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Twilight Zone Roddenberry's TNG influence?
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Posted by: cancermatt

I would appreciate some help from some Trekkies/Trekkers.

I've become somewhat a Twilight Zone fanatic with 2 to 3 episodes airing daily (still can't get over Grateful Dead's intro in the '80s version) and just watched episode from yesterday. I accidentally deleted it, but it told of a man w/ premonitions of doom/disaster on a tugboat from England to NY, it turns out his dopelganger is w/ the Nazis.

One scene delighted me fully when on screen is the captain and he calls to the tugboat engineer:

PICARD, this is the Captain.
We need full strength to the engines to get us there tomorrow. (or something like that)

- then he turns to his assistant and says something like:

NUMBER ONE, do you think we can make it???!

I STARTED SCREAMING WILDLY. I did not know of this episode and its possible origins of Star Trek The Next Generation.

Does anybody have any clues if this was Roddenberry's influence for the names?

Does anybody know the name of the episode? I accidentally deleted it.
I do know it was from '59-'62 I think.

Thanks so much!

Matt

Posted by: edc

The "Twilight Zone" you are thinking of was "Judgment Night," from the first season in 1959.

http://the-croc.com/tzone/tzeplist/judgment.html

It is highly unlikely this had anything to do with "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Naval Captains have a long history of referring to First Officers as "Number One." Indeed, the female first officer in the original series pilot was only identified as "Number One."

While I don't know of any interviews nailing down the origin of the Picard name, the most common (and reasonable) theory is that the name was influenced by Auguste and Jean Piccard

http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/piccard.htm

These two brothers were scientists, and collaborated on high atmosphere ballooning in the days before airplanes.

Posted by: harvscar

You're adding the name Picard in yourself right? AFAIK, "Judgement Night" never mentioned the captain's name. Great episode BTW.

Posted by: cancermatt

Tivo'd the episode last week, watched it, accidentally deleted it, then wrote it up on this board. The engineer (?) coal shoveler, SOMEONE in the show was named Picard, because the Captain called to him in an oldie type of CB(?) and said something to the effect of : PICARD we need to go faster

I dunno. That's what I heard, but didn't have Closed Captioning on!

Matt

Posted by: harvscar

I did some research after you posted this and found the script. McCloud is the chief engineer and that's easy enough to mistake for Picard. The Chief Engineer being Scottish does back up somewhat a Roddenberry TZ-ST influence (okay, a bit of a stretch). I don't think there's anyway Roddenberry couldn't have been influenced in some way by TZ and Serling, it was in many ways as revolutionary as ST:TOS was.