The set up is interesting indeed, but the rest is rubbish. Never bought the fact that Data easily blended into the 19th century, it feels so forced. Ironically for me, Jerry Hardin was the highlight of the two parter. Usually those types of episodes with historical figures showing up prominently are pretty cheesy and grating (like "The Savage Curtain", "The 37's"). His performance is entertaining enough to make the second part more enjoyable, maybe because the main plot isn't very good in the first place. On the other side, I understand that his presence on the episode is quite unnecessary. I remember when I first watched I didn't like him at all. I'm not American so I was vaguely familiar about who he was and I was confused about why that old guy is gaining so much attention. Turns out it was just one of the most revered writers in history! Well, keep in mind that I was only 15 years old at the time, so I had no idea about him.
It's not any less believable than Guinan passing herself off as some kind of upper class socialite. While San Francisco was more progressive than most places, people who looked like Guinan only comprised about 2-5% of the population. The vast majority of them were middle class service industry workers, & discrimination in employment was as rampant as you'd expect. Someone who looked like Whoopi back then, being as well off as she looked, would've been bloody infamous. Ok... since I'm opting to be the history killjoy in here, I might as well point out that neither Jack London nor Mark Twain were in San Francisco on August 13, 1893. London was 17 & still seven months at sea, seal hunting on the Sophie Sutherland, until it came home on August 26th Hardin's Twain looks too old in this, like the 70 year old Twain. He's only 57 in 1893, & looks much less gray, like in this picture at the Tesla lab in 1894 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain#/media/File:Twain_in_Tesla's_Lab.jpg He's also bordering on financial ruin from his publishing company bankrupting him. In 1891 he moved his family to Europe for cheaper living, where he stayed until he began a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his creditors, which didn't really happen until after his last novel in 1894, & the company finally went belly up.
It's been years since I saw this but I have fond memories. Goofy but endearing. And Data's head at the start was something.
About Time's Arrow.... I'm not sure if it's a good idea to place real people who have passed in an episode?
I think as long as enough time has passed. What's the point in doing time travel stories if you can't occasionally put someone famous inside? Plus this story is the one that introduced me to and hooked me on Twain's marvellous work!
That's an unusual take imho. It's like literally one of the main reasons people choose to write time travel to the past episodes, to mention, see, interact with past figures. I can't see anything objectionable about it myself, unless it's someone who's history you're going to alter in questionable ways to damage them or something. I suppose it would be in bad taste too if the deceased was recently so, & the subject wasn't sufficiently respectful. I mean Nelson Mandela has only been dead 8 or 9 years or so. Probably not a good time to be having him show up as a quirky appearance in a silly sci-fi story But Twain? I don't see how his depiction would be any more questionable than someone choosing to play him in any genre
That's a good thing about it if Twain's work has been discovered through these episodes. Fortunately TNG didn't damage Twain's reputation. It just feels odd that the person if question cannot have a say whether that person should make an appearance. But it's fictional universe so why take real people to appear? Unless they do it themselves like Stephen Hawking. I was just thinking how the character seen in those episodes might affect how people see him and affects Twain's reputation? It probably won't and I'm making an ass of myself, again.
@JesterFace I agree there’s a line, but I don’t think the episode crossed that line with Twain. He’s generally shown to be intelligent, good natured and humorous and his work is treated with a certain reverence within the narrative. I always thought of Twain as being a stuffy Dickens type so it was his more offbeat portrayal in Star Trek that made me pick up Huckleberry Finn, so it did some good. Problems in this kind of thing come into play with movies like The Imitation Game where vast scads of factual detail are misrepresented in order to push the story forward. I was disgusted with that movie and the estate of Alan Turing were none too happy. Like I said, a line. You have to make sure you’re doing the right thing by the person you’re doing the thing by, I guess.
It's certainly a valid worry, & if we were talking about huge misrepresentations, in things that present themselves as historical accounts, I might agree, but maybe not... depending. Despite it being largely historically off & misrepresentative to both composers, I still really love Amadeus. It's a perfect piece of cinema. Motion picture has been around over a century now, with countless examples of real persons being portrayed, & nearly none are 100% historically accurate. So, at some level we must exact a continual understanding that it's not medium of accuracy. It's art, which is our responsibility to know from reality, not the artists' job to bear that burden, nor limit themselves to never depicting real persons. This one, from TNG, is of the least objectionable imho, as it's firmly set in fantasy, with no intention whatsoever of having factual depictions of them. It couldn't be more deliberately making itself known as total nonsense imho... If it were a show called "Clemens", portraying his life, & got tons wrong, I'd expect/have more objections, but even still... I loved Deadwood. Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen, & Wild Bill Hickok were real, & they did nearly nothing of accurate depictions... & we should & do know that such was their intention. I cut a lot of slack, even to the trickier biopic & historical stuff, especially when they do it well, like Apollo 13 or Schindler's List, because even when they do depart, sometimes it's a necessary cinematic component, & in the end, we shouldn't think of them as a history lesson anyhow, but only a performance piece. As long they make something artistically good, they can get my approval & praise... especially if they might also drive the viewer to learn about the real history or person. They do an ultimate good, because without them would anyone in 50 years even know who Jim Lovell or Oskar Schindler were? Now that they do, they should want to learn or at least accept that not everything we saw was objectively factual. I could show you 3 different centuries old painted portraits of a real person, that don't look 100% like the same person, because the artists had different talents, visions, & perspectives. They still serve a value, but we should be aware of that caveat all the time when taking in art imho.
And it may just have done Salieri more posthumous good than it did Mozart. Until it came out, Salieri's work was largely forgotten. Afterward, people became curious about this supposed "patron saint of mediocrity", and his music began to be performed regularly. Accurate history, including Mozart's own correspondence, suggests that while the two composers sometimes competed over jobs, they were basically colleagues, and Salieri admired Mozart a great deal.
& Salieri was a well-respected, influential & highly competent composer, who would have no reason to be jealous of Mozart at all. The whole movie (& source play) is complete & utter fiction, with a little bit about Mozart's life, talent & career as a back drop, & reared out of mostly post-mortem gossip. The same can be said of Immortal Beloved, about Beethoven, which is also a really great movie based on a lot of nonsense lol
There seemed to be a trend where the showrunnners didn't care whether their heroes should clean up their own mess after injecting themselves in Earth's past. I don't believe Samuel Clemens would act that way if he encountered what would be perceived as Extraterrestrials; to gain knowledge of TNG crew should've blew his mind. This exposure is a major problem for me and it should've been for the crew in resolving this dilemma. I'd prefer the crew to evade any exposure and if they encounter a historical figure, make it happenstance.
It's hilarious how durable the space time continuum is in Star Trek. Look at "First Contact"... it never occurs to anyone that Zephram Cochrane's support crew might have played an important part in history, and that when the Borg essentially wiped them out, history might have been seriously changed.