Trials and Tribble-ations Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN: 0-7434-2083-7

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  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Afterword

  Look for STAR TREK fiction from Pocket Books

  INTRODUCTION

  Trials and Tribble-ations

  by David Gerrold

  I have now spent more years on this planet known as "the guy who created the tribbles" than I spent wondering what I would be when I grew up; if I had known I was going to be "the guy who created the tribbles" for the rest of my life, I might have thought twice about it.

  When I wrote it, I just wanted to write one good Star Trek episode, just to prove I could do it. And I was deliberate about two or three things in the script. In particular, I wanted each of the ancillary characters to have something important to do, not just open hailing frequencies or fix the doubletalk generators. One of the things that I had learned in Irwin R. Blacker's screenwriting course was that "every character gets his page."

  I loved these characters; not just Kirk and Spock, but McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, and Chekov, too. I wanted each and every one of them to have at least two or three good pages. And I think that's one of the reasons why they all enjoyed the script so much; it was a chance to show a different side of their characters, a chance to have some fun.

  For me, of course, the real fun was watching the actors say the lines I had written. I had been watching them for weeks, studying the way they talked; I spent hours on each scene, listening to their voices in my head, trying to match the way they spoke in the dialog I wrote.

  And, of course, there was other stuff to learn, too; one day, for instance, producer Gene L. Coon pointed out to me that there were no pockets in the uniforms. "But where do they keep their money?" I asked.

  "We don't use money. We use credits."

  Okay. . . .

  When William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and the others finally brought the dialog to life, I was thrilled; they found things in the script, ways to say the lines, things to do with the action, that made the whole thing even funnier than I had imagined.

  The only real disappointment for me came as a result of having written in a single line for myself. The part of Ensign Freeman. And Gene L. Coon had told me I could play the part; but then at the last moment, it didn't happen. I was too young-looking. Too skinny. So Shatner's stand-in got my line of dialog. *sigh*

  "The Trouble with Tribbles" was first broadcast on December 29, 1967. I had just graduated from college, and I invited all my former classmates over to my house to watch the episode with me. They watched it as an episode and had a terrific time. I watched it as a terrifying collection of production values that mostly worked, sort of, but not quite the way I had imagined it, and, oh, dear, why did they use that take instead of the other one?

  That's the problem with being on the soundstage; later on, when it's all put together, you can't see the show; you can only see the production of it.

  But my family and friends enjoyed the episode, and they congratulated me on my first professional credential, and it was otherwise a wonderful night. But I remember, quite clearly, that at one point I said, "It's only a television show. Thirty years from now, who's going to remember it?"

  Duh.

  The answer was, everybody is going to remember it!

  But at the time, who knew? Right?

  My first hint that the tribble episode had made any impact at all was when I found out it had been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. It was on the same ballot with "Amok Time" by Theodore Sturgeon; "The Doomsday Machine" by Norman Spinrad; "Mirror, Mirror" by Jerome Bixby; and "City on the Edge of Forever" by Harlan Ellison.

  "City on the Edge of Forever" won the Hugo, as well as the Writers' Guild Award. And, yes, I was disappointed. Since then, a number of polls have been taken among Star Trek fans as to what is their favorite episode. In some polls, "City on the Edge of Forever" is voted the best episode of the original series; in other polls, "The Trouble with Tribbles" is voted the most popular. Either way, it's no disgrace to be in a neck-and-neck horserace with a Harlan Ellison script.

  During the years that followed, I went on to other television shows; none that inspired me as much as Star Trek, of course, but each was fun in its own way. I developed Land of the Lost for Saturday-morning television; it's a show that continues today in reruns. I did scripts for Logan's Run, Tales from the Darkside, Twilight Zone, The Real Ghostbusters, Superboy, and Babylon 5.

  I also wrote a few novels: When HARLIE Was One, The Man Who Folded Himself, Moonstar Odyssey, A Matter for Men, A Day for Damnation, A Rage for Revenge, A Season for Slaughter, The Voyage of the Star Wolf, The Middle of Nowhere, Star Hunt, Under the Eye of God, A Covenant of Justice, Deathbeast, Chess with a Dragon, and a few others. Several of these were also nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.

  In 1994, I wrote a story about my son's adoption, "The Martian Child," and it was my first sale to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In 1995, "The Martian Child" won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Readership Poll.

  So … yes, I have had a career outside of Star Trek; a rather successful one at that. But I was still being introduced as "the guy who created the tribbles." Occasionally, someone asks me if I mind; well, yes and no. Yes, I mind that some of my later (and, I think, better) work gets overshadowed. But no, I don't mind, because the tribbles have opened a lot of doors for me; indeed, the tribbles opened the first and most important door. "The Trouble with Tribbles" was my first professional sale and gave me high-profile credentials in my chosen field of science fiction. The tribbles were my launch pad, so I've always felt a strong attachment to them.

