Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 5-06: Trials and Tribble-ations - Part 1

Episode:

104

|

Writer:

Ronald D. Moore & René Echevarria

|

Director:

Jonathan West

|

Air Date:

04-Nov-1996

---

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally reached Deep Space Nine's legendary Star Trek: The Original Series tribute episode Trials and Tribble-ations! This would've been a more impressive milestone for me if I hadn't skipped 73 episodes to get here.

Man, I haven't written about a Deep Space Nine episode in four years, that's crazy. I could've waited three more years and written about this 30th-anniversary episode on its own 30th anniversary, but I just wrote about The Trouble with Tribbles and More Tribbles, More Troubles and I've got to complete my tribble trilogy. (Publishing this 8 days earlier would've also been good).

This was the first tribble episode to not be written by David Gerrold, because he didn't work on Deep Space Nine. Instead, they assigned this to Ronald D. Moore and René Echevarria, who clearly knew a bit about the classic show. It was directed by Jonathan West, who'd also been working as DS9's director of photography since the start of season three. I guess his cinematography skills were useful for a project like this.

Okay, I'm going to go through Trials and Tribble-ations scene-by-scene with screencaps, so there'll be SPOILERS below. This is first-time viewer friendly, however! Everything Star Trek that aired after November 4th 1996 is off limits, everything that came before is fair game.

---

There's no captain's log at the start of this episode, instead we've got a framing story featuring these two gentlemen in the futuristic suits.

A very pregnant Major Kira welcomes them to Ops and they identify themselves as Lucsly (left) and Dulmur (right). The fact that they're both guys and neither looks like David Duchovny helps obfuscate that both those names are anagrams paying homage to another iconic sci-fi show. They are agents though, from the Department of Temporal Investigations - a brand new organisation introduced in this episode and then basically never heard from again.

Lucsly's been on the series before though, the actor anyway. He was a Bajoran villager in season 1's The Storyteller.

The captain dealing with bureaucrats is a tribble episode tradition and now it's Sisko's turn, as they come into his office for a chat. Dulmer asserts his dominance by picking up the baseball and then they get straight to the point, asking why he took the Defiant back in time. That is a good question to start an episode with!

The agents are relieved to learn that this wasn't one of those situations where they were meant to go into the past, as they hate predestination paradoxes almost as much as they hate time jokes. So we know right at the start that the episode could potentially retcon things a little, but not enough to change anything important. Kira's still pregnant, Sisko still has a goatee, we're still in the regular DS9 timeline pretty much.

This is a good scene I reckon, as the agents have that Men in Black deadpan thing going on that can make exposition funny, and there's a lot of exposition here. The episode's not just for DS9 fans, it's for Original Series fans who don't know the difference between a Bajoran, a Bolian and a Bashir, so the teaser spends a little time explaining what the Orbs of the Prophets are.

It turns out the Defiant had taken a trip to Cardassian space to pick up one of the orbs, which was being given back to the Bajorans. It really shows how much of a face-turn the Cardasssians have made since getting rid of their military government last year. While the ship was at Cardassia they also took on a human passenger called Barry Waddle, who'd gotten stuck on the planet when the Klingons invaded.

The guy's grateful to see humans again as he's tired of looking at people with bumpy foreheads, though he goes straight to the replicator to order a raktajino (Klingon coffee). That's not actually so weird, as it's Sisko's favourite coffee too. Everyone drinks it on this series. Waddle makes it clear that he's less keen on Klingons themselves though, as they're foul-smelling barbarians... which gives O'Brien and Dr Bashir an opportunity to torment Worf by saying he smells like lilac. Lots of comedy in this episode, shockingly.

Barry's played by Charlie Brill, who also played the role of surgically-altered Klingon agent Arne Darvin in the original episode. His appearance here isn't a coincidence, though when the writers went out for pizza to discuss the episode concept and saw him there at the counter they knew that fate was on their side.

