“Devil’s Due” is written by: Philip LaZebnik, from a
story by: Philip LaZebnik and William Douglas Lansford, and is directed by: Tom
Benko. It was produced under production
code 187, was the 13th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation
Season 4, the 87th episode overall, and was broadcast on February 4,
1991.
Like “The Child” before it, “Devil’s Due” is an
episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that started its life as a
proposed script for Star Trek: Phase II.
Unlike “The Child”, it is coming from a production team that is far more
competent in what an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation should
be. “Devil’s Due” is also not an episode
that forces a character through an assault and childbirth of sorts, instead taking
a fairly straight deal with the devil as the con that it is. The devil is initially couched in the science
fiction language of a godlike alien who has purchased an entire planet’s souls
and society after a millennium of prosperity, now returned to arbitrate the
deal with signs and wonders. These are
the aspects of the episode that feel the most reminiscent of Star Trek
from the 1960s, although it has been updated for the then present of 1991. Marta DuBois plays Ardra, the devil in guises
of the many devil figures of various planets.
There is a Klingon devil that makes brief appearances with a
particularly unsettling makeup design.
It’s just a Klingon with a mouth that is split almost into a beak which
is effective with its creep factor.
Ardra as a character is also just a particularly fun portrayal, director
Tom Benko clearly telling DuBois to channel John de Lancie as Q. DuBois is not playing a devilish character as
a temptress outside of a select few scenes, but as an agent of chaos, taking
advantage of the letter of the contract over the spirit of the contract.
The back half of the episode is a courtroom drama to
untangle the contract that this society signed a millennium ago in the hopes of
finding a loophole as Ardra is working to the letter and not the spirit of the
contract. The running theory is that
Ardra is actually not the devil figure, but somebody else taking advantage of a
contract put on a society. Again it is
DuBois’ performance in this sequence that is particularly fun as there is
rightly the question of whether or not the devil would have to use mystic
powers to give this society prosperity and perform her actions or
technology. It is eventually revealed
that she is a con artist and whatever deal this society made was not with her,
if a deal was made at all. The ending is
a nice little subversion of the original series trope of a godlike alien being
responsible for an episode, again this script being structurally and
philosophically close to an episode of the original series. Where the episode really succeeds is adding
itself to the large pile of episodes focused on Data as a character. It opens with Data performing an excerpt from
A Christmas Carol on the holodeck and Brent Spiner playing Data playing
Ebeneezer Scrooge is this fascinating layered performance of someone who would
be a good Scrooge play Scrooge far worse than he could to keep in character as
Data. Data is actually giving a good
performance as Scrooge, he is imitating the emotions and those imitations are what
acting is all about according to certain schools of thought. This connects to the trial in the back half
of the episode where Data is the arbiter due to his impartiality. This is a small element and clearly meant to
put Data at odds with his own sense of justice, using his own ability to approximate
emotion to give Picard and company time to find the loophole for the
conclusion.
Overall, the biggest drawback to “Devil’s Due” is the
clear fact that it was meant to be an episode of Star Trek: Phase II. While the performances across the board are
great and Tom Benko’s direction focuses on the chaos and the character, the
script is one that feels often from a different time brought thirty years into
the future. It’s different from what Star
Trek: The Next Generation has become but that does not make it a bad
episode, it just does not make it particularly notable when compared to the
episodes around it. On its own merits
“Devil’s Due” is a good time, a pastiche of a story archetype that has been
around for centuries. 7/10.