“I hold no malice toward my benefactors. They could not possibly know the hell they have put me through… for it was such a badly written book, filled with endless cliché and shallow characters… that I shall welcome death when it comes.”
I get into a lot of cross-discussion with other fans who complain about early Next Generation episodes, and how most of them seem like Original Series stories. “The Royale” is one of them, and yes, I can see the connection, particularly middle-to-late second season Original Series, when the show had lost its course due to the departure of steady hand Gene Coon. Most of the time, episodes were devoted to effect rather than cause and the Enterprise crew would get swept up in another planet’s politics or misadventure.
In “The Royale,” we have a “casino planet” scenario. Riker, Data, and Worf beam down after they snag a piece of a NASA spacecraft in orbit around Theta VIII. Instead of an uninhabitable atmosphere of solid methane, nitrogen, and neon, they discover a hotel with revolving doors and a casino. For a time, they’re amused until they find they can check in any time they want, but they can never leave. Welcome to the Hotel Royale! This is like transporting into the middle of a soap opera.
A young woman squanders her fortune. A love triangle ends in bloodshed for a lowly bellboy at the hands of gangster “Mickey D,” and the hotel is to be sold shortly to a “trio of foreign investors.” They detect human life signs in the hotel, but when they arrive at the origin, they discover only a decaying skeleton left behind tucked away in a bed. There’s something sad about this. Riker reads a note left behind by a Colonel S. Richey, presumably commander of the NASA spacecraft that crashed on this planet.
Richey speculated that the aliens who lived here felt a sense of guilt for the lone survivor of the ship and created a world for him to live in based on the only source of information they could find among his possessions: a “second-rate,” dime store paperback titled Hotel Royale. Riker comes to the conclusion that he, Data, and Worf must win big playing craps so they can buy the hotel and, hopefully, escape. This is a clever episode written by Tracy Tormé (who eventually removed his name after rewrites by Maurice Hurley) that cuts right to the heart of the silliness and proves to be a welcome respite after so much drama in the first season of the show.
Tormé’s first draft was a more surrealistic exercise owing to Richey’s tragic demise and the clueless aliens who unwittingly imprisoned him in this bizarre scenario. Richey still exists, albeit as a lonely ghost and there was an additional member of the landing party, a female who dies and keeps Richey company after everyone leaves. That sounds positively morose, doesn’t it? Hurley thought there should be more humor, and less of an invitation to compare it to the Original Series episode, “A Piece of the Action,” which also involved gangsters, and another constructed society based on a book.
Still, I enjoy these goofy diversions. Enjoy them while they last, because the show will soon stop showcasing humor in favor of more “serious” stories. I’ll take this over “Hero Worship,” “The Inner Light,” “Tapestry,” or “Lessons” any day of the week.