  Flash-forward twenty-nine years.

  In the summer of 1996, Ira Steven Behr, Ron Moore, and René Echevarria, producers on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, decided they wanted to do a special episode for Star Trek's thirtieth anniversary. They told Executive Producer Rick Berman that they wanted to spend some extra money and use the digital technology perfected in Forrest Gump to insert the actors from Deep Space Nine into an episode of the original Star Trek. Berman agreed; so did the studio. So then they had to decide which episode of the original series to use.

  There were several episodes they were consi
dering. The tribble episode was only one of them. One day, they all went out to a local restaurant for an "executive lunch" to discuss the problems and see if they could make a decision. They kept coming back to the tribble episode as a likely candidate; they could have Arne Darvin, the Klingon spy, go back in time intending to kill Kirk, followed by the Deep Space Nine crew, who have to stop him before he does so. But was Charlie Brill, the actor who had originally played Arne Darvin, available? Would he even want to do it?

  While they were sitting there talking … who should come into the restaurant but Charlie Brill himself! And that decided that. It was a sign from God, or, at least, the Great Bird of the Galaxy. So that decision was made.

  The script was written in secret. In fact, the whole project was shrouded in secrecy while the studio scrambled to make sure that they could get the necessary permissions from the original series actors. I didn't hear about the project until … well, never mind. There were rumors circulating on the Internet, on America Online, and on CompuServe, and I started getting E-mail and phone calls asking me for interviews and my opinion on the new show.

  I ducked the first few calls, then called Executive Producer Rick Berman. I hadn't spoken to Rick in several centuries, not since the early days of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it was as if hardly a day had passed. This is what's true about Star Trek friendships; they're timeless.

  We chatted about this and that and the other thing, catching up on stuff, and finally got around to talking about the new Deep Space Nine episode. He told me how the episode had come to happen, how everybody was really looking forward to shooting it, and why so much of the process had to be kept secret for so long. Rick Berman is a true gentleman. He understood not only what the tribbles mean to Star Trek, but also the special place the original episode has in my heart. He said, "Y'know, if we're going to do a tribble episode, you should be a part of it."

  So I told him how I'd always dreamed of being an Enterprise crew person. He laughed and thought it was a terrific idea. After making a couple of phone calls to make sure it was doable, he got back to me and told me it was all arranged. I was to report to the costume department the very next day.

  I hadn't been on the Paramount lot in a long time, but it was like coming home. Coming through the main gate, you see the sky-wall overlooking the tank and the parking lot, a cluster of offices and soundstages. It is the quintessential movie lot; a factory of imagination. And like all factories, it looks like a chaotic and senseless collection of disorganized and disjointed fragments—unless you understand the process. The more you understand, the more you realize just how efficient a factory this place really is. Every eight days, a new episode of Deep Space Nine comes rolling off the assembly line. You could do four years of classes at USC film school and still not have a sense of just how complex a film production really is, but that's a different discussion. When you have a team that really works, they work wonderfully.

  The costume lab is a warehouse full of Star Trek costumes, everything imaginable, and a row of fitting and dressing rooms. The process of being measured and fitted is a lot like going to the tailor for your bar mitzvah suit. It's boring—except when it's embarrassing.

  After the fitting, I went over to the soundstage where the current episode was shooting and introduced myself to the first assistant director, B. C. Cameron. (And just between you and me, she is a real treasure. Deep Space Nine is lucky to have such a talented and dedicated person on board.) I also glommed a copy of the script; it was my first opportunity to see what they were really up to.

  To be real candid, I was prepared to hate it.

  After all, how dare someone else write a tribble episode? The tribbles were mine, weren't they? Just who were these guys to be meddling with my story? Brimming with righteous indignation, I sat down to read "Trials and Tribble-ations."

  Without giving anything away … Arne Darvin, now a hundred years later, goes back in time with the intention of killing Kirk and becoming a Klingon hero. The Deep Space Nine team—Sisko, Dax, Bashir, Worf, and Odo—go after him. While "The Trouble with Tribbles" occurs around them, they hunt for Darvin on the space station, in the storage compartments, in the bar, and, in particular, all over the Enterprise, up and down the corridors, in the rec room, in the turbo lifts, on the bridge—everywhere.

  About ten pages into the script, I started smiling.

  Twenty pages in, I chuckled.

  Thirty pages in, I laughed out loud.

  Forty pages in, I was guffawing.

  Fifty pages into the script, I was rolling on the floor.

