“Bloodlines”
Written by Nicholas Sagan
Directed by Les Landau
Season 7, Episode 22
Production episode 40276-274
Original air date: May 2, 1994
Stardate: 47829.1
Captain’s Log: A probe approaches the Enterprise, which hails Picard by name and projects a hologram onto the bridge. The image is of DaiMon Bok, who claims to have found Picard’s son, Jason Vigo. He plans to kill Vigo just as Picard killed Bok’s son at Maxia Zeta fifteen years ago.
This comes as rather a shock to Picard, who has no idea who Jason Vigo is. He has Worf bring the probe on board, Data search the records for Jason Vigo (he suggests starting with a woman from the New Gaul colony named Miranda Vigo), and Riker query the Ferengi government as to why and how Bok has regained his rank after losing it in “The Battle.”
Data finds a picture of Vigo, who is twenty-three years old, and he and his mother settled on Camor V, a planet that has dodgy planetary records. Riker very carefully does not ask the obvious question, but Picard goes ahead and answers it anyhow: he was involved with Miranda Vigo for a short time about twenty-four years earlier. It was a two-week romance, and she never mentioned being pregnant, but Picard feels that it would’ve been in character for her not to mention it and raise the child on her own.
They arrive at Camor V. Data is able to find Vigo and beam him aboard in mid-spelunk (the kid’s a major climber), at which point Picard brings him up to speed on the situation. Vigo was never told who his father was, so it’s possible that Picard is him—he also informs Picard that his mother died a few years ago.
Vigo agrees to a genetic test, which reveals that he is, in fact, Picard’s son. Picard then brings him to his quarters for an attempt at bonding, which fails. However, Picard wishes to keep Vigo on board until the situation with Bok is resolved.
Data and La Forge are working on trying to figure out where the probe came from. Meanwhile, a Ferengi official named Girta assures Picard that Bok was not only relieved of command, but imprisoned, until he bought his way out of jail two years earlier. Girta is only willing to admit that he was last seen in the Dorias Cluster, which has some twenty star systems—but La Forge and Data found residue on the probe indicating it was near a particular type of quasar, one of which can be found in that cluster. The Enterprise heads to the Xendi Sabu system.
Picard sees an image of Bok in his quarters. There’s no sign that Bok was actually there, nor evidence of a hologram or another mental projection like the one he used the last time. La Forge continues to investigate while Worf assigns a security detail to Vigo. Meanwhile, Data alerts Picard to Vigo’s criminal record: petty theft, disorderly conduct, trespassing, and assorted other misdemeanors.
Vigo goes to Ten-Forward, where the two guards are making him nervous. Picard makes attempt #2 at bonding, and that fails even more spectacularly. A probe appears near the Enterprise and then explodes, but the explosion provides a display in Ferengi code that Data translates to, “My revenge is at hand.”
Bok appears in Picard’s ready room, saying that he insists on being paid for the loss of his son. Then he disappears in what appears to be a Ferengi transporter beam. Right after that, Vigo’s security detail reports a medical emergency: Vigo is having an awful seizure. Crusher diagnoses him with Forrester-Trent Syndrome, a degenerative nerve disorder. It’s also hereditary, but Picard doesn’t have it, and as far as Vigo knows, his mother didn’t, either.
La Forge and Data determine that Bok is using a subspace transporter, which is unstable and impractical, but which can also work over long distances. Picard then joins Vigo on the holodeck, where he’s indulging his rock climbing fetish. The captain climbs up to join him, and makes attempt #3 at bonding, which works a bit better by virtue of Picard asking about Miranda. Vigo is also rather surprised to realize that Picard knows all about his criminal record.
Crusher calls Picard to sickbay with a revelation: he isn’t Vigo’s father. His DNA was altered to make it appear that Picard was his father, a side effect of which was to give Vigo Forrester-Trent Syndrome.
Bok is able to beam Vigo off the Enterprise despite La Forge’s efforts to stop it. However, Data traces the beam and the subsequent gloating transmission from Bok to find the source. La Forge and Data modify the transporter to work as a subspace transporter that puts Picard on Bok’s bridge. Picard reveals that Vigo is not his son, which prompts Tol, one of his crew, to lament that he’ll never pay the ransom. But there is no ransom, and Bok is not a true DaiMon. Tol, realizing there’s no profit and that he and the crew were deceived, takes Bok into custody.
Vigo stays on board long enough to get his Forrester-Trent treated, and then goes back home to Camor V. Picard gives him an archaeological relic as a gift before he beams back.
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: Subspace transporters work over much greater distances, but are unstable and dangerous. This doesn’t prevent them from working absolutely perfectly every single time they’re used in this episode.
