Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 5-06: Trials and Tribble-ations - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the second half of Deep Space Nine's big 30th anniversary episode, Trials and Tribble-ations! Click HERE for part one.

Hey, have you ever wondered how many Star Trek episodes have a dash in the title? Because I haven't. It had never even crossed my mind until right now. The answer is "8": The Magicks of Megas-tu, The Counter-Clock Incident, Q-Less, Trials and Tribble-ations, The Siege of AR-558, Badda-Bing Badda-Bang, Species Ten-C and First Con-tact.

I originally planned to mention here that this is the highest-rated Deep Space Nine episode on IMDb, but it's not anymore. It's dropped to second place, behind In the Pale Moonlight. That's a shame I reckon, because the very next episode to air, Let He Who is Without Sin, is the lowest-rated episode on IMDb. That's the biggest gap in quality between adjacent episodes since The City on the Edge of Forever came out the week after The Alternative Factor.

Alright, I'll be analysing the second half of Trials and Tribble-ations so there will be SPOILERS below. There may be some spoilers here for earlier series as well, but I won't spoil anything that comes after this episode.

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Previously, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:

Captain Sisko is sitting in his office with two men from the Department of Temporal Investigations, telling them the story of his recent trip to the past. It all started when former Klingon agent Arne Darvin used the Orb of Time to teleport the USS Defiant into the Original Series episode The Trouble with Tribbles so that he could get his revenge on Captain Kirk. The Defiant crew put on period-appropriate costumes and went looking for him, with half of them scanning Deep Space Station K-7 while Sisko and Dax scanned the USS Enterprise.

And now, the conclusion:

O'Brien and Bashir meet up with Odo and Worf in the K-7 bar and O'Brien spots Kirk sitting at another table. Well, he spots Lieutenant Freeman anyway and mistakes him for Kirk. Fortunately, Odo talks him out of buying the man a drink.

Odo heard from the waitress earlier that someone had tried to order a Klingon coffee and Bashir thinks it's very convenient that this clue has kept him in the bar, waiting for Darvin to return. But there's anther twist when the waitress tells them that the Klingons who came over for shore leave have all been asking for it as well. The characters didn't even realise that they were surrounded by Klingons! I guess they don't teach Federation children about the Klingon forehead situation in schools.

But Worf knows why the Klingons look different, somehow, so this is DS9's chance to finally explain the makeup upgrade that happened in Star Trek: The Motion Picture 17 years earlier. It doesn't want to though. Bashir and and O'Brien make a few guesses, like genetic engineering and a viral mutation (presumably they're the fan theories that had been going around) but Worf will neither confirm or deny that those are both the exact right answer. The scene does acknowledge that the Original Series Klingons look different however, which is a big deal.

Koloth's appearance in the episode Blood Oath implied that Klingons had always had the bumpy foreheads and the classic makeup had been retconned away, but now we know that something happened, and that the Original Series really is an authentic depiction of TNG and DS9's past. Which suits me!

I'm sure some fans would've preferred it if Worf had transformed into a classic Klingon when he crossed over into this TOS world, but that really wouldn't have worked for me. There's a difference between design and depiction. If these two both showed up in the Lower Decks cartoon they would appear different even though they shared the same animation style.

Anyway, this is the point in The Trouble with Tribbles where Korax comes over to provoke Scotty and Chekov into a fight, triggering a whole bar brawl... and this time the DS9 characters are in the middle of it.

The production crew have already shown off their ability to composite their characters into 30-year-old footage, but now they're editing them into a fight scene! And the actors had to fight like they were in a '60s show or else it would've looked weird. Another thing that had to match the original footage was the Klingon uniforms. Fortunately, they found that they still had some old costumes in storage and were able to use them as a guide.

Bashir and O'Brien weren't about to sit this out and Worf's right there in the thick of it as well, because he's Worf. These TOS Klingons don't stand a chance against him. Odo decides to stay out of it for the most part, until he spots Darvin taking a peek at the chaos through the doorway and gives Worf an assist so they can both chase him.

Darvin actually did come back like he said he would!

They're really showing off here by adding their actor in behind a glass. I guess the green screen in the background helps.

Meanwhile O'Brien and Bashir are caught by the chunkiest security guard in Starfleet. He looks like a Rob Liefeld illustration of Captain America. We never saw this redshirt on an landing party in the classic series because death wouldn't dare go near him.

In the original episode, Undersecretary Baris tasked Kirk's crew with guarding his storage compartments of quadrotriticale grain and then later accused the captain of not taking the job seriously. It turns out that Kirk sent a human truck to guard that grain, so maybe Baris didn't know what he was talking about.

