Trivia / Star Trek The Next Generation S 6 E 7 Rascals

• Creator Backlash: This is not among Ronald D. Moore's favorite TNG scripts.
• What Could Have Been: Since Ro is not seen returning to her real age at the end of the episode, Jeri Taylor's said the Writers did briefly consider having Ro decide to remain a child. After all, where else but Star Trek could you do something like that? However, they decided it was too drastic and a restored Ro would reappear next season in the show's penultimate episode "Preemptive Strike".
• Writer Revolt:
  • The Ferengi's comments about how it's cruel to keep children aboard a starship that regularly goes into dangerous situations are very much shared by Ronald D. Moore, who wrote the final script for the episode uncredited, and later ensured that the Enterprise-E would be a child-free zone when it arrived on the scene in Star Trek: First Contact.
  • Moore's also admitted than when Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor first bought the pitch during Season Five, he thought Piller was out of his mind. Moore thought the premise was ludicrous (even by Trek standards) and he kept doing everything in his power to bury it over and over again. As Moore's lamented, this inevitably and ironically got him assigned with the eventual script rewrite when the episode finally entered production. To his credit, while he did not like the premise, Moore's acknowledged he had to swallow his pride, commit to his inner professional writer, and do what he could with the material.
• You Look Familiar:
  • David Birkin, the child actor who played Young Picard previously played Picard's nephew in "Family". He'd rather inconveniently gone through a major growth spurt since then, which rather undercut his supposedly seeming to be a helpless child (the phenomenon that de-aged the characters supposedly returned them to just before puberty; while the other three's appearance more or less qualifies, Birkin was clearly a teenager). The director tried to work around it by having most of his appearances be alongside Jonathan Frakes and Michael Dorn, the two tallest members of the cast, though this didn't really conceal his height very much.
  • Three actors playing Ferengi appear in other episodes as different Ferengi.

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