Just when did Riva negotiate these treaties for the Federation and Klingons? By human standards, he seems to be fairly young and some of his chorus look even younger, and yet, I believe he 'said' they grew up together. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country the Federation begins negotiations with the Klingons. In Yesterday's Enterprise it's believed that sending the Enterprise C back 22 years to help defend a Klingon outpost would prevent the war. So when exactly did the Klingons and the Federation declare peace and how many years of negotiations did it take before things were as we saw them when The Next Generation began?

In the opening, Picard and Riker are talking about Riva and Picard hopes he can bring peace to "those planets." It is not two planets that are warring it is two groups of people on the planet Solais V.

Before Riva the Klingons had no word for "Peace... maker." (That's how Worf pronounced it.) Firstly, wouldn't the Klingon word for Peacemaker be the same as the Klingon word for Sissy? Secondly, don't the Organians qualify as Peacemakers? Thirdly, don't the Klingons have a word for Peace and don't they have a word for Maker? How hard is it for them to put those two words together?

Just before the assassin fires, as Riker gets Riva out of the way, it looks like a gold sleeved arm reaches for 'the chorus.' Did Worf start to try and get them out of the way and then change his mind?

If Riva has a chorus that reads his thoughts, then why does he need to know sign language?

Why is Worf unfamiliar with the idea of sign language? Surely a warrior race would be familiar with non-verbal communication. (Certainly a race that howls and growls.) Also in the later episode Allegiance, Picard signals his bridge crew to trap the two aliens.

When Data is signing for Picard, he stops signing even though Picard is still talking. (Actually, Brent Spiner seemed to be hesitant in his signing. As if he wasn't certain he was using the right signs. Was I the only one who had this impression?)

If Picard was worried about laser damage to the Enterprise then why did the ship make itself a bigger target by orbiting with the belly of the ship facing the planet instead of sideways as usual?

Several times Riva tells Riker to place the table and torches "here" and Riker just tells Geordi, who is on the ship, "Did you get that?" Wouldn't it have been interesting if Geordi had said, "Gosh, Commander, can Riva be even more vague in just where he wants this stuff, or should I just beam it where the sun don't shine?"

I thought it was really funny that out of all the different possible gestural languages that Riva could have known, he just happens to know *American Sign Language*! (And he IS using ASL. I recognized a lot of the signs. Also, the actor Howie Seago who portrayed Riva is himself deaf.)

Data says he narrowed it down to five sign-languages. I think he could have narrowed it down further. The sign language he views on the viewscreen uses only the hands, without relationship to body position. Riva's sign language uses the hands in relation to body position!

There's a really great scene in this. When Riker, Worf and Team Riva beam down to the hostile world, Riva communicates that the two Starfleet officers should not respond even if antagonised (or something close to it). Riker then turns to Worf and gives a lok of "You understand that you Klingon?" and Worf turns to Riker with a look of "Who me?".

It's a quick bit but very funny.

The end of this is SOOOOOO lame. Can you honestly imagine those guys learning sign language?? And what do they do in the meantime?

Also, when Riva orders the ceasefire across the planet it happens almost immediately. As my mum said "Gee- great communication system"- and not only that but it happens straight away and there are no soldiers who say "Yeah right" (or words to that effect which I can't use here) and just continue. Actually, I can invisage a couple of them doing an Ezri Dax "sssshhhhh.....can't hear you....sssshhhhhhh.....signal breaking up....."

In response to what Keith Alan Morgan said, I find it very realistic that Riva knows a gestural language. One would think the "bond" between him and his chorus had to be practiced and learned, so Riva would need some way to communicate until it was completed.

Data's signing was weak. Very weak. I showed the episode to my American Sign Language teacher, and she laughed at the signs he makes. He *was* very hesitant, and signed very awkwardly. But we still love you, Data.

Its also hard to account for Data's interpreting sometimes. When you account for the differences in grammar structure, you can see how Data begins sentances aloud with a subject or verb that Riva doesn't sign until the end of his line. Also, when they begin to mention turning "disadvantage into advantage", Riva signs only the signs for POSITIVE CHANGE-TO NEGATIVE. Data shouldn't have been sure he was referring to advantage or disadvantage. Riva could have been referring to the good and bad in their societies, or the quality of their television programming. At the very least, he shouldn't have been so quick to say it out.

I feel bad ranking on Data so much. He's my favorite Next Gen character....