ACT FOUR

Back in the present, Dulmur points out that getting into historical bar fights is against regulations... which means that Sisko just ratted Bashir and O'Brien out. In the original episode, the crewmembers in the fight wouldn't reveal who started it, but I guess in the 24th century Starfleet officers believe that their first duty is to the truth. Or it could be that Sisko's admitting to a few trivial missteps to keep the agents distracted from something else they did while they were there...

Either way, the Defiant crew would've been the first to notice if the timeline had changed by throwing a few punches in the fight, so they know it worked out fine. Lucsly's pretty sick of people using that line, but it's true! They can go check the Defiant's historical database and see if it matches up if they need confirmation. Incidentally, this means that we already know that the crew will be 100% successful in putting time back how it should be.

Well, 99%, as O'Brien and Bashir find themselves composited into this lineup in place of the original crewmembers.

They really did an amazing job here of matching the angle, the lighting, the makeup, everything. You can stare at the screencap all you want, it just refuses to look fake.

The Trouble with Tribbles

Here's the 2006 remastered edition of the original shot, which reveals that they replaced Freeman! I guess he slipped away in the chaos and escaped punishment in this altered timeline. No one seems particularly keen on volunteering to accept blame here.

There are actually three people missing from the lineup, as a different officer is standing next to Bashir. That's clever as it makes sure there's no compositing weirdness going on around the face you're focusing on. Though he's taller than the person who used to be there, so they had to paint in some of the face of the guy behind him. Their boots, on the other hand, all remain the same.

Damn, they were doing really well until that shadow on O'Brien. I don't know how they achieved that, but it looks painted on.

Speaking of things that have been painted on, I'm pretty sure they've replaced the whole background here. I don't know why they did it, maybe it was easier than covering up the actor who was standing in O'Brien's place, but I think they got away with it.

The Trouble with Tribbles

See, look at the beam above Chekov's head. The background's different!

Anyway, Kirk fails to get any answers about who started the fight, with O'Brien telling him he doesn't know, and they're all sent out and confined to quarters. O'Brien's so hyped about it afterwards! He only wishes that Keiko had been here to see him lie right to Kirk's face. I mean he would've preferred to have bought him a drink, but at least he got to talk to him at all!

Aww, they should've totally put Keiko on his mission and had her trying to blend in as an Enterprise officer with them. Keiko never gets to join in with the fun bar fights.

The two of them run into (or step on) a lonely little tribble lying on the floor outside, but when they look down the side corridor they see that he's not quite so alone. The ship is getting infested with the creatures.

Meanwhile, Worf and Odo have apprehended Darvin and beamed him back to the Defiant.

The crew would've been absolutely clueless about what to do next if Darvin had kept his mouth shut here, but the dude's so proud of his ingenious scheme to murder Kirk that he actually admits what he's done. He's planted a bomb inside of a tribble to blow him up! Poetic revenge for how Kirk used a tribble to blow his cover.

So now that the crew are done with their 'scan for Darvin' mission, they can get started on the completely different 'scan for the exploding tribble' mission. This time Worf's staying behind due to his tribble allergy, O'Brien and Bashir will be helping Odo scan K-7, and Sisko and Dax are going to risk going to the Enterprise's bridge to use its internal sensors. Even though it will mean some pretty impressive compositing work.

It's a shame that we never get to see the Defiant next to the Enterprise, but the ship has to stay invisible for the story to work.

Trials and Tribble-ations wasn't the last time that the visual effects in The Trouble with Tribbles got an overhaul. Here's what the 2006 remastered version looks like by comparison:

The Trouble with Tribbles

I'm going to give Greg Jein's Tribble-ations Enterprise miniature points for not sticking a window over that grey panel on the bottom of the saucer, but the remastered CGI ship has a better looking deflector dish. In fact, it's more accurate in general, due to them having better references to work from. On the other hand, the Tribble-ations Enterprise has the advantage of being a real object with real light bouncing off it.

Honestly, I'm just glad that these talented artists used their skills to recreate the thing instead of reimagining it.

Sisko and Dax make it to the bridge in time to witness another clip from the classic episode. For a moment it looks like they're going to witness Kirk sitting on an exploding tribble lurking on his captain's chair, but fortunately it's just the regular kind of tribble.

Reusing old footage like this meant that the production crew were spared from having to recreate a huge slice of the bridge like they did for the Next Generation episode Relics, but they did have to create a path for Terry Farrell to walk around during the scene.

Trials and Tribble-ations - An Historic Endeavor

It took a dozen takes to get this simple scene working because Farrell was stuck on her own in a universe of blue, with the crew having to rely on overlayed footage on a monitor screen to figure out what the timing should be.

