The android Data needed the three most brilliant scientists in history for a game of poker on the holodeck, and the chosen ones were Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The first two had been dead for decades (or centuries). The third was fifty-one years old and had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but he had expressed his desire to appear in the series to Paramount bosses.
When was it? On June 21, 1993, the finale of the sixth season of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’. The first ninety seconds of the episode, titled ‘Descent, Part 1’, contain something that It hasn’t happened again. in more than fifty years of franchise: a real person, with a first and last name, playing himself. It was Stephen Hawking.
How it started. Hawking visited the offices of Paramount Pictures in 1991 to present a documentary about his life directed by Errol Morris. Rick Berman, executive producer of the series, discovered during the visit that Hawking was a trekkie declared and offered him a tour of the sets of ‘The New Generation’. And once on the set, the scientist made an unusual request: that he be taken out of his wheelchair (something unusual) so he could sit in the captain’s chair.
Once installed, he commented to his host Leonard Nimoy (Spock in the original series) that the seat was considerably more comfortable and powerful than his chair. He then asked if there was any chance of appearing on the show. The producers took note. Hawking would return to Los Angeles a few months later, and a filming window was available. All that was left was to know what the hell a theoretical physicist with ALS was going to do in an episode of a science fiction series without it coming off as parody, or even condescending.
To do. The scriptwriters decided that the most appropriate thing was a scene in the holodeck, probably accompanied by the android Data. From there, it was time to build a scene that justified the presence of the most famous scientist in the world. Executive producer Michael Piller came up with the idea that solved it all: a poker game. The Enterprise holodeck allowed any historical figure to be recreated with precision, and the lucky ones were Newton, dead since 1727, and Einstein, since 1955. And Hawking, also dead in the fiction of the series, but capable of playing himself.
To construct the physics joke that opens the scene, screenwriter Ronald D. Moore called his partner Naren Shankar, a doctor in applied physics and future showrunner of ‘CSI’. Shankar designed the Mercury perihelion joke (a phenomenon that Newtonian mechanics is unable to explain), and proposed the comic dynamic between the three scientists, with Hawking and Einstein mocking Newton.
April 8. Hawking filmed his appearance April 8, 1993. Brent Spiner, who played Data and usually had no problem bringing the android’s emotional coldness to life, was nervous. The actor later described that moment as “probably my favorite moment in my entire experience doing Star Trek.” The scene that was filmed that day ended up lasting less than two minutes. In it, after joking about the possible apocryphal quality of the story of Newton and the apple, Hawking wins the hand, and Einstein argues that the odds of that victory could not have been improved even by quantum fluctuations. Hawking replies (with seconds): “Wrong again, Albert.”
A historic cameo. It was not the first time that ‘Star Trek’ played with historical figures: we had even seen Abraham Lincoln fighting alongside Kirk and Spock. But Hawking is still, todaythe only real person to have played herself in any series or film in the ‘Star Trek’ universe. Furthermore, that cameo came at a particular time for the franchise: the audience for the sixth season of ‘The Next Generation’ was beginning to experience a gradual decline and ‘Deep Space Nine’ premiered that year. The franchise was expanding and the public was divided, but there was time for a cameo that was almost a declaration of intent.
Moore claims that Hawking had helped build, with his work on black holes and cosmology, the type of scientific imaginary that ‘Star Trek’ had been playing with for decades. That he wanted to appear on the show, that he didn’t disdain science fiction but rather enjoyed it, functioned as a kind of circular validation. That’s why there is one last icing on the cake in the chapter: in the future that the episode imagines, it is revealed that Data holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. That same chair was held by Hawking between 1979 and 2009, and before him, Newton between 1669 and 1702. The three would end up sitting at a poker table in a future imagined in 1993.
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