Episode Quotes

Mistakes/Goofs

• Goof (crew or equipment visible): When Riker and Beata are alone together in her quarters, Beata places her glass down without looking and a hand can be seen taking the glass from her.
• Goof (errors made by characters, possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When the Enterprise begins to search for survivors of the freighter Oden, Picard orders La Forge to break fixed orbit. But a fixed orbit means that the ship remains above a given location constantly. The shot of the Enterprise shows the planet is rotating in one direction, while the Enterprise is moving in the opposite direction. That is a counter-rotational orbit.
• Goof (continuity error): When Mistress Beata is talking with Riker in one scene her right arm is at her side. An instant later her right hand is massaging the back of his neck.
• Goof (boom mic visible): When Riker meets with Beata and Ariel, the shadow of a boom mic moving around can be seen on the wall behind them.
• Goof (continuity error): Near the end, Data tells Riker that the Enterprise would have to leave for the Neutral Zone in 48 minutes, in order to reach it in time at maximum warp (which, for the Enterprise, is ordinarily about warp 9). A little later, that deadline has gone down to 17 minutes. Yet when Picard thereafter retakes command, he orders the ship to proceed to the Neutral Zone at warp 6, in which case they would not reach it in time.

Trivia

• 47-reference: Data tells the away team that they must leave for the Neutral Zone in 48 minutes, then he counts down to 47 minutes.
• The concept of Angel I's Matriarchal leadership and dominance was originally intended to be an allegory to South Africa's system of Apartheid, a major topical issue at the time of the episode.