The Big Goodbye
"The Big Goodbye" is the twelfth episode of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Data (Brent Spiner), and Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) are trapped, due to a computer malfunction, in a 1940s-style gangster holodeck program with Captain Picard playing the role of detective Dixon Hill.
Tormé credited Gene Roddenberry with the idea for the detective novel, and employed a film noir style using references to The Maltese Falcon (1941).
The Enterprise heads to Torona IV to open negotiations with the Jarada, an insect-like race that is unusually strict in matters of protocol.
After practicing the complex greeting the Jarada require to open negotiations, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) decides to relax with a Dixon Hill hard-boiled detective story in the holodeck.
Playing Detective Hill in the holoprogram, Picard takes up the case of Jessica Bradley (Carolyn Allport), who believes that Cyrus Redblock (Lawrence Tierney) is trying to kill her.
He invites Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) and visiting historian Dr. Whalen (David Selburg) to join him in the holodeck.
Lt. Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) and Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) attempt to repair the holodeck systems.
Mr. Leech (Harvey Jason) appears, having waited for Picard, demanding he turn over an object he believes Jessica gave him.
Instead, Wesley resets the simulation, briefly placing Picard and the others in the middle of a snowstorm before finding themselves back in Dixon's office.
The initial idea for Picard's detective based holodeck program came from series creator Gene Roddenberry and other writing staff.
The episode's name is itself a reference to two works by detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.
[2] Scanlan and Tormé recommended filming the holodeck sequences in black and white, but Rick Berman and Bob Justman disagreed with the idea.
After his performance in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Tierney gained new fame playing Joe Cabot in Quentin Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs (1992).
[9] Tierney returned to Star Trek in 1997 to play an alien Regent in the Deep Space Nine episode, "Business as Usual".
[10] Wheaton said that after 12 previous episodes in the series at the time, he and the cast and crew preferred "The Big Goodbye" as it allowed them to play a period piece.
[11] Cast member Wil Wheaton called the episode a "fantastic collaborative effort, from Tracy Tormé's script, to Joseph Scanlan's direction, to Ed Brown's cinematography, to every actor's performance.
[9] Writing for Den of Geek in 2012, James Hunt said that the risk of disintegration on the holodeck was "insane" and was rectified in later episodes.
[6] Michelle Erica Green of TrekNation praised the dialogue but felt the episode did not "hold up to a lot of logical analysis".
Club, Zack Handlen observed "a certain flatness" in parts of the episode and considered it "very silly" for the characters to slowly disintegrate after leaving the holodeck.