I love the effect of the chorus being dissolved! the melting of the skin to the bone was quite nice!

Actually it hurt like hell.

I was watching Data's signing in this episode and it seems that he jumps the gun a wee bit.

At one point Data says the word "three" before Riva holds up 3 fingers. And later, Data holds up a single finger before Picard says "one". Maybe he was just using his initiative.

I have to seriously question Troi’s public sizing up of Worf’s emotions in the teaser. Now anyone with only a superficial understanding of human(oid) behavior might consider Troi’s actions appropriate, given that Worf’s emotions may be construed as a potential threat to the mission. But people with greater understanding of psychology and a deeper familiarity with behavioral patterns, such as a psychologist (which Troi is) know that people think of many things in the course of the day, and that their thoughts often drift from one subject or memory to another, without necessarily any connection to the situation at hand. Not only is Troi a trained psychologist, but she is also an empath, so she should have an instant familiarity with this common trait. True, she said she never sensed these emotions before except when he went into battle, but even if she was concerned, she should have spoken to him in private, to discern the nature of his feelings, not broadcast his private emotions to everyone in the transporter room, unless it was an emergency, and privacy was not an option. She did this same thing when she revealed Grave’s feelings to Briannon in The Schizoid Man.

How does Riva correctly sense that Troi is empathic when he meets her in Act 1? And along the same lines, when he meets Data on the bridge in Act 2, he says it is a pleasure to meet such a unique individual. This has to be a reference to Data being an android. How does Riva know this? True, Data doesn’t appear human, but wouldn’t Riva merely assume that he is an alien, as many of the Enterprise crewmen are? Was the comment a reference, on Riva’s part, to his assumption that Data was an alien? I doubt it. For one thing, one member of an entire race isn’t "unique," he’s one of millions or billions. For another, he did not react this way to meeting Worf. It is also doubtful that he reviewed information on the ship’s crew prior to its arrival at his planet, given his surprised reaction to learning that Troi is an empath.

Something quite interesting happens when Riva introduces his chorus to Picard, Worf and Troi in Act 1, something that didn’t occur to me the first few times I saw this episode. Supposedly, everything the chorus says when Riva is speaking with someone is Riva’s own words transmitted telepathically, right? But when the Artist/Scholar introduces himself in some detail, the Warrior/Adonis becomes impatient and interrupts, saying, "Artists. They tend to ramble. Neglect the moment." The Warrior/Adonis then continues, introducing himself. Does this mean that some part of Riva’s mind was being too verbose, and another part of it became irritated with the first part and interrupted? Would this mean that Riva has some kind of multiple personality disorder? Or do the chorus members embellish the translations with their own little touches, and sometimes get carried away? Just wondering.

When Picard is ready to beam Riva and his chorus to the Enterprise at the end of Act 1, he says to Riva, "Riva, if you are ready...", and Riva, who was looking straight ahead at Troi when Picard (who was below him and to his left) began speaking, actually turns to Picard in response, as if he could hear him. (Or did he see him out of the corner of his eye? Personally, if I were in front of Troi, staring at her, and I were deaf, it’d take a lot more than some bald guy in the corner of my eye to distract me!)

How many languages does Riva know how to lip read? He insists people address him when speaking to him, and he reads their lips to understand them, (as Troi mentions during their dinner in Act 2), but when aliens speak, they speak in their own language, and it’s the universal translator that provides audible English. Reading their lips would be useless, unless Riva knows how to lip read English, Betazoid, Klingon, and the language of everyone he encounters on the Enterprise, as well as the Solari warriors.

When Riker pages Troi toward the end of Act 2 to bring Riva to the bridge, she relays the message to Riva, but doesn’t answer Riker.

You really have to be appalled at the way the crew neglects to make arrangements for Riva to accomodate his special needs, and otherwise treat him like a regular person. Deaf people today have special provisions to allow them to lead independent lives, like flashing lights that come on when someone rings their doorbell, so that they know someone is at their door, and special typewriter-phones that allow them to receive messages on a telephone. Yet, as Phil Farrand pointed out, after Data has learned Riva’s gestural language in Act 4, Riva storms out of the observation lounge, and can’t go anywhere, because the turbolift requires voice commands, and no evidence suggests the crew gave Riva any device that could read his gestures and translate them into sounds, like the one Amy the gorilla wore in the movie Congo. In addition, when Picard and Riker first speak with the Solari, and need to summon Riva, Riker calls Troi to bring Riva to the bridge, rather than simply paging Riva himself. Riva’s chorus would no doubt hear the page and relay the message. Now granted, Riva’s chorus wasn’t present with Riva at the time of Riker’s page, but Riker didn’t know that. He simply assumes that Riva has to be "brought" to the bridge, rather than simply calling him and addressing him personally, as Riva said he preferred.