Cut to halfway through the trip, and O'Brien's on the bridge trying to get the others to join in with trolling Worf. But the comedy is cut short when they're transported through time! In fact, they've been transported through space as well, as they're in the Beta Quadrant, over 200 light-years from their last position. Voyager can cover 1000 light-years per year on average, so they've just made a two-month journey in a flash.

The lighting is so dark right now as the ship was cloaked to sneak past the Klingons, but they decloak for a moment as someone beams out. Hey, I thought they weren't allowed to use the cloaking device in the Alpha Quadrant!

Their systems were a little disrupted by the time jump, but they're able to detect another ship nearby...

.... and it's the USS Enterprise!

The 90s Trek spin-offs got a lot of use out of Kirk-era starship designs like the Reliant, Excelsior and Bird-of-Prey, as they had access to the filming miniatures created for the movies. Unfortunately, the 11-foot Enterprise model was (and still is) on display at the Smithsonian, so their only option here was to construct a brand new miniature that would only ever get used once. And they actually went and did it.

This is a 5.5-foot miniature, so it was half the length of the original, but no less detailed. In fact, the original miniature was only finished on the starboard side (the one we're looking at now), while this one could be filmed from multiple angles and mounted from multiple points.

It's not an exact match, you can find lists of minor inaccuracies online and I've always thought the saucer looks a bit too thick, but damn it's close enough! They even got the spinny bits at the end of the nacelles working.

ACT ONE

Modeller Greg Jein also built a whole bloody space station model for the episode - an exact replica of Deep Space Station K-7 from the original episode. This thing is like the prototype for Deep Space Nine, as it's the first space station we ever saw in Trek.

Back in Sisko's office, Dulmer requests that the captain be more specific about which Enterprise they ran into, pointing out there have been five of them (Lucsly helpfully corrects him, saying there are six now, giving us the first reference in Star Trek to the shiny new Enterprise-E). Funny how they're leaving out the NX-01 from the TV series Enterprise, which was involved with... a bit of time travel.

The two agents are dismayed to hear it's the Constitution class ship from the original show, as Captain James T. Kirk is their nemesis. It turns out that the Defiant crew had travelled back 105 years, 1 month and 12 days, from 2273 to 2268. Which is pretty much consistent with all the dates we've been given in previous episodes.

Lucsly points out it was a Friday, as if that's a perfectly normal thing for a time agent to know off the top of his head. (It was also the day the episode aired).

From the 'An Historic Endeavor' featurette

We only get to see K-7 from a distance, but Jein put in a crazy amount of detail. What makes this even more impressive is that the original model had been lost years ago and they had nothing to reference except for what they could see on screen in The Trouble with Tribbles.

Sisko explains in his voice-over that Barry Waddle attacked the deputy guarding the Orb of Time, somehow worked out how to use it to teleport the Defiant to K-7, and then beamed off the ship once they got there. He only stunned the deputy though, he didn't kill him. It's not that kind of story.

The crew have a meeting in the briefing room mess hall where Worf explains that Waddle is actually Arne Darvin, the surgically altered Klingon agent from The Trouble with Tribbles! Hang on Worf, is that really his real name? Surely that's as much of a pseudonym as 'Barry Waddle' is, more so in fact as he was undercover in Trouble with Tribbles.

Unless... he'd continued using the name Arne Darvin after the events of that episode and only switched to the name Barry Waddle to trick the Defiant crew specifically! You know what, it's not important. The characters all start calling him Darvin at this point, so I'm just going to do that.

Odo joins in and just goes and spoils the ending of The Trouble with Tribbles. Darvin had secretly poisoned a shipment of grain but Captain James T. Kirk figured him out and he was arrested. But he apparently finished his sentence and started a new career as a very human-looking merchant, trading in the same kind of stuff as Trouble with Tribbles' Cyrano Jones. That's what got him trapped in Cardassian space during the Klingon invasion.

