Why no 'evil TNG crew' episode ?

In most trek incarnations, there have been episodes featuring 'evil versions' of the crew, in mirror universes/alternate realities/warped accounts retold centuries later/whatever . TOS, DS9, VOY, ENT, they all feature such 'evil crew' episodes.

Not so in TNG AFAIK (though I could be forgetting an ep that does just that) -- the most we get is some members of the cast becoming evil due to alien posession. Why ? Mere coincidence ? Or is there something more to be said ? (like, 'tng took itself quite seriously and an evil crew episode would have been too farcical')

Mind you, I'm not saying it should have been done, or that it would have been 'cool' -in fact I'm not particularly fond of such cliché ideas myself- -- just curious as to why it didn't happen in TNG, as it is a trope the other trek shows obviously couldn't resist.

 

Perhaps B&B were too early in their stint to run so low on ideas as to create an evil crew show or arc.

j/k. It would have been interesting to see, actually.

 

"Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Parallels" both dabbled in the idea.

In "Yesterday's Enterprise," we saw an episode based around the premise of what if the Enterprise was a battleship, which was not utterly unlike the premise of the original "Mirror, Mirror."

In "Parallels," we saw an alternate reality with long-bearded Riker not giving a damn about anybody but himself.

 

TNG does show alternate realities on some occasions, yes. In both shows you mention, however, I wouldn't say any crew is evil, just desparate.

 

Jerome Bixby did pitch a "Mirror, Mirror" sequel to TNG called "Broken Mirror," but it was rejected. I'm sure they got a variety of "evil twin" episode pitches, since they heard hundreds of pitches a week and no doubt got every cliche and TOS rehash imaginable tossed their way multiple times. But it isn't the concept that makes a story worth doing, it's the execution. Presumably nobody found an angle on the evil-twins idea that made it worth doing.

Besides, for most of its run, TNG was trying to establish its own identity as a distinct entity from TOS. Aside from doing "The Naked Now" as episode 2, it mostly tried to avoid reusing TOS elements and to develop its own story threads and species. That changed over time, as TOS fans like Ron Moore came onto the staff and began injecting more TOS elements, but there would've been resistance to doing a Mirror Universe sequel just for the sake of doing a sequel. Presumably what made the DS9 producers think "Crossover" was worth doing was that it deconstructed Kirk's solution in the original episode, showing that it may have done more harm than good. That was the kind of fresh twist that made it worthwhile in a way that a more-of-the-same Terran Empire revisit would not have been.

I will never understand the "B&B" myth, the idea that Berman and Braga were perpetual collaborators. Brannon Braga didn't even join the TNG writing staff until season 4, when he was a staff writer and intern, the lowest rung on the totem pole. He made it to story editor in season 6 and co-producer in season 7, the lowest rank that actually has "producer" in the name. And as a writer, his usual collaborator on TNG was Ron Moore. (The actual showrunner on TNG was Gene Roddenberry in season 1, Maurice Hurley in S2, Michael Piller in S3-6, and Jeri Taylor in S7.)

Braga then moved to Voyager as producer (one step up) under showrunners Piller and Taylor, moving up through the ranks to supervising producer in season 2 and co-executive producer in season 4 before eventually taking over as executive producer/showrunner in season 5 and 6, then ceding the showrunner post to Ken Biller for season 7 while he moved on to develop Enterprise. On VGR, his main writing partner was Joe Menosky.

As for Rick Berman, he was more the production executive than the showrunner (i.e. more the equivalent of TOS's Herb Solow than Gene Roddenberry, for all that he was treated as Roddenberry's successor), and he rarely contributed as a writer on TNG, DS9, or VGR, except for developing story outlines for a lot of the big 2-parters. The only actual scripts he wrote on any of those series were the TNG episodes "Brothers" and "A Matter of Time," both of which he wrote solo. He worked closely with Braga on the two VGR seasons that Braga ran, but as Braga's boss, not his partner. He co-wrote the stories to Generations and First Contact with Moore and Braga, but worked on Insurrection and Nemesis with zero involvement from Braga.

The only time when "Berman and Braga" existed as a real collaboration was on Enterprise, where Berman moved into screenwriting on a regular basis and he and Braga served as co-showrunners for the first three seasons. Since ENT ended nearly a decade ago, they've gone their separate ways and haven't worked together since.

So if we're talking about TNG, for the most part, you should be talking about "B&P" -- Berman and Piller. At that point, Braga was basically the Wesley Crusher to their Picard and Riker. Or maybe the Ensign Ro, considering that he only came onboard about halfway through the series.

 

The TNG people tried hard to avoid trite and cliche storylines (opinions on their success may vary). As one producer put it, "You run low on ideas on this show, you can't just fall back and say 'Let's do the rodeo episode.'"