In Act 2, when Picard tells Riva that the fighting has resumed on Solari V, Riva is walking down the port bridge ramp, facing the general direction of the main viewer, yet he responds to Picard’s specific news as if he heard him.

Pulaski offers to regenerate Geordi’s optic nerve in Act 4, and he tells her he’ll have to think about it and get back to her, but he never does get back to her, either in this episode, or ever again on the subject for the rest of her stay in the second season. I remember reading somewhere that the creators and LeVar Burton decided against it because they felt it would diminish the ability of physically challenged viewers to identify with the character, defeating one of the whole points of making Geordi blind in the first place, but why didn’t they at least show Geordi give Pulaski his answer? They just left it hanging.

In the teaser, Picard tells Riker that if Riva can put an end to all the bloodletting on Solais, then should do everything in their power to assist him. Riker says that it isn’t their job to police the galaxy. Picard half-jokingly comments that that should be his line, and then concedes Riker’s point, that they must not get involved. When first meeting Riva, the crew apparently didn’t know that he was deaf, or that he uses a chorus of translators. All of this strongly indicates that Ramatis is not a Federation world, and that the Enterprsie is simply transporting Riva to mediate the dispute, but is not permitted to participate in the talks. But didn’t the Solari and/or Riva request that the Enterprise transport Riva to Solais? Why would they do this if Ramatis wasn’t a Federation world, and if the Federation didn’t didn’t have some stake in the dispute? Is Starfleet nothing more than a glorified interstellar taxi cab service? In addition, if they’re not supposed to get involved, why does Troi tell Riva in Act 4 that she’s decided to handle the mediation herself? Or was this simply a psychological ploy on her part to provoke Riva to go back down to the planet?

Speaking of which, does anyone else find the manner in which Troi tries to pressure Riva to return to the mediation a bit inappropriate and callous, given that he just witnessed his three best friends being brutally murdered right in front of him by the people she wants him to work closely with? Is it really so unreasonable for Troi to think that Riva deserves at least some time to grieve before returning to work with them?

>Pulaski offers to regenerate Geordi’s optic nerve in Act 4, and he tells her he’ll have to think about it and get back to her, but he never does get back to her, <

Maybe he's still thinking about it?

If the Federation don't have a stake in Solais then Riker and Worf participated in the first landing in order to protect Riva and his chorus. The react very slowly on this. Why didn't they use the transporter to maintain a steady lock on Riva and the chorus so at the slightest sign of danger they could beam theese civilians out within seconds.

Why in the world is the chief engineer responsible for making, and beaming down, the three-sided table and torches. Wouldn't that be the duty of the quartermaster, or at the very least, a junior engineer?

Luigi said, "How many languages does Riva know how to lip read? He insists people address him when speaking to him, and he reads their lips to understand them, (as Troi mentions during their dinner in Act 2), but when aliens speak, they speak in their own language, and it’s the universal translator that provides audible English."

Silly, don't you know by now that the Universal translater magically makes it appear like everyone is speaking English, including lip mouvement.

If I remember correctly, Troi translates "Data is a very fine machine, but he could never replace the translators". WHY NOT ??? In TOS they had the universal translator ... You mean to tell me that in 100 YEARS they couldn't come up with some device to do this !

I think the truth is it was larry ass way of molding the story around a guest star who was deaf in real life ...

GREAT SFX: The phasers set for "kill" scene was one of the best I've seen yet in all of "Star Trek"

Of course the most obvious "deleted line" is when Riva kissing Troi's hand is having Riker barging in and saying.....

Ah, you know what goes here!

On the same note, If I was Riva, I wouldn't have ANY problems reading Troi's lips either...in fact, I'd get closer to them until.....SMOOOCH!

JAL: Of course the most obvious "deleted line" is when Riva kissing Troi's hand is having Riker barging in and saying.....

"Hands off! HE's mine!"

When Data and troi try to reason with Riva in his quarters the last time, look at the doors in the background. They have a big square mark on them.