Starfleet officers typically time travel at least once a decade, but a merchant might have to wait a century before an opportunity like this arises. Getting access to the Orb of Time has given Darvin his big chance to put wrong what once went right and ruin a classic episode of the Original Series. In fact, he might be planning to kill Kirk, which would ruin all the movies and also lead to the destruction of Earth. If V'Ger doesn't finish them off, the Whale Probe will. On the other hand, it'd also mean no TOS season 3, so some disasters would actually be averted.

They don't know if Darvin beamed to the Enterprise or K-7 station, so the Defiant crew will have to search both locations. Sisko makes it clear that they need to keep their presence to a minimum, as they don't want a visit from Temporal Investigations when they get back. For a second there I thought the episode was going to cut back to Dulmer and Lucsly's reaction to that line.

Only the senior staff will be going, though they can't be senior staff over on the Enterprise, as it might get suspicious if there are two captains walking around. They're hiding Dax's Trill spots as well, so I guess there weren't many Trills in Starfleet at this time. Either that or it's easier to blend in with a mostly human crew if you look human. She's also got a beehive hairdo and a bright red miniskirt, but that's the opposite of a distinguishing feature in this era.

Dax seems into this cosplay, even giving the others a little twirl, and it's nice to see her enjoying herself.

Hey, Worf and Odo are both cosplaying as Cyrano Jones! Kira has to sit this one out, however, as she's heavily pregnant right now. Also, someone needs to command the Defiant while they're gone.

Bashir's a little confused about why everyone but him is in the wrong colour uniform, and Sisko explains that the division colours got flipped in the 24th century. That doesn't explain why science officer Dax is in red instead of blue though. I guess she just felt like tempting fate.

O'Brien has figured out a way to decloak the Defiant and beam over to the Enterprise without being detected, taking advantage of the fact that the ship is using 100-year-old tech. They've only got a 3-second window, but the transporters are apparently fast enough for that these days. I guess Darvin decloaked and beamed over at the exact right time.

It's the USS Enterprise, just as it looked in the '60s! They didn't change a damn thing. There has been absolutely zero attempt to modernise it for '90s audiences. In fact, they went out of their way to meticulously research and recreate every detail. They even decided to use 1960s film stock and lighting styles to recreate the look more accurately.

Which raises the question... what colour is Sisko's tunic? I mean we're seeing it as gold, but did they use the same material used in the classic series that looks green when you see it in person and yellow on camera? Man, I don't even know anymore. A person could be driven mad trying to research this. They apparently went with velour, like the season 2 tunics, not nylon like in season 3, that's all I know.

Here's a better question, why is the hallway so packed with extras? Are they all on their way to take their shore leave?

ACT TWO

O'Brien and Bashir are sent to scan the bottom of the ship and work their way up, while Sisko and Dax start at the top of the ship and work their way down. The plan immediately hits a snag, however, when O'Brien and Bashir can't figure out how to get the turbolift moving. They're almost caught taking a panel off when an Enterprise crewmember comes in and just walks over to hold one of the handles.

So these two are going to be the rubbish spies then. The comedy double act.

Meanwhile, Dax is the nostalgic spy, wasting time talking about how awesome the classic tricorders were when she should be using it to scan for Darvin. She's definitely the stand-in for fans of the classic series and we get to see this century through her eyes.

Some people would rather that Star Trek would move on from the designs of the '60s series to become a more realistic vision of our future... and they probably hate this scene. The episode hasn't just put a classic tricorder prop right up to the camera, it's drawing attention to how dated it is. It's a relic of an earlier era in-universe as well as out of it.

Though this is actually a replic created by the Defiant's replicator, not an authentic 23rd century device. Even the prop is a replica actually. Though they've done a fantastic job of matching the original details.

Over on K-7, Odo drops by the bar to do some surreptitious scanning with an alien tricorder. Which means this episode features sets and miniatures for two starships and two space stations! The room might look pretty basic, but the production crew went all out on this.

