#Rishon Uxbridge

[astralbondpro]

Star Trek: The Next Generation // S03E03: The Survivors

[filmjunky-99]

s t a r t r e k t h e n e x t g e n e r a t i o n created by gene roddenberry The Survivors [s3ep3]

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[data2364]

John Anderson as Kevin Uxbridge 1989 in Star Trek: The Next Generation ”The Survivors”

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Survivors_%28episode%29

[thegreaterlink]

Reviewing Star Trek TNG - S3E3 "The Survivors"

Yes, I know this is the season’s third episode. I accidentally posted the review for the season’s second episode, “The Ensigns of Command,” on Tuesday. You can find it here.

THE PREMISE

The Enterprise responds to a distress call from Delta Rana IV and discovers the planet to be a desolate wasteland completely devoid of life except for a single patch of land containing a house and some vegetation.

An away team beams down and meets with the house’s occupants, a married couple named Kevin and Rishon (pronounced ree-shon) Uxbridge, who claim to have witnessed the attack that destroyed the colony but were unaware that they were the only survivors. The team finds nothing of interest in the house except for a music box, but the Uxbridges refuse to return to the Enterprise.

MY REVIEW

This was another one where the plot summary makes it sound a lot less interesting than it actually is. Or maybe I’m just bad at writing summaries. Ah well.

Anyway, the premise for this episode is excellent - there’s an obvious intrigue to finding a perfectly intact house in the middle of a wasteland, especially when the only occupants are an unassuming elderly couple who for some reason refuse to leave despite the crew making multiple attempts to convince them.

Speaking of which, I have to give credit to the casting of John Anderson and Anne Haney. They don’t come across as threatening in any way, and you genuinely want to believe them… but it’s kind of hard to look past the fact that they’ve somehow survived and cultivated a garden in the middle of a former war zone. There’s something off about them (aside from the obvious), but you just can’t put your finger on it.

Meanwhile, Troi is suddenly bombarded by auditory hallucinations of the same song on loop, getting louder each time. It’s obviously painful for her and Marina Sirtis gives it her all like always, but I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t edited that scene to replace the music with “Faith of the Heart” or something by now. It gets bad enough that Dr Crusher has to put her in an induced coma.

We don’t know for sure what’s causing it, but the melody she’s hearing just so happens to be the same one being played on the Uxbridges’ music box, and Picard theorises that the music is connected to the Uxbridges’ unwillingness to leave. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Anyway, back on the bridge, the Enterprise is suddenly attacked by a warship, apparently the one responsible for wiping out the planet’s inhabitants. It flees after a single warning shot, but after another attempt to convince the Uxbridges to come with them it returns, unaffected by their attacks and causing severe damage, forcing the Enterprise to retreat. Despite this, Picard is convinced that the ship will have disappeared, and returns to the house.

There's a lot of back-and-forth trips between the house and the Enterprise. It's as exciting as it sounds.

The Uxbridges, particularly Kevin, dismiss their story about the warship as an attempt at intimidation, to which Picard replies that the Enterprise will remain in orbit around the planet for as long as the two of them are alive.

The away team beam back to the Enterprise (you’re probably sensing a pattern here), when suddenly the warship returns and obliterates the house from orbit before being destroyed by a single photon torpedo.

But Picard isn’t fooled. He orders for the Enterprise to enter a higher orbit and remain there until he says otherwise. Three hours later, the house just so happens to reappear, completely intact. It’s obvious by this point that Picard has worked out what’s going on. He has Kevin and Rishon beamed directly to the bridge, revealing that the house and warship were Kevin’s creations, and so is Rishon.

Kevin admits that the game is up, and after removing Troi’s auditory hallucinations - he had placed them there to stop her empath abilities from revealing the truth - he explains everything.

(I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible, but it is long.)

He’s a member of a powerful immortal race called the Douwd and decided to live as a human after meeting Rishon. The planet was attacked by alien raiders called the Husnock, but as a devout pacifist he was ethically unable to harm them and chose to trick them instead, which only angered them further. Rishon died fighting the raiders, and blinded by grief and frustration at his inactions he eradicated the entire Husnock species - about fifty billion - with a single thought. Wracked with guilt, he recreated Rishon and their house and exiled himself on the ruined Rana IV for eternity.