Funny what you could learn from the DVD extras of this season. Turns out that Riva's woman member (Marnie Mosiman) of his choir is married to none other than John "Q" DeLancie himself! They said in an interview that when it was first shown she asked their then-four-year-old son what he thought of how well she did and he said something like, "You weren't very good. Daddy never dies. You never should've gone down to that planet." I just found this out tonight, watching the last eps of this season, so it was news to me.

I tend to think there is more to the Chorus than what is shown. If all Riva needed was a way to communicate his thoughts, then someone could put together an artificial set of ears and a speaker and hook them to a UT. I think the man was devestated and totally thrown by the Chorus' demise for more reasons than just friendship or the loss of his method of communication. I think the members of the Chorus were also Riva's advisors.

It seems very unlikely that the Chorus is passively spitting out Riva's words without any thoughts about what he is having them tell people. The communication could be going in both directions. As Riva thinks of what to say, his Chorus suggests better ways to say it, and the four of them polish his every utterance to perfection. I can picture the advice and suggestions extending to other areas, as they silently discuss their observations of each situation. That would explain why Riva is so skillful as a diplomat. He can bring his aides with him to every last meeting and they can always give advice without disrupting things. If two heads are better than one, how much better would four be?

One thing that really makes no sense is, why didn't Riva bring a personal staff with him beyond the Chorus, possibly one with some guards and a backup Chorus? He is royalty, and he is a quadrant-wide celebrity. I would think that both Ramatis and the Federation would take steps to secure Riva and the Chorus against kidnapping or assassination, since they would be big targets. In case of some unforeseen misfortune befalling the Chorus, you'd think he'd bring along another Chorus, just in case. If he wished them to be incognito, he could employ them as ordinary staff members or servants.

Also, if Riva was determined not to bring such a large retinue, should Picard not have ordered a contingent of security personnel to beam down and bodyguard Riva, the Chorus and the leaders of the opposing groups? It would show how seriously the Federation takes Solaris' problems, and one would have to be mad to take a potshot at someone protected by Starfleet.

Also also, when the angry loner pulled his weapon to shoot, where was Worf and his brilliant warrior reflexes? Picard should have had his bottom in a sling for being so negligent.

Finally, since Riva is so important, why was he not received on the Enterprise with all customary honors? This man is royalty, and the greatest negotiator of the day, and he doesn't even rate a boatswain's whistle or a 21-gun salute with the phasers? Come on.

In an earlier draft of the script, Riva's chorus wasn't murdered; instead the device that enables Riva to communicate with them malfunctioned.

In my opinion, the final version is more interesting and dramatic.

Luigi Novi:How does Riva correctly sense that Troi is empathic when he meets her in Act 1? And along the same lines, when he meets Data on the bridge in Act 2, he says it is a pleasure to meet such a unique individual. This has to be a reference to Data being an android. How does Riva know this? True, Data doesn’t appear human, but wouldn’t Riva merely assume that he is an alien, as many of the Enterprise crewmen are?

The episode maintained that Riva was telepathic, as this was how he was communicating with his chorus. It isn't a stretch for me to conclude that Riva could therefore sense Troi's empathic ability, as well as not being able to sense Data at all. Riva could simply have called Data unique because he was the first life-form Riva could not sense in some way, in the same way as Lwaxana was intrigued by Rex, the holographic bartender.

Luigi: Riva storms out of the observation lounge, and can’t go anywhere, because the turbolift requires voice commands, and no evidence suggests the crew gave Riva any device that could read his gestures and translate them into sounds, like the one Amy the gorilla wore in the movie Congo.

I'd guess that the turbolift is also equipped for activation through the little control panel we saw in Disaster and probably several others. Now, whether Riva would know how to operate the little panel...

Right, but didn't Phil point out that that panel didn't appear until Disaster?

As for the first nit, thanks, Snick.

Pulaski states that Riva and his race have no auditory nerves nor anything that causes other species to hear.

However, Riva still has ears.

Are they there just for "decoration"?

Also, someone should tell Picard that yelling at a deaf person doesn't do any good whatsoever.

Maybe the ears are remnants of a previous time?

Or he needs them so his glasses don't fall off?

LOL

The thing about yelling at a deaf person was brought up by Phill in the NextGen Guide!