The costumes and hairstyles had to be matched as well, as people here had to look like they'd stepped over from the original episode. Especially this waitress, who actually was in the original episode.

You can catch a glimpse of her in The Trouble With Tribbles picking up some drinks. That makes her probably the only character to get recast with a new actor for the episode.

Odo asks her for a raktajino and she mentions that he's the second person to order it today, though she still doesn't know what it is. Of course a Federation station in the 23rd century wasn't going to serve Klingon coffee... so the other person who ordered it must be a Klingon agent from the future! The waitress mentions he said he'd be back, so now Odo's got a reason to stick around.

Hey, it's Uhura and Chekov! That means this must be the very start of The Trouble with Tribbles, when Enterprise crewmembers begin coming over to K-7 for shore leave.

Oh no, Odo, what are you doing? Get out of the shot! You're ruining Star Trek! This means that the TOS Season 2 Blu-rays feature a defunct timeline; an Odo-less version of these events that was canonically rewritten by time travel. But they also include the DS9 episode, so it's fine I suppose.

When Trials and Tribble-ations aired back in 1996, the Original Series was only available on VHS and the transfer they'd used dated back to 1983. But they went back to the negatives here, allowing them to show off remastered footage that looked better than ever. I'll be curious to see how this compares to the 2006 HD release.

Anyway, Uhura is tempted by a tribble and it seems to catch Odo's eye as well.

Here's a rare shot of the Enterprise's port side for you as it orbits the station. It's not very exciting I'm afraid, as it looks a lot like the other side. Here's a question though: why is the ship orbiting the station? How does that make any sense? And why is the station spinning?

This screencap also shows off the amount of work that went into the K-7 model. Deciphering and reproducing the markings on the cone at the top was a bit of a struggle for them, until they realised it was just the letters K and 7 with windows cut into them.

The episode's story could be summarised as "the DS9 crew try to avoid raising suspicion while running their scans", so the characters pretty much just roam around the ship having isolated comedy scenes. Like here, when Bashir and O'Brien have to do some improv when an engineer finds them working on the panel they were sent to fix.

Bashir comes up with a convincing lie about him being there to do a study on work-related stress, which becomes more convincing when O'Brien starts accidentally screwing stuff up. The dude works on a Cardassian station and fixes alien ships from the Gamma Quadrant, so I'm sure he could figure out archaic Federation tech if he was given a little time to work out what he was looking at. It's a bit of a cross-circuited mess in there.

Hey, the engineer brought one of those giant tools with him. Though hang on, GNDN? That's a '90s Star Trek joke, that shouldn't be in the '60s ship! (It stands for "Goes nowhere, does nothing").

Edit: I've been informed that it is, in fact, a '60s Star Trek joke.

ACT THREE

The episode cuts back to K-7, as Worf joins Odo in the bar. Worf's disguise is considerably less extreme than Darvin's. In fact, he's done even less work to hide his alien appearance than Dax did. I guess they were in too much of a rush to run a light over his forehead.

In the original story, tribbles had an instant negative reaction to Klingons, but it wasn't because they were the episode's villains, it's just they don't like something about the Klingon biology. Maybe they can't stand the smell of lilac, I don't know. So when Odo shows Worf the tribble he's bought the thing freaks out at him. Worf hates it right back, for similar reasons to the ones Spock gave in the classic episode. In fact, it turns out that the Klingons hated the tribbles so much that at some point after Trouble with Tribbles they got a fleet together and destroyed the tribble homeworld. They made a species that can replicate at a ridiculous rate extinct within 40 years. Honestly, that's kind of impressive.

Back on the Enterprise, the crew is being called to battle stations. The camera follows one security officer in particular while it's panning across to find Sisko and Dax... played by original tribble writer David Gerrold! The dude just loves making cameos.

He didn't get to appear in The Trouble with Tribbles, but he does make an animated appearance in More Tribbles, More Troubles, so it's very possible that there are two redshirts on the Enterprise who look like him, one 25 years older than the other.