 

Christopher, I won't re-quote your whole post but thank you for eloquently summing up exactly how I feel about this whole "B&B" nonsense.

On topic, I agree with others here - I think the producers were commendably trying to avoid blatant rehashes. We did get a glimpse of what it might've been like with the novel "Dark Mirror" though.

 

Odd they would state such because I remember having the impression that many storylines seemed more or less formulaic to me. I guess a discussion of such invariably digresses into a discussion regarding how closely one story matches another.

However, I do appreciate that it must be extremely difficult to write hundreds of shows without eventually banging into an old concept in one way or another. Then you have to worry about 'canon' issues and network suits trying to tweak things, censor things, cut costs or use a specific guest star or concept. It would all probably cause me to pull out more hair than I have left.

 

Agreed. It's not really the same thing.

 

You mean "The Naked Now"? I think it was partly because the premise was a good way to develop the characters. There's an old saying (not that I really believe it) that you don't really know who a person is until you've seen them drunk. "The Naked Time" was a strong episode for defining the characters of TOS and what motivated them, so Roddenberry figured the same premise would do the same for fleshing out the TNG cast -- and for establishing that it was a more modern, less prudish era where the show could go to more overtly sexual places than the original could.

Plus I think they wanted to do one big nod to the original series before moving on. Though maybe it was a mistake to do it so soon, because it may have sent the wrong message about what to expect from the series. (One could say the same of Star Trek Into Darkness, perhaps.)

The last thing that TNG's early producers were worried about was canon. Roddenberry had a lot of regrets about TOS, things that hadn't turned out as well as he'd hoped, and wasn't too happy with the aspects of the franchise that had been created under other people's leadership, like the third season of TOS, the animated series, and the movies (even though he chose to step back from season 3, and even though he had total creative control over TAS but chose to leave it in other hands). So he saw TNG as a way of defining a new Star Trek canon that superseded the old one, keeping the broad strokes of what came before but freely rewriting history. He tended to promote the view (particularly in his TMP novelization) that earlier incarnations of Trek were inaccurate dramatizations and that the newer versions were closer to the underlying "reality." It was only in later seasons, after Roddenberry was out of the picture, that other producers began tying the new shows more closely to TOS.

And really, as a rule, most long-running series are flexible about their continuity, and often retcon, reinterpret, or ignore past continuity that doesn't fit their current needs. It's a myth that "canon" means a consistent reality. It just means something that pretends to be, with the newer version always superseding the older. Writing is a process of constant revision and reworking, so writers never see their past ideas as fixed and immutable -- just as approximations that can be refined further over time, given the chance.

 

^ This is what I've always suspected. It was the 1st spin-off, & it was the 1st time in 20 years Star Trek had been on TV. Reason enough to be gun shy about being compared to or trying to relate to TOS. It's why there's very little featuring of TOS aliens, Vulcan, Andorian, Gorn, etc.. It's why it's set a century later, and it's probably why they rejected mirror universe ideas. Heck, it's probably even why they concocted the holodeck, so they could use contemporary props, sets, & costumes, without creating TOS style, Earth mimicking planets.

The want of their own identity. Ironically enough, they still found ways to do the evil twin, or doppelganger episodes. Datalore, Allegiance, etc... But all in all, TNG was always going to be the one that distanced itself from TOS the most. It had the daunting task of reigniting interest in a Star Trek TV show, a concept that had been long dormant on tv, and a syndicated predecessor rerunning around the world which they could never really embrace in the new era, an era they redefined for themselves, and carried over with 3 other spin-offs done in THEIR style.

 

If only they did...

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6T2nRAazrY[/yt]

 

I thought they tried that with "Power Play" While it was the disembodied prisoners that were "evil" they were played by 3 crew members. But maybe I'm not answering your question correctly.

I also think that going to the Mirror Universe well too damn many times is the reason most of those other episodes exist.

 

Dark Mirror is a pretty good novel.

 

I'm glad they had no 'evil duplicates' episodes in TNG. It's kind of a hacky trope.

 

Long-bearded Riker is the 'Neighbourhood Crazy Old Guy On His Porch' of the Star Trek multiverse.

"Yew Borg, git off'n mah lawn, or I'mma whack yew with mah stick!"

 

Yeah, I thought so as well. In addition Shatner's series of books utilized the MU characters effectively.

 

From the first airing in '87, I always saw the dialog as Wesley implements his reverse-tractor beam as a blatant disclaimer about the aim of the show from there on:

While being an exact replica of a TOS episode, it ends with them "pushing away" from a TOS-era ship and going off on their own path.

Whether or not it was actually intentional, it always has been so in my mind!

 

Definitely worth a read. The description of the mirror Enterprise alone is enough to send chills down the spine.

 

The reason there was none is because TNG was first. There was no precedent set yet.