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: Troi checks in on Vigo, offering her professional services. Vigo prefers instead to flirt with her, and poorly at that.
If I Only Had a Brain…: Data’s sheer awesomeness keeps the plot moving, as he’s able to figure out that Bok is using a subspace transporter, finds out everything about Vigo, and is even able to find Vigo on a planet full of people.
No Sex, Please, We’re Starfleet: Picard’s womanizing ways seen in “Tapestry” apparently continued into adulthood, as he had a two-week romance with Miranda Vigo, and promptly forgot all about her.
I Believe I Said That: “But one thing is clear: you’ll never look at your hairline again in the same way.”
Picard, providing Vigo with the ugly truth about being his son.
Welcome Aboard: The character of Bok returns, but this time played by Lee Arenberg, who previously played two other Ferengi on “Force of Nature” and Deep Space Nine’s “The Nagus.” Frank Corsentino played Bok in “The Battle,” as well as two other Ferengi in “Ménàge à Troi” and Voyager’s “Inside Man,” but he was unavailable for this episode. Peter Slutsker also plays his third Ferengi as Birta, having been different Ferengi in “Ménàge à Troi” and “Suspicions,” while Michelan Sisti makes his only Ferengi appearance as Tol. Ken Olandt plays Jason Vigo as a smarmy asshole.
Trivial Matters: This episode is a sequel to “The Battle,” with Bok continuing to attempt revenge against Picard for the death of his son at Maxia Zeta.
One of the names Picard called out in “The Battle” when he relived Maxia Zeta was “Vigo,” the weapons officer. When he wrote the novel Reunion, which provided details about Picard’s crew on the Stargazer, Michael Jan Friedman had Vigo as a male Pandrilite. Sagan’s script for this episode originally had a line that Miranda Vigo was the sister of the weapons officer, though it was cut. As yet, the relationship, if any, between the Pandrilite Vigo and the human Miranda Vigo has not been addressed.
This episode came about when co-executive producer Jeri Taylor asked Sir Patrick Stewart if there were any outstanding plot/character points he thought should be addressed before the show ended, and Stewart mentioned Bok. Taylor then gave Nick Sagan the assignment to write it. Sagan named Forrester-Trent Syndrome after the writer of “The Battle” (Larry Forrester) and the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor).
Make it So: “I have a life back on Camor.” The biggest problem with this episode is honestly in the recasting of Frank Corsentino with Lee Arenberg. Allegedly, the producers couldn’t find Corsentino (though they found him eventually when Voyager’s “Inside Man” came ’round), but Arenberg spends the entire episode being absolutely nothing like Corsentino. It’s easy to just dismiss the Ferengi as all being alike, but—leaving aside that Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, and Max Grodénchik spent seven years on Deep Space Nine proving that wrong—this episode is a strong case against that. The Bok of “The Battle” was a father who was devastated by the loss of his son. There was an emotional hook to his revenge. But Arenberg, sadly, just plays Bok as someone who shouts a lot. This will serve him well in other roles (particularly on Enterprise as a Tellarite ambassador), but makes the character considerably less interesting here.
Not that the episode doesn’t have dozens of other problems, like its complete inability to commit to its premise. It could’ve been cool if Picard really did have a long-lost son and he was kind of a dick, but the show refuses to actually pursue the interesting path, instead having it be a technobabble solution where Bok basically created a son in order to devastate Picard by killing him.
On top of that, Bok’s whole plan relies upon the use of a subspace transporter, which they pulled directly out of their asses so that Bok could properly torture Picard. Lip service is paid to its danger, but that danger is never actually shown. It’s not like, say, the dimensional shift in “The High Ground,” where the risk in using the technology is front and center. Subspace transporting is dangerous only because Data says it is and we’ve never seen it before or since, but it does everything it’s supposed to do in this story without any ill effects. It’s the laziest of lazy technobabble writing.
And then in the end, Bok pulls the same trick on his fellow Ferengi that he pulled in “The Battle,” lying about the profit in the mission, and it doesn’t work this time, either. If we saw Bok as someone who was suffering legitimate grief about his son, it might have been more interesting, but nobody seemed interested in showing genuine emotion in this episode.
Including, sadly, the guy atop the credits. Picard’s reaction to a long-lost son is surprisingly muted, his bonding attempts perfunctory and flat. Compare this episode to DS9’s pilot episode “Emissary” and the look on Picard’s face when Sisko reveals that he was a survivor of Wolf 359. Sir Patrick Stewart recoils as if he’s been slapped, and devastation and horror is writ large on his face. He manages more in that single closeup on “Emissary” than he can manage to scrape together at any point in this episode.