The effect looks a bit shaky when the camera's moving, but overall it's pretty amazing how similar to an old FMV adventure game with digitized actors this isn't.

Star Trek: The Next Generation 6-04 - Relics

Here's what Relics looked like four years earlier. They did a pretty good job of recreating this wedge of the classic bridge set, but it understandably looks like we've stepped into 1992, not 1968. The film stock, makeup, lighting etc. makes a big difference. I should mention that the screencap's from the old DVDs so it's suffering the quality loss that comes from being put through a '90s video editing process, but then that's true of the DS9 images as well.

They did actually rebuild some of the Enterprise bridge set for Trials and Tribble-ations, but this time they made the rarely-scene slice opposite the turbolift door, to the right of the viewscreen.

I think they must have added extra graininess to this scene to make it match the footage from the classic episode.

People have mocked those buttons for years, saying that they look like someone stuck some boiled sweets on there as buttons and didn't even label any of them. Thankfully they weren't actually sweets, because eww, they were backlit translucent resin. And there was no point in labelling them as it wouldn't have been picked up by the camera. Sisko knows what buttons to press, it's fine.

Sisko and Dax have a chat about Dr McCoy and it turns out that she met him a few years before this when she was a gymnast and he was studying at the University of Mississippi. He had the hands of a surgeon, apparently. So there's a new fact for McCoy's Memory Alpha page. Or an implication at least.

ACT FIVE

They're showing off by compositing actors into shots again. This was an important shot to include in the episode as it establishes that tribbles sometimes sit on bartenders' heads.

I'm surprised that Bashir and O'Brien didn't change disguises, seeing as shore leave was cancelled due to the fight. They could've gotten them into those big merchant costumes with the pockets that Odo and Worf have been wearing.

While the team on the station races to scan an impossible number of tribbles, Sisko and Dax trail Kirk, as anything that's going to kill him is going to be near him. They're so good at this that they got to the mess hall before him and are hanging out playing 3D checkers while he and Spock go to grab a meal.

The production crew got clever here, as there was already someone wearing a gold shirt there in the original episode and his hands were obscured behind the piles of tribbles...

The Trouble with Tribbles

... so they could just replace the actor's head! And Dax's hair was composited over his opponent.

The two of them overhear Kirk as he realises that the tribbles could've gotten into the wheat on the station, and Sisko gets to be the one to repeat 'storage compartments, storage compartments' twice this time as he realises where they need to look.

Sisko and Dax beam over to the station and make their way inside the storage compartment that Kirk's about to open up.

That's Kirk's nemesis Baris in the black suit, played by William Schallert. This was actually Schallert's second appearance on DS9, as he played a Bajoran musician in the second season episode Sanctuary. Though he was a bit older at the time.

Damn, that's a lot of tribbles to scan. Imagine if Worf had been in here with them, it would've been a screeching nightmare. Well actually it would've been pretty quiet as most of these tribbles they're sitting in are dead or dying from the poisoned grain. So that's less cute than it could've been.

The two of them overhear Spock give the same number for the current tribble population as Dax did earlier, so she gets to feel vindicated. It's always nice to know that your science officer is on Spock's level. I still think she should've rounded her estimation up though.

Suddenly K-7 explodes!

Actually they found the tribble bomb at the very last moment and beamed it a safe distance from the station, so this explosion is harmless. You'd think that a bomb going off next to two starships from rival powers would set off some alarm bells, but no one on the station, the Enterprise or Koloth's ship seems to notice or care! The writers could've had them disarm the bomb, that would've been a lot more subtle, but they just couldn't resist that cathartic explosion.

It's a good thing Sisko kept Dax from drifting off into nostalgia too much during the episode or they would've lost precious seconds and the future would've been ruined.

So now we've finally solved the mystery of who was in the storage compartment throwing tribbles at Kirk's head in The Trouble with Tribbles! The answer is: no one, because Sisko and Dax are alone in there, and they weren't in the compartment in the original episode (in the same way that Bashir and O'Brien weren't originally standing in the lineup after the fight).

But they definitely throw at least one of the tribbles that land on Kirk in this altered timeline.

Sisko narrates the ending of The Trouble with Tribbles to the time agents to wrap up the story. Kirk discovered the tribbles don't like Darvin and McCoy outed him as a Klingon. The mystery of who put the poison in the quadrotriticale was solved.

While this was going on, Kira figured out how to use the orb, so the return trip to the 24th century wasn't a problem. Makes sense to me. If Darvin could work it out, it would've been no problem for an actual spiritual Bajoran who hangs out with the Emissary of the Prophets all day.

And then Sisko admits that he went and got Kirk's autograph, with the aid of footage taken from Mirror, Mirror.

