Taken from Star Trek Monthly Jan. 1996, Vol. 1, No. 11

                        Q Knows

Not long after John de Lancie appeared in Encounter at
Farpoint, the two hour opening episode to Star Trek: The
Next Generation, series creator Gene Roddenberry told the
actor who plays the enigmatic entity 'Q' : 'You have no
idea what you've gotten yourself into.' Those words turned
out to be prescient indeed. Over the course of the series,
de Lancie returned seven more times, made an appearance
in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and will soon be appearing
on Star Trek: Voyager, making him one of the Star Trek
universe's most enduring quest stars.

"That's exactly what he said," recalls de Lancie of that
conversation with the late Roddenberry. "I say those words
with a sense of pride, and a bit of glee, in the same way he
said them to me, but of course I had no idea at the time. I
was not a Star Trek fan, and everybody knows that it was
never my cup of tea when it comes to SF; I've always enjoyed
a darker, much more bleak kind of SF. I'm not a great one for
cautionary tales and things like that, but the irony is that as
a kid, I always wanted to be involved in SF, and it took me a
couple of years to realise I am. It's just so different from what
I had anticipated."

One of the most intriguing aspects of Q is his ambiguity. Is
he malevolent? Is he well-intentioned? Are his motives
beyond Human understanding? Writer Peter David, who's
penned two ST:TNG novels featuring the character, likens Q
to a small boy who, after dissecting a frog, isn't necessarily
interested in putting it back together again.

"That's certainly an acceptable way of looking at that
character," de Lancie reflects. "My idea was maybe a little
more directed than that. I don't like the idea of the kid. I
don't think there's anything kid-like about this character.
Although one might interpret it that way, that's not what I'm
playing.

"To me, he's much closer to what I've said before, that I felt
the character was mad, bad and dangerous to know. 'Mad'
being more in the idea of the kid maybe; I don't mean crazy,
but very naughty, and the kid part may also have something
to do with the fact that one of the elements about the
character that I think is enjoyable is that I don't feel
constrained by any sort of moral choices, so I just do what I
feel like I'm doing, and it tends to have that look about it."

As de Lancie explains, he generally avoids formulating any
long-term decisions about his character; instead he simply
waits for the next script. "If I make any kind of decisions that
I'm going to play Q in a certain way before seeing the next
script, I'm really going to run up against some problems, so I
don't do that.

"I think the audience appreciates that actors are immediate,
and so I try to deal with what the immediate problems are. I
have so much audience support with this character; they
ascribe far more to me and this character than is there, so all
I have to do is be aware of that and present it, and every once
in a while a wink and a nod in that direction does as much as
an entire page of dialogue might do. I can skew things in
such a way as to accomplish that. I can certainly turn a love
line into a hate line very easily, and vice versa, contrary to
what the script might mean, but I still have to go with what
the script says.

Nonetheless, the actor notes that the Q stories that appeal to
him have more of an edge to them. "The shows that have
made the least impression on me are the ones where I'm in
love with somebody; any of those shows. The shows that
work the best for me are the shows that have to do with the
greatest philosophical issues, and also the ones where you're
not quite sure what the hell is going to happen. I like the
ruthlessness of the character, and his unpredictability."

Case in point: Q's 'It's not safe out there' speech to Picard
after the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D encounters the Borg
for the first time in Q Who. "That's when this character works
the best, and frankly it's when I think me and Star Trek
works the best. Whether or not I'm in love with Vash,
Jennifer Hetrick, who cares? I don't, and when it's hard to
find reasons to care, it's hard to play. It's easier when it's
talking about taking risks, as in Tapestry, or arrogance as in
the one we just mentioned, or the last one, where,
interestingly enough, seven years after the day, here I am
presenting the pop psychology of the Nineties, and telling
Picard to loosen up. Those were the ones that to me stood
out."

De Lancie acknowledges that doing a comedic episode from
time to time is okay, citing Deja Q, in which the character is
stripped of his godlike powers, as one of the better examples.
"It was after that one I said, 'The next show, if I do one for
you, must be as vicious as possible,' and they gave me the
Sheriff of Nottingham in Q-Pid. That's the only one where I
went out of my way to change the intent. In the scenes with
the sheriff, I played him much harder than was intended.

"The episode that says it all for me in terms of what I wanted
to do from an actor's point of view, an the importance and
the weight of the character from a show point of view, was
the last scene of All Good Things. In that, you get a real sense
that this character has been a major player. It was a
complicated scene, and I fought for it, because that scene was
going to be cut down to the point where a scene stalls out if
you cut too much, but they didn't, and there were a lot of
elements in that scene that were important: 'I'll see you
again, if you're lucky.' There were lots of elements that really
answered some fundamental questions about the character
and his value to the show."