The story of Picard discovering a long-lost son and having him targeted could’ve been a good one. This ain’t it.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido is in the midst of his promotion to second-degree black belt in karate as he does this rewatch. If all goes well, he’ll have that second stripe by the time the rewatch for “Emergence” goes live….
Wasn’t subspace transporting (or something like it) used in the 2009 Star Trek movie? Lazy writing indeed.
The final season of TNG had too many episodes like this–half an interesting idea but in dire need of a rewrite… or two.
Looking forward to the DS9 rewatch.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the biggest flaw of the episode — it’s a retread of the David Marcus plotline from TWoK, except whereas David’s animosity towards Kirk was well founded and well portrayed by Merritt Butrick, here it’s just used for another of the Seventh Seasons’ lame, soap operaesque family reunion shows without any effort to get a decent actor in the main role.
I agree that it wasn’t a very good episode, but disagree about it being better if the long lost son was real. Personally I was groaning about them using that trope and was relieved when they went with the relatively new twist of trying to create a fake son for the emotional damage.
Take out the subspace transporter, make the villain more menacing, and tap more into Picard’s previous angst over sacrificing his chances at family for his career and I don’t think you need the son to be real.
I agree the biggest problem with this episode is nobody has an emotional commitment to anything. By the end of the episode I didn’t even care that the kid wasn’t Picard’s even though I thought it was a cop out. The best line is the one about Vigo’s hair especially considering what Daniel Stewart looks like.
Alright Then: I thought so, but technically what we got in JJTrek was transwarp transporting, so it wasn’t exactly the same thing…..
Sean: *shrug* The Wrath of Khan was hardly the first time anyone did a long-lost son story. It was just marginally better than average (as opposed to “Bloodlines”). But it’s far too common a trope for this to be considered a ripoff of that particular instance of it, IMO.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Sean and KRAD:
Actually, I think this episode bears a much closer similarity to “Future Imperfect” than it does to “The Wrath of Kahn.” David Marcus really was Kirk’s son; neither Riker nor Picard turned out to actually be a dad in the respective episodes. In both, Picard and Riker, to their credit, try to share their hobbies/obsessions (Riker’s trombone, etc.) with their “sons.”
In my TNG prequel novel The Buried Age, I made a passing reference to the coincidental similarity in names between Picard’s weapons officer and the woman he had a fling with. I guess that counts as addressing it, albeit barely.
I actually liked Arenberg better than Corsentino, because he was more effectively menacing. But you have a point about him being more one-dimensional and unsympathetic. I hadn’t considered that before.
@1: Yeah, I tend to assume the “transwarp beaming” in the movie was the same technology as the subspace transporter here. The problems with the technology as explained here help to justify why the technique in the movie wouldn’t become a routine thing and render starships obsolete. Sure, the episode didn’t do more than pay lip service to those dangers, but that doesn’t stop us from choosing to believe they’re real. (To Keith, yeah, the name was different, but the movie was using “transwarp” in the sense of “across the warp barrier,” i.e. from a transporter at sublight to a ship at warp, rather than in the sense of “beyond warp speeds” that transwarp drive uses. So I choose to think it is the same subspace beaming technology; it’s only called “transwarp” in the specific case when it’s between a stationary location and a ship at warp.)
I was never really convinced that you could disguise a person’s DNA to look like another person’s DNA, but recently I saw a CSI episode (I think) where someone managed to fool a standardized DNA test by constructing a gene sequence that only contained the specific markers it usually tested for. So if Crusher’s standardized test also looked at just a few markers instead of the whole genome, it might be possible to alter those specific markers enough to fool the test. And then there was something I’ve seen in a couple of cop shows this season: if someone gets a bone marrow transplant, their blood cells will contain the donor’s DNA rather than their own. So if the test was done with a blood sample, maybe Bok just altered the genes in Jason’s bone marrow.
Casting trivia: Michelan Sisti was the performer inside the Michaelangelo (sic) costume in the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies in the ’90s.
I think that if he really HAD been Picard’s son, that would jumped the ep up to at least a 6. The whole “rewriting dna” thing really threw my suspension of disbelief out the window when I watched this one; I probably could’ve lived with the rest of the little bits of bad if they’d have toyed with a son.
Jeri Taylor did *not* ask Sir Patrick Stewart as he was not knighted until much later. At this point, he was just Patrick Stewart.
One thing I forgot to mention: It annoys me that they had two consecutive episodes called “Firstborn” and “Bloodlines” and dealing with a main character’s (real or supposed) son, because I’m always forgetting which is which.