Sisko didn't have to tell the time agents, he could've just kept it quiet and no one would've been any the wiser, but the first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth... unless he's being sneaky and manipulative and bending rules, like Sisko has been known to do when necessary. DS9 likes to stray into the gray areas sometimes.

Dulmer tells Sisko that he's satisfied by everything he's heard here and there was no harm done. He even says he probably would've gotten Kirk's autograph himself, to Lucsly's shock. And then the two of them leave to write up their report.

Anyway, it turns out that Sisko did tell them the truth, about their time travel adventure, about his officers getting into a bar fight, about him getting Kirk's autograph... he just didn't tell them the whole truth.

You could argue that there was no reason to tell the time agents that someone (probably Odo) brought a tribble back with them and reintroduced the species, as it doesn't alter the timeline at all. Besides, rescuing an extinct species is very Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and everyone likes that movie.

So now Deep Space 9 is absolutely infested with the things, the bartender's got a tribble on his head, and the best solution their best experts can come up with is "We could build another station." It's a good thing Worf lives on the Defiant where he can sleep in peace without a chorus of a hundred thousand screaming tribbles serenading him all night.


CONCLUSION

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Every now and again a series will get creative and break format to do something different, like a musical episode, or an animated episode, or an episode where the heroes are turned into puppets etc. You don't get many episodes like Trials and Tribble-ations though, where the heroes invade another series from 30 year ago. That typically doesn't happen. Probably because it's bloody difficult to pull off.

Matching new shots to footage filmed at a different time and location wouldn't have been anything new for the production team, stories are always shot all over the place and out of order. It gets trickier, however, when there's three decades of technological evolution in the meantime and all you've got left in storage are a few old props and maybe some Klingon uniforms. They had to meticulously recreate sets, props, costumes, and miniatures, and then match the film stock, makeup, lighting and so on. (But not the sound quality I noticed.) Then they got even more ambitious by using Forrest Gump technology to try to pull off cutting-edge 1994 movie compositing effects on a 1996 TV series.

It's easy to imagine how much more creative a modern series with a toolbox full of AI-assisted CGI magic could've been with this, but harder to find a single damn flaw with what they achieved here. Well, when the camera's not moving I mean. And some of the shadows are a bit dodgy. But on a technical level, the episode shows that if you get a bunch of talented and experienced people together, unleash them upon a project they really care about, and spend a ton of money on it, you can achieve great things. Potentially.

Another big part of what makes the episode work is that it's just as laid-back and fun as the original Trouble with Tribbles without a whole lot of plot to ruin the vibe. The heroes spend the episode scanning for stuff and trying to be inconspicuous, so it's mostly about the characters getting to be in this place and this time, and having dumb conversations about tricorders and being their own great-grandfather. In fact, I'd say the episode's all about nostalgia, experiencing the past, and enjoying classic design, which is very fitting for an anniversary celebration.

Though in the process it kicks wide open a door that was pushed ajar by the Next Gen episode Relics, and fully canonises the Original Series's aesthetic after Star Trek: The Motion Picture's implied reimagining. Like The Motion Picture, this is a big flashy return to the characters and setting of the Original Series after a long time away from that world, but it takes the opposite approach. Instead of trying to bring reality to the Trek universe it asserts that TOS is the reality of the Trek universe. It has zero shame about where it came from, only love. Also, The Motion Picture had the characters looking out of the window at the impressive effects, while this uses its impressive effects to brings the DS9 crew inside to see the characters, so that's different too.

They're both based around a second season TOS episode as well, now that I think about it, with The Motion Picture almost being a remake of The Changeling and this being a riff on The Trouble with Tribbles. I'm really glad the DS9 writers decided to revisit Tribbles instead of going with their other idea and returning to the gangster planet from A Piece of the Action to reveal that they're all Star Trek cosplayers now. Save ideas like that for the cartoons!

Though choosing perhaps the most well-known and beloved episode of the Original Series to base their own episode around was a bit risky, especially as it blatantly retcons it. They digitally painted their own characters all over the background of Trek's Mona Lisa! This had to be the best damn Deep Space Nine episode ever or else fans were going to be a bit cross about that. Fortunately it kind of is! Well, it's a contender at least. I think it's pretty good.

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NEXT EPISODE

Sorry, that's the last Deep Space Nine episode I'll be writing about for a while. But it's not the last anniversary special, as next time I'll be covering Doctor Who's The Three Doctors!

In fact, I've decided that this is now Anniversary Special Month!! Though it took me two months to get this one review published so I can't promise I'll be getting many more of them written before I run out of November.

Please consider leaving a comment if you have your own opinions about Trials and Tribble-ations or want to yell at me for not writing about enough Deep Space Nine.