Don't you just hate it when the characters on Star Trek talk about some previous incident and then never give us any details about it? They do this quite a few times, and it's very annoying. For example at the beginning of this episode Picard is sitting in his ready room looking at a model of a star system, trying to figure out why the third planet has such a peculiur orbit. Then he says "This might explain what happened in that system," and Riker agrees, but neither of them say what happened! Can there not be one cabbagehead present, who, like us, has no idea wha happened and needs to have it explained to es in detail? Maybe a convienently placed captains log? Why is the computer never listening to the captain's mind when you want it to?&lt/rant&gt

HTML never works when you want it to either.

It's not Riva's species that has no ability to hear, but his particular (inbred royal) family line that has no hearing centre in the brain. This is why he has ears.

That yelling is so embarrassing and tacky. Plus, why does Picard, the consummate diplomat, need to be told to address Riva instead of his chorus? Isn't this standard protocol for dealing with any kind of interpreter?

But since the invention of the Univeral Translator how much need of interpreters have the Federation needed?

Just a note: I can read D. Troi's lips very well too....they say, "Kiss me."

About a year ago, I was called into work (a video editing house in Washington state, which I'd been fired from about 2 years before but still occassionaly calls me in for contract video work that my boss didn't know how to do) to do some After Effects work for a video on preventing child abuse for deaf children. The producer of the video was himself was deaf and communicated through an interpreter. I'd been working on the required sillhouette animation for a couple minutes when my boss, familliar with my love of sci-fi, mentioned "By the way, did you know that Howie here was in Star Trek once?" At the time, I didn't know the name, so I started wracking my brains for deaf Star Trek characters. The interpreter said, as he started signing, "The episode was called-"
"Loud As A Whisper?" I asked her.
Howie's face lit up imediately as, at the same time, she gave a rather amazed "...Yes," but I was already turning toward him- "You're RIVA?!" I asked... momentarily forgetting for a moment that he was deaf. :-) (Thank God for lip-reading!) It turns out that Mr. Seago was just about as amazed to be recognized by anyone that would know the character by heart as I was to meet him! I was fortunate enough to spend a good half-hour 'listening' to his behind-the-scenes stories about making this episode- and now I'm lucky enough to have a picture alongside ambassador Riva himself on my Myspace page. For a die-hard Trekkie and uber-nerd, that day was heaven. :-)

Very cool, Zarm!

More info on meeting 'Riva' and the stories he shared:
http://www.starwarsfanworks.com/lionsmouth/index.html
(Episode II.V - "Warp 2.5")

very nice story!

Thanks! It was a lot of fun!

"How does Riva correctly sense that Troi is empathic when he meets her in Act 1? And along the same lines, when he meets Data on the bridge in Act 2, he says it is a pleasure to meet such a unique individual. This has to be a reference to Data being an android. How does Riva know this? True, Data doesn’t appear human, but wouldn’t Riva merely assume that he is an alien, as many of the Enterprise crewmen are? Was the comment a reference, on Riva’s part, to his assumption that Data was an alien? I doubt it. For one thing, one member of an entire race isn’t "unique," he’s one of millions or billions. For another, he did not react this way to meeting Worf. It is also doubtful that he reviewed information on the ship’s crew prior to its arrival at his planet, given his surprised reaction to learning that Troi is an empath." - Luigi

He seemed to use his empathic sense by waving his hand across the chest of the addressee... when he did so for Data, he waved it back and forth several times, looking confused- indicating he couldn't sense anything, thus labeling him 'unique'- it didn't have anything to do with his appearance or species.



"If Riva has a chorus that reads his thoughts, then why does he need to know sign language?" - KAM

An earlier draft of the script filled this in; apparently there was a previous negotiation that didn't allow the chorus to attend, just Riva, so he had to learn sign language to be able to communicate.

Shame that line got cut.

Maybe Picard was shouting at Riva to show Riva that he cared, Riva is empathic and can read lips so he should be able to roughly sense what Picard meant.

Why does no one shoot the guy who kills Riva's chorus, it's pretty obvious what he's going to do and he's not exactly quick about it. Granted Worf might not have felt he could shoot someone just in case (which is probably a good thing, Worf is such a bad shot he's probably shoot Riva by accident) but the other aliens and that guys superior just stand and watch.

I can understand why Geordie would want to keep his range of vision that the visor gives him after all he's had it all his life and its probably a massive part of his identity but considering how the visor gives him constant headaches you'd have thought he'd jump at the chance to replace it. Tho they dropped that idea quietly this was only the second time the visor hurting him was mentioned (the other being the pilot) and was never mentioned again.