TNG - Devil's Due

[Fianna]

If the world could sell itself to Ardra, presumably Ardra could then sell the world to someone else. Once she establishes herself as the legal owner of the planet, she can then go to the Ferengi or Klingons or Cardassians and let the bidding begin.

[clearspira]

I liked this episode. It's fun and Ardra is an entertaining scoundrel type character like Harry Mudd or Quark. I actually would have liked to see her again in another crazy scheme.

Oh god forbid we see a character again. Might have to acknowledge continuity. Then you have a 5-10 minute scene just explain who the person was to get the audience up to speed. Such a hassle.

I think a lot of her character traits got sort of folded into Vash, whom we we saw three times in two different shows. Of course getting guest actors in on the timescales demanded of episodic television is always a bit complicated, because you never know if they are going to be available or if you'll have the budget.

I also wonder if Ardra was just a bit too evil to return as anything other than a villain. Vash is a small time con artist and thief; Ardra was about to enslave a planet.

Isn't this one of the arguments for Locarno vs Tom Paris? The former would have gotten away with it and was quite happy to do so if not for Wesley forcing him to admit his crimes. The latter admitted his crimes of his own free will. Its a subtle but actually quite crucial difference.

[clearspira]

The bit that I always wondered about was when Ardra uses her holotechnology to turn herself into a clone of Troi.

Like what Plinkett pointed out about Lily's dress in his ''First Contact'' review, how does overlaying an image over someone else's body work exactly? With Lily we were only talking about the suspension of disbelief involved in the computer projecting a new dress (and presumably cleavage and bare arms) over your old clothes (which in her case was included a heavy jacket) which should logically mean that your body would now be twice the size it was before. Much smaller than that and the holodress would have bits of leather jacket poking out.

With Ardra, it is even worse. Not only do you have the size doubling issue inherent with Lily's dress, but ACTUAL size problems given how Ardra is taller than Troi. Put it this way: where does that extra half a foot of Ardra (including massive haircut) go when she shrinks to become Troi? Is it cloaked or what? This holocloning ability should realistically only work if you are disguising yourself as people larger than yourself, not smaller.

And on a side note, wow, the reset button is in full force this week. The ability to project holograms onto a planet surface from orbit with the accuracy to disguise someone's identity is wildly above anything we see before or after.

I haven’t seen the episode in years, but is it possible that it wasn’t her? Maybe she was standing in her holodeck, interacting with a holographic Picard while her projection was put on Enterprises. When she “changed form” to Deanna, her holo-Picard suddenly got taller.

Yeah, I like that theory.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I like how they make a point to ground out that it isn't Q.

[pilight]

I'll give "Ardra" points for attempting a very ambitious con, but I must question just what she thought the end game for this was going to be. As I've stated previously, the god act isn't something you can keep up forever unless you're the real thing. Plus you're royally fucked if you ever get exposed as a false god; people aren't going to take kindly to you posing as a deity (or demon) that they've feared for centuries, especially if it was all for purposes of defrauding them.

My guess is she would have eventually offered them a new contract similar to the old one, for a hefty price of course

[PapaPalpatine]

I also marvel at just how loyal "Ardra's" crew are for a bunch of criminals. This scam she had them running was risky enough when all they had to worry about was bilking a planet of backwater bumpkins, but then a Federation starship shows up? That raises the oh shit factor quite a bit. That's even more unlucky than a hoodlum who goes in to rob a convenience store only for a police cruiser to pull into the parking lot as he's accosting the cashier. I honestly would've expect them to be more like, "Ah HELL no, we're out of here. Sucks to be you, 'Ardra.'"

[Eishtmo]

My guess is she would have eventually offered them a new contract similar to the old one, for a hefty price of course

Yeah, that was probably the plan. Likely she had been using some agents (likely from the planet itself) to stir up the rumors that she was coming back. Things went a little overboard, but I doubt she realized it was happening before she arrived.

Which was after the Enterprise did. So why carry on? Well she had read the contract and figured it was valid, and the Federation was known to back off when dealing with "internal" matters, so she banked on the Picard backing off if she was sufficiently convincing.

It's likely she didn't know it was the flagship of the fleet, just a big ship. It helped that it wasn't in an aggressive stance, aka it never had it's shields up. Why would it? There was nothing there to harm it. Using that, her cloaking device and some clever using of transports, holograms and some interference beams, she could screw with the ship just enough to have a chance at pulling it off. All she had to do was convince Picard to leave, even for just a little bit, and that would be enough.

Claiming the Enterprise was an attempt to scare them off. Well, less scare and more "we'll show you, engage!" Then she can claim she made them go away get her loot and run.

As for her crew, she probably kept them on point with charisma and blatant lying. It's possible she never told them about the claim on the Enterprise she made, or convinced them it was "all part of the plan." May not even been a large crew, or even a large ship. I don't think we're ever told.

Heck, she probably had confidence because she had done something similar before. Would explain all the tools she had in the first place.

Anyway, I vividly remember this episode and quite fondly. Didn't realize it was so late in the series though.

[clearspira]

Interesting to know how this episode would have gone down if it remained a TOS episode. My guess is that Kirk would have kissed her at some point and beaten up the crew of that other ship.

[bronnt]

It's likely she didn't know it was the flagship of the fleet, just a big ship. It helped that it wasn't in an aggressive stance, aka it never had it's shields up. Why would it? There was nothing there to harm it.

This also shows just how ballsy Ardra was. She was teleporting on and off the Enterprise at whims. If they'd just raised their shields one time when she was on board, she's fucked-her ship isn't going to attack a Galaxy class ship to knock the shields down and beam her out.

Also, doesn't transporter activity leave traces that can be detected? It's possible that this was something established later in TNG, and was hardly applied consistently.

[Darth Wedgius]

It was just hidden, Ardra's ship just extended their cloaking field around it so it couldn't be seen. Pretty sure they say that's the case in the episode itself. Transporter beam was down it was true and communications were likely being interfered with but it probably wasn't as bad as it initially seemed. Ardra's made clever use of existing technology (well existing tech in the Star Trek universe anyway) to inconvenience them it's true but that's all they were: inconvenienced.

Really not sure where you're getting that they "just extended their cloaking field". A memory alpha page about damping fields specifically references the episode:
[url]https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Subspace_damping_field[/url]

If you just want to argue about disabled versus inconvenienced, that's a level of pedantry I'm not going to debate beyond saying: If they couldn't move out of the field, couldn't use the transporter, couldn't communicate, couldn't find a way to help the captain get back to the ship, couldn't shoot the ship that had them in the field apparently... That seems more than inconvenient.

Given they managed to capture Ardra's vessel with no appreciable damage and without any loss of life, it didn't seem to really take them all that long for that matter, they clearly weren't terribly hindered. The moment the Enterprise spotted them they were dealt with and apparently didn't even manage to put up much of a fight in the process. So despite all the admittedly clever tricks they used against the Enterprise in the end all they managed to be was a nuisance.

The Enterprise didn't know it was cloaked or wasn't able to do anything about it until Geordi pointed out where the ship was? The Enterprise not suffering damage or loss of life might be because Arda's ship didn't try to inflict damage or loss of life.