Picard admits that the Federation and humanity as a whole is not qualified to judge him, and allows him to continue living on Rana IV with Rishon. Back in his quarters, Picard is unsure whether someone like Kevin should be condemned for his crime or praised for his conscience, but decides that someone as powerful as Kevin (just try to read that with a straight face) is best left alone.

6.5/10 - A decent sci-fi mystery, but a lot of room for improvement.

[jimintomystery]

TNG: “The Survivors”

Responding to a distress signal about an unidentified vessel attacking Delta Rana IV,  the Enterprise discovers the entire planet has been scoured of all life...except a single house.  The occupants, Kevin and Rishon Uxbridge, offer little information about what happened, and are curiously eager for the Enterprise to leave so they can carry on with their lives.

This is the sort of episode that tries to be a fun puzzle, but in execution it just spends forty minutes being inscrutable to delay the solution for as long as possible.  I find the ending intriguing, but it doesn’t really enhance repeated viewings--now you know what’s really going on but you still can’t get any greater insight into the story.

We’re (eventually) told the Rana IV colonists fought a hopeless battle against Husnock invaders.  (This is interesting and timely parallel with “The Ensigns of Command,” in which another human colony considers waging the same sort of desperate resistance against hostile aliens they know nothing about.)  The full account of the hostilities suggests a protracted ground battle--allowing Kevin opportunities to help, which he only does indirectly, and Rishon time to leave him behind to join the fight.  That doesn’t square, though, with the scope of the devastation shown at the start to set up the puzzle--the attack has not simply wiped out the colonists, but razed the entire planet down to the bedrock and (apparently) boiled away its seas.  The simplest explanation is that the Husnock grew frustrated until they resorted to orbital bombardment, but how that fits into Kevin’s story is left unexplained.

I rarely watch “The Survivors” because I find the Counselor Troi subplot deeply uncomfortable.  Marina Sirtis does a great job conveying what it’s like to have that insipid music box tune stuck in one’s mind, but it’s painful to watch.  I think the main reason it bothers me is because Kevin knows it’s inhumane, and he regrets doing it, but I can’t accept that he couldn’t come up with another trick that would be less cruel.  Ultimately, Troi has to suffer for the story to work, because it gives Captain Picard a reason to refuse to leave the Uxbridges alone.  But that doesn’t justify the lack of an in-story explanation; indeed, it just reinforces that Kevin should want to neutralize Troi in a way that doesn’t provoke Picard.  So we’re left with Troi suffering for no good reason except that the writers want to make us watch.

The existence of the Husnock--an advanced, hostile civilization within striking distance of Federation space--could have been an interesting addition to Star Trek’s galactic neighborhood, if they had been acknowledged outside of this story.  Even the sudden annihilation of their civilization, and the resulting power vacuum, so close to the frontier could have made for some interesting stories.  The fact they’ve never been mentioned since this episode raises an eerie possibility: Kevin may have destroyed the Husnock race in a manner that erased all records and memories of them having ever existed at all.  In other words, yesterday the Enterprise might’ve been rushing to intercept an imperial Husnock dreadnought to defuse a diplomatic crisis near the Husnock Neutral Zone, but today they just have a garbled message about an “unidentified spacecraft”...

[kwebtv]

Character Actress

Anne Ryan Thomas Haney (March 4, 1934 – May 26, 2001)  Stage, film and television actress. She was best known for her roles in Mrs. Doubtfire and Liar Liar, as well as Alberta Meechum on the sitcom Mama’s Family.

Haney began acting in 1970, appearing in commercials and in local theatrical productions in Atlanta.

Haney appeared in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Survivors" as Rishon Uxbridge, and later appeared as a Bajoran arbitrator in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Dax". She was a regular guest-star during the syndicated run of Mama's Family, playing Alberta Meechum, the nemesis of Thelma Harper. On Our House she played fussy neighbor Virginia Taft. She was also a recurring cast member of L.A. Law, playing Judge Marilyn Travelini. She guest starred on Benson, Cheers, Designing Women, The Golden Girls, Charmed, Boy Meets World, Columbo, ER, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Ally McBeal.  (Wikipedia)

[actionfigurebullshit]

An Illusion

Idea for...

