Entertainment
How Riker Accidentally Inspired One Of Star Trek’s Most Hated Episodes
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
There are few characters in Star Trek quite as beloved as William T. Riker. On The Next Generation, he was basically Kirk 2.0: a brilliant, cocky Starfleet officer who was as friendly as he was flirty. It helps that he was played by Jonathan Frakes, one of the most charismatic actors in the entire franchise. Frakes eventually got behind the director’s chair, giving us the two best TNG movies and episodes from six different shows in the franchise. He’s practically the de facto brand ambassador for Star Trek, securing Riker’s popularity with fans all around the world.
However, would you believe there is one Star Trek spinoff that started by using Riker as a negative example? When Enterprise came out, it was designed as a prequel that took place about a century before Captain Kirk was exploring strange new worlds in The Original Series. Therefore, the crew of this show was far less seasoned, and they didn’t always handle problems with grace and dignity. Case in point: in “Unexpected,” Trip freaks out when visiting an alien vessel for the first time. It’s meant to show that he’s very little like Riker, but the episode ultimately validates his fears. After all, this is the episode where an alien babe gets him pregnant!
Subspace-ive And Breedable
“Unexpected” begins with a similar initial plot to many episodes of Star Trek: the Enterprise crew encounters aliens who need a little help. Specifically, they need help with their engines, and Captain Archer graciously volunteers the services of his chief engineer, Trip Tucker. Trip visits the alien vessel and, Kirk-style, ends up hitting it off with an alien babe. They don’t have physical sex, but due to a quirk of her biology, one of their interactions gets him pregnant. Fortunately, the Enterprise crew is able to successfully remove the implant, keeping the engineer from becoming the ship’s newest dilithium daddy.
It may sound like faint praise, but Executive Producer Brannon Braga (who was one of the key writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation) commended the writers for making Trip the opposite of William Riker in this episode. Regarding the plot point where Trip is excited to visit the alien vessel and then wants to leave because it’s so weird, he told Star Trek Communicator, “That’s the kind of stuff you would never see a Riker do, because they’re just too seasoned.”
At Least He Parties Like Riker
The comparison is apt, as there’s arguably nobody in Star Trek history who vibes with alien cultures like Riker. He certainly took enough of them to bed, including one woman who used him to deliver a mind-controlling game to the Enterprise. On another occasion, he fell in love with an andyngious gal, even though their romance was basically a crime. And let’s not forget the time he had to violate the Prime Directive by banging a hippie just to escape an undercover mission that went sideways.
Riker’s comfortable with aliens because, as a seasoned Starfleet officer, he doesn’t see them as any different than himself. Trip, however, is on his first deep space mission, encountering various aliens for the first time in his life. Instead of presenting him as instantly cool with everything, Enterprise chose the more realistic option of showing how alien culture freaked him out. To his credit, though, Trip rallies and works on his alien relations so much that he ends up pregnant. Fortunately, the actor was able to carry the heavy narrative weight of this episode. As Braga put it, “Connor [Trinneer] just brought more to Trip than we could’ve imagined.”
Can You Get Pregnant From Decon?
That was, of course, intentional on Trinneer’s part. Realizing that this was the first Trip-focused episode, the actor decided to give it his all. He showed the producers how well he could perform the scripted material and how well he could improvise. Best of all, he showed them he was equally adept at both comedy and drama, and the actor credits this episode for helping everyone learn who his character really was. He put in the work, and it paid off, but maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, who’s going to put more “labor” into their performance than the actor playing the first pregnant man in Star Trek history?