Fans have often remarked about the chemistry between de
Lancie and ST:TNG star Patrick Stewart, pointing out that
scenes between Q and Picard have always had an added
electricity to them. Were the actors as much on the same
wavelength as it appeared on screen? "That's not necessarily
an accurate impression every time, but it's certainly the
impression you're supposed to have. The last scene of the last
episode of the show that we shot, and it was out of sequence,
was the primordial earth scene. If truth be told, Patrick was
involved in the emotionality or the significance that this was
the last episode of this seven year show they had done, and
since we were up on a 20 foot platform, with a guy who was
holding a bucket of goo beneath me, I was much more
involved in whether I could drip the goo on the top of his
head during the scene without him laughing. For me, it was
perfect, because it was the kind of naughtiness the character
would have.

"I can't say that I was all choked up about the fact that it was
the last scene, at one o'clock in the morning. For me, I saw
the opportunity of being a little naughty, and it worked,
because when I turn to Patrick and say, '... in this goo,' and I
have that little flash in my eye, it had much more to do with
the guy whose face was dripping with goo and couldn't say
anything because he was standing on a 20 foot ladder, than it
had to do with Patrick!"

To date, de Lancie's last Star Trek appearance was in the
ST:TNG episode All Good Things, where Q finishes the trial
against Humanity seven years before. Although his character
looked ostensibly the same as he did in Encounter at Farpoint,
de Lancie says he certainly wasn't playing Q the same way.
"There's a lot of history there, and you can recapture it by
having the same costumes and doing the same camera moves.
The history that has taken place in that period of time is
different, at least I like to think it is. Maybe it isn't, maybe
I'm kidding myself that someone would see both of those
shows back to back and say, 'Oh my God, they were shot in
the day!'"

Of course, the inevitable question in a discussion about Q is
has de Lancie read either of the ST:TNG featuring his
character? In particular, what does he think of Q-Squared,
which address the long therorised link between Q and Squire
Trelane, from Classic Star Trek episode Squire of Gothos?

"I know that the audience got a great deal of pleasure from
the 'Q Meets Lwaxana Troi' story, Q In Law, but I'm not
enough of an aficionado of the show to appreciate that. There
is a part I thought was really quite clever, and it came as a
surprise to me - I had to sit down and do one of these Simon
& Schuster readings for the Q-Squared audio book, and I was
reading it cold. Suddenly I said, 'Oh my God!' It was the
scene where I get rid of Trelane, because he's been too
naughty, and Trelane says, 'Why hast thou foresaken me?' I
like that type of material, the mythology of the religion
interwoven with the mythology of this character. That's what
I'm saying about this character working best when he's at the
philosophical level, or just bigger than life rather than love
stories, so that's when the print conceptualisation of this
character and his relationship with other characters was, I
felt, kind of neat.

"When I first did the show, people kept on saying to me, 'My
God, you must have seen Trelane!' and I had no idea what
they were talking about. I said no, and one day somebody
sent me The Squire of Gothos. I sat down and watched it, and I
can't tell you how tickled I was to see such a good actor, 20
years earlier, create a character whose rhythms and
sensibilities were so in sync with a character that I created 20
years later. It just goes to show that there's something new
under the sun, and I have great admiration for Bill
Campbell's expertise and skill. He really did a hell of a job at
that. What was interesting was that with these same
characteristics, I had created a character 20 years later that
sparked the audience the same way as he had sparked their
interest."

As for Q's return to the Star Trek universe, only time will tell
just when the meddling entity will pop up in an episode of
Star Trek: Voyager. "I'm actually going to Kate's house tonight
to have dinner," says de Lancie, who's being friends with
ST:VOY star Kate Mulgrew for many years. Pausing a
moment to consider the metaphor, "I don't know, it's like
being asked whether I'm going to be invited to somebody's
dinner party. In this case, it's Kate's dinner party, so she's
asked me to come. When it's Rick Berman's dinner party, I
don't really ask him whether I'm invited to it, just like I don't
think anybody else would.

"I'm just getting ready to go to Aspen where I'm going to be
during the narration for Beethoven's Fidelio, a concert
version of that opera. Then Leonard Nimoy and I are
sketching out a project that I think will be of enormous
interest to Star Trek fans, or more generically to SF fans. I
had to put it to one side while I was working on Legend, but
it's a project that has to do with classic SF. When I get back,
I'm going to devote myself completely to it."

While John de Lancie is reluctant to discuss the project just
yet, one thing is certain: for the man who's spent the last
seven years meddling with the fabric of space and time,
creating a new universe is all in a day's work...

                                              Joe Nazzaro