard responds:

    “Not until the third season, Counselor. Provided we all survive that long.”

    Test time, dear readers. See if you can correctly identify where the “aliens” who created this travesty of writing got the idea for the “Hotel Royale” story.

    1. A bad dream the result of eating an entire bag of Doritos and having to breath your own methane emissions.

    2. They stole if from an old “Lost in Space” episode.

    3. They stole if from an Original Series episode.

    Or, and no-one would ever have seen this coming:

    4. One of the astronauts on board the ship found floating in pieces around the planet had brought it with them.

    The answer is 2, 3, and 4. This episode was written, perhaps after the events described in number 1 above, by Tracy Torme. He was actually proud of it, even though he had originally pitched the idea for season one of TNG but was told it didn’t suck enough to be in season one. Kirk and company did something much like this in the TOS episode “A Piece of the Action”, and Lost in Space did an episode like this as well. The notion of characters becoming caught up in the events of other famous novels is as old as storytelling itself. One notable example is Clarke’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. Consequently, there was nothing new to see here. Well, there was one thing new to see, defined as how TNG took the ideal of “The Crappy Episode” to a new low.

    WWKD: Set the auto-destruct on his ship simply out of pride.

    There is one brief, and I stress brief, moment of worth in this otherwise completely forgettable piece of crap. When the Enterprise crew find the body of one of the Earth Astronauts, Riker comments:

    "Looks like the poor devil died in his sleep."

    Worf responds:

    "What a terrible way to die."

    Speaking of death, Riker and company find the last log entries of the dead astronaut interred at the Hotel Royale. In it, the astronaut states:

    “I hold no malice toward my benefactors. They could not possibly know the hell they have put me through, for it was such a badly written book, filled with endless cliché and shallow characters. I shall welcome death when it comes.”

    The fan watching this episode understood that sentiment only too well.

    To end this episode, Picard suggest that, like the math problem involving the two trains, they may never be able to solve the puzzle of the Hotel Royale. Allow me to help out with that. The producers of TNG got caught with their pants down, and had nothing other than this juvenile sophomoric boring what qualified as a script in name only piece of crap to produce so that something would go on the air.

    Puzzle solved. Oh, and the answer to the train problem? 123.5 miles out.