  And when I finished reading, I was really really annoyed, because it was such a terrific script, I was jealous. How dare these guys write such a good script?!! This was one of the very best Star Trek scripts I had ever read. It was going to be a great episode, probably even a classic in its own right. Probably even a Hugo winner, and wouldn't that be ironic if, thirty years later, a tribble episode finally walked off with a rocket-shaped trophy?

  But in a larger sense, the tribbles aren't mine. They are Star Trek's. They are the audience's. The purpose of the original episode was to have fun; to give our heroes a change of pace and a chance to let their hair down and stop being so serious every week. In that regard, the tribbles were a gift—to the show, to the audience.

  And once I had gotten past my momentary selfish considerations, I knew I should be very flattered that the gift had gone so far, that it was still giving. To have the original tribble episode brought back as an episode of Deep Space Nine is an acknowledgment of the popularity of the original show. For it to be remembered thirty years later, enough to be affectionately reused, is deeply touching to me. It's a very sweet validation.

  To do this episode, not only would they have to insert digitally various Deep Space Nine characters into shots from the original tribble episode, but they would also have to rebuild and re-create large pieces of all of the original Star Trek sets, as well as specific tribble episode sets: corridors, the rec room, part of the bridge, the turbolifts, and the space station bar. They would have to match the lighting, the makeup, the film stock, the costumes, the props, the hairdos, and half a million other details.

  The research needed to re-create the original Star Trek was painstaking. And the heroes of the day were Herman Zimmerman, and Mike and Denise Okuda, not to mention the rest of the crew in the art department. They studied blueprints; they studied blow-ups of individual frames of film. They had a new digital master tape made of "The Trouble with Tribbles" so they could study each shot in greater detail. (Then they could see the coffee stain on Mr. Spock's shirt.)

  Then they started building, planning, preparing. Phasers and communicators and tricorders were rebuilt. A 3-D checker set and a desktop monitor. Bridge stations. Lights. Wall panels. Signs. Handles for the turbolifts. A curved corridor began taking shape on Stage 11 … and where are we going to find the right kind of orange mesh for the wall next to the ladder? Oops, hey? Look at this stuff over here that the construction workers are using.

  Director Jonathan West, who also works as a director of photography for other Deep Space Nine directors, called Gerry Finnerman, the director of photography on the original Star Trek, to find out what kind of lighting he used (arc lights); and what kinds of filters were necessary to re-create "Finnerman lighting"? Remember all those orange and green and purple and blue lights on the walls?

  This wasn't a new world that could just be invented; this was a world that had already been invented once and had to be re-created accurately. If any detail was amiss, hundreds of thousands of Star Trek fans would catch it immediately.

  Fortunately, the team that was rebuilding the costumes, props, and sets of the original Enterprise were also Star Trek fans. In fact, I don't know anybody in the world who isn't … myself included.

  So there I was, on the first day of shooting.

  I was officially considered an "atmosphere person." I reported to the studio at eight in the morning. My twelve-year
-old son, Sean, came with me to watch, as did Susie Miller, who works with me on a variety of projects. The costumers handed me my uniform; it came with a red shirt. Uh-oh. I immediately turned it around to see if there was a bull's-eye on the back. There wasn't. Whew! But I couldn't help wondering if someone wasn't trying to tell me something. . . .

  As I changed into the uniform, Sean frowned and asked, "Where are the pockets?" Remembering what Gene L. Coon had told me almost thirty years earlier, I said, "We don't have pockets on the uniforms."

  And Sean immediately asked, "But where do you keep your space money?" That's when I fell down on the floor laughing. The morning was off to a good start.

  A little later, Sean asked, "Will we see Kirk and Spock today?" And I had to explain to him that Kirk and Spock would not be there. They didn't do Star Trek anymore. He was not happy about that. It was a bittersweet moment; I knew what he was feeling. To me, Star Trek will always be Kirk and Spock, too.

  Once I had the costume on, I had a chance to look at it, and myself, in the mirror. Too young and too skinny were no longer considerations. I was probably the oldest security guard on the ship; that was because I'd never beamed down.

  Beyond that, however, I was struck by how accurate the entire outfit was. The original uniforms had been re-created exactly: everything—the boots, the flared pants, velour, the braid on the cuffs, and even the way everything was all tailored—was just like the costumes the original actors had worn thirty years earlier. And I was starting to feel a weird little tickle at the bottom of my spine.

  After the costume department, we all headed over to the makeup lab, where sideburns and makeup were applied. Because the original Enterprise sets were lit with arc lamps, a much harsher light than is currently used for television filming, a different kind of makeup was required; the Deep Space Nine makeup team had gone back to the original Star Trek makeup as designed by Fred Philips.