SHORT ACTION FIGURE BULLSHIT

...

ACTION FIGURE BULLSHORTS

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ACTION FIGURE BULLSHORTZ

...

AKSHYN FYGGURRE BYULLZHURTZH

,,,

TWO ideas for a short AFB video, heavy on TNG, because these are TNG action figures, so why not go whole hog instead of dancing around the fact that they look like a bunch of fucking Star Trek action figures?

Yar stands on the bridge while the crew looks on. Data holds Yar’s hand like they are lovers.

Picard takes the other hand, and we use the like from “The Survivors” when he reveals that Rishon Uxbridge is an illusion. Bye-bye... A short while later, Picard is disturbed by something.

“Sir?” asks Data.

“I saw Tasha in the shuttle. I must get to the shuttle!”

He gets down there, but is greeted by Data, possibly with phaser in hand. Now comes the hard part here. Do I finally break down and start cutting off the phaser beams from these phaser toys? You can never put them back, but with phaser beams, they’re useless to me. I wish I could make a mold of them, but in all truth, for most of my stuff, I could probably get away with just one being sacrificed... plus that Type 1 that will have to be cut for the BTV stuff.

Uh, anyway...

Using lines from “Ship in a Bottle”, Data reveals Picard is also an illusion, and he, too, disappears... or does he phaser him? I want him stopped with a phaser, but I don’t want him to be eliminated with one. He’s supposed to disperse on his own choosing.

Finally, Data turns around and asks another Picard (AGT Picard?) if he’s dead. The dialogue comes from the season 1 finale of Star Trek Picard. Rather than be confronted with his unreality, Data, the illusion, asks to be released.

Perhaps Picard uses the phaser here, or we take advantage of the slots on his arm and back.

Now it can turn into a riff on Daft Punk’s “Epilogue” if I want to get fancy, do the shot of them walking away with Data falling behind, but we see that Picard just goes off to go get the thing to plug into him so he can blow up. I could get silly with it and use the bomb sound effect from Mario Paint.

Data says good-bye, a la “Nemesis”.

It could get really weird. Data preserved Yar- “I could not let her pass into oblivion”, lines from “The Offspring”, put it after Data saying the line about compounding one illusion with another.

A-ha! It’s a PADD, and there’s a message from Data, and it ends with a holographic image, which he puts down on a table. A short while later, a third, holographic Picard comes in and says the line from SIAB about how it could all be an illusion on display in a device playing on someone’s table.

Could be simple enough, right?

[sokorra]

The Rewatch 128: The Survivors

The Rewatch 128: The Survivors

Series: Star Trek:TNGEpisode: 3.03 The Survivors (10-9-1989)Rating:  5/5Redshirt Status: 0/0/21.5 Notable Guest Stars: John Anderson – Kevin Uxbridge. Anderson was a long time character actor.Anne Haney – Rishon Uxbridge. Haney would appear on Star Trek during DS9 as well. She also guest starred on many tv shows including NCIS. She had a reoccurring role on the comedy Mama’s…

[dennisjerz]

The Survivors ( #startrek #tng rewatch, Season Three Episode 3) Charming geriatric love and a pacifist morality play

Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break.

After the Federation colony on Raina IV is obliterated, the Enterprise discovers a perfectly preserved house with two elderly survivors.

The standoffish Uxbridge impresses Worf by confronting strangers with a non-functional hand phaser, and the hospitable Rishon tells a charming story of how the two fell in love on Earth.

The script does a good job of…

[startrekhugs]

[Image: Kevin and Rishon Uxbridge hug sadly. From The Survivors. Image from Trekcore.]

[filmjunky-99]

s t a r t r e k t h e n e x t g e n e r a t i o n created by gene roddenberry Rishon and Kevin Uxbridge [the survivors, s3ep3] 'They came in a spaceship so big you could see it in orbit. They took our world apart piece by piece.' - kevin