Conspiracy (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - Production

Production

Gene Roddenberry originated the idea for the episode in a single sentence proposal entitled "The Assassins". Robert Sabaroff expanded this idea to thirty pages, but his version was seen as too expensive. Tracy Tormé was then given the job of re-writing it, but some producers thought the new version was too dark until Roddenberry saw it and endorsed the new version. In one of the original versions, it was a faction within Starfleet who were conspirators rather than alien parasites but Roddenberry did not like showing Starfleet itself in such a dark manner. The premise was based on the Iran–Contra affair.

The director of the episode, Cliff Bole, was a school friend of makeup supervisor Michael Westmore. The scene with Remmick at the end of the episode was added in post-production, as it was originally scripted to have Riker and Picard come face to face with a full sized mother creature. The part where the parasite enters Remmick's throat reportedly took many takes because the bulging effect was made by Westmore blowing into air bladders under a false neck, and Bole kept trying to make Westmore hyperventilate from the exertion. The parasites themselves were created by Makeup & Effects Laboratories from a design by Rick Sternbach. A mold of Paul Newman's face was filled with raw meat and then blown up to create the effect used when Picard and Riker fire on Remmick, but both Rick Berman and Peter Lauritson were concerned that it was too graphic. Dan Curry invited his six-year old son to watch the episode in order to test how children would react to it, who reportedly liked it so much that he suggested the creation of a Remmick action figure where the head would blow up by pressing a button. This resulted in Berman deciding to air the episode uncut with the full sequence included.

Several props and effects seen in the episode were reproduced from the Star Trek movies, including the shots of Earth and Spacedock One, and the painting used of Starfleet Command. The doors to the room where dinner is served would later be reused from season 2 onwards on the set for Ten-Forward. The episode also features two first appearances; both of the Ambassador class starship as the Horatio, although it had already been designated at this point as being the class of the Enterprise-C and it also marks the first time that a Bolian had been seen on Star Trek, the species having been named after the episode's director. Although they never appeared again on screen in any Star Trek series, the parasites re-appear in the Deep Space Nine relaunch novels, where they are revealed to be mutated Trill symbiotes.