Classic Star Trek Episode Ruined By Showrunner

Sadly, Tormé has never revealed the exact details of his original story for “The Royale,” but he once described it as “kind of a surrealistic piece, with a lot of comedy and lots of subtle satire in it.”

For its many strengths as a franchise, Star Trek has a pretty spotty record for both satire and comedy, and it rarely does surreal. Considering that the writer pitched this originally for the first season of The Next Generation, it’s easy to imagine such a script impressing producers specifically because it had gone where no Star Trek story had gone before.

The finished episode is nothing like what Tormé originally pitched and wrote because Hurley demanded endless rewrites. This resulted in the writer taking his real name off the script, and the finished episode of “The Royale” is credited to the fictional Keith Mills.

Tormé hated the forced script changes so much that he stepped down from staff writer to creative consultant, and after Hurley demanded similar rewrites to his next episode, “Manhunt,” the writer left the show completely.

Looking back, he has no love for the version of “The Royale” that fans saw, saying that he has “completely disowned the piece.” He described rereading the forced rewrite and getting only “ten pages through it” before he “got sort of a cold chill and had to put it down.”

Normally, rewrites are intended to make episodes better, but to hear the writer tell the story, almost everybody except Maurice Hurley was confused as to why the script was rewritten in the first place.

Regarding the changes to “The Royale,” he later said, “the cast, the crew and even secretaries went out of their way to tell me how much they liked my draft, and they asked me in a totally puzzled manner, what on Earth had happened and why we had changed it.”

All he could offer in response was a shrug because he was a staff writer and had to do what the showrunner asked him to do. Nonetheless, he dearly misses the elements that were taken out of his original script.

He confirmed that “a lot of the comedy was taken out” of “The Royale” along with the surrealism. Now, he’s an even harsher critic of the finished episode than the fans, calling it “very heavy-handed” and noting how “it’s gone from being a strange episode to being a stupid episode.”

That’s about how we feel about the episode, too, which felt like a bottle episode that inexplicably took place mostly on a new set (in this case, a crappy casino).

On the sliding scale of early Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, “The Royale” certainly isn’t the worst one (that will always be “Code of Honor”), but it does commit cardinal entertainment sin of being completely boring.

It’s not entertainingly bad like when Wesley Crusher is so bad at sports he is sentenced to death or when Dr. Crusher has a passionate affair with her grandma’s lover who lives in a candle. No, it’s just a forgettable early adventure, one that could have been an instant classic if the showrunner had simply stuck with the original script.