“You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave”: The Royale
“The Royale” is another episode that nobody in particular is especially fond of and that I frequently see gracing any number of “Worst Of” lists. One is certainly not enthused by looking at its production history: Originally pitched for very early in the first season, it sat ignored in the slush pile of unused scripts until necessity required its exhumation in the second. It was also the subject of yet another one of writer Tracy Tormé’s trademark spats with then-producer Maurice Hurley, and apparently it was the straw that broke the camel’s back too, as the dispute finally led Tormé to walk off of Star Trek: The Next Generation at the end of the year.
Tormé claims his original pitch hinged far more heavily on surrealist imagery and symbolism. His primary influence while writing it was The Prisoner, and he wanted to bring the same kind of abstract and multi-tiered psychedelia that characterized that show to Star Trek: The Next Generation. And you can see at least some of that in the finished product, with the eery revolving door afloat in nothingness, to the guests who act in bizarrely programmatic ways and the way the hotel itself operates. Apparently Hurley objected to this as well as the very prominent role the astronaut character was going to have, the former for vague and unspecified reasons (which is troublingly something of a hallmark of Hurley’s tenure) and the latter because he felt it wasn’t good for the show to have big guest stars and couldn’t afford it even if it was. This, of course, does little to explain Billy Campbell and Howie Seago showing up earlier in the season. Another thing it doesn’t explain is why Patrick McGoohan was tapped to appear for three minutes in “The Schizoid Man” when offering him the part of the then-living Colonel Richey here seems like the most dumbly obvious idea in the universe. Sadly, another hallmark of the Maurice Hurley era has been its pathological aversion to sense.
Given its origins then, its unsurprising that “The Royale” feels so much like an Original Series episode: Like “The Naked Now”, “Code of Honor”, “Blood and Fire”, “Justice”, “Angel One” and “When The Bough Breaks”, this feels straightforwardly like the creative team cherry-picked some narrative structures and devices from the old show, shuffled them around a bit and changed the names. Unlike those episodes, however, “The Royale” as aired is actually surprisingly serviceable in spite of itself: It doesn’t feel like a reiteration of the abjectly terrible aspects of the Original Series or an embarrassingly tepid attempt to ape its better ones, it actually feels like something the Original Series could have done and done quite well. It’s got the campy, performative fun of episodes like “A Piece of the Action” blended with the haunting and disquieting surrealism of something like “The Empath”. Granting both that the episode as aired is not what Tormé wanted it to be and that, like so much of this season, it was thrown together at the last minute just to get something on the air that week, it does seem as if “The Royale” is coming perilously close to standing among the very best of the Original Series just from that brief alone.…