Sisko and Dax are a lot more familiar with the classic Enterprise than Bashir and O'Brien, and are blending in effortlessly. They even know how to use the handles in the lift. Sisko does get caught out for a moment though when he absentmindedly taps his embroidered delta emblem instead of flipping open his communicator, and the actors' reactions are very genuine.

It turns out the ship is on alert because Captain Koloth's D-7 battlecruiser has just arrived at K-7. I suppose Kira didn't call them up earlier to let them know because it would've looked weird for them to whip out a communicator in public.

Koloth has actually shown up in DS9 already, in the episode Blood Oath, where he died an honourable death. Dax really wants to go see her old friend, but Sisko has been diligently steering her away from anything she's too interested in. She's a Star Trek fan on a meticulous recreation of the original sets, and she's loving everything a bit much. Personally, I'm loving that light effect behind the glass when the turbolift moves. They've improved on the original look without it seeming out of place.

It turns out that Greg Jein made three miniatures just for this episode!

This Klingon battle cruiser wasn't in the original Trouble with Tribbles due to the fact that it hadn't even been designed yet. In fact, the series was really shy about paying for new starship models. It got to the point where model company AMT hired Trek designer Matt Jefferies to come up with another Star Trek ship for them to sell as a kit... which is what you're seeing here.

As far as I can piece together, the Star Trek production crew took AMT's wooden master tooling model, originally built to create the model kit from, and used it on screen as both Klingon and Romulan ships in Star Trek's third season. When the series was almost revived as Star Trek: Phase II, this wooden model was used by Greg Jein to create new molds for a new fibreglass miniature that was ultimately never used. But Jein kept the molds, so 20 years later he was able to use them to finally build a proper D-7 filming miniature. This thing had internal lighting, extra hull detail, and because it's made from the model kit master, it's presumably absolutely 100% accurate.

Of course, Koloth's ship didn't show off all this extra detail in the original episode, but as it wasn't even in the original episode I'm not seeing that as a problem.

Hey, it's her again! Lieutenant Watley. It's kind of weird that she keeps running into O'Brien and Bashir in turbolifts like this. Especially as they know that someone ordered a raktajino on the station, so they should really be scanning over there instead.

She seems into Bashir, and O'Brien quips that she's only using Bashir to get to him. Bashir's not laughing though, as he's started to suspect that she's his great-grandmother... and he's his own great-grandfather. Luckily it's not actually a predestination paradox and Bashir doesn't really have to sleep with a relative. He does have to go over to join Odo and Worf on K-7 though, so they're beamed out.

Sisko and Dax's have been opening up panels all over the ship to look busy and here they're using their fake maintenance to secretly eavesdrop on Kirk and Spock's conversation. They're really living out a fan fantasy here. Us real-life people can never meet Kirk and Spock, because they're fictional characters. But Sisko and Dax can, and we can be right there along with them. Though actually they can't, and Sisko closes up the hatch in a hurry when Dax starts talking about how handsome the Vulcan is.

This is a pretty amazing shot, as they composited Sisko and Dax in there during a camera move. In fact, the whole back wall was composited in. It becomes kind of obvious if you look at the seam while it's in motion, but otherwise this looks way too good for 1996.

Here's what the original shot looks like, from the 2006 Remastered edition:

The Trouble with Tribbles

Oh no, the panel was in a slightly different place! The fantasy is ruined.

It's interesting how the DS9 version of the scene is a little more vibrant than the later remaster. Damn, now I want to get hold of an old VHS copy and compare that too. And the laserdisc. Maybe I can find some footage filmed off a TV set in the '60s...

Actually, I think what I'll do is take a short break, as this article seems to be filling up with words and pictures and it's a bit much for just one page.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO

---

NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the second half of Trials and Tribble-ations and hopefully I won't leave you waiting long. It might even be published already!

Either way, please feel welcome to leave a comment here.