The Nicest Villain You'd Ever Want to Meet



by Lou Anders

Star Trek Monthly, 
March 1996, Vol. 1, No. 13

"I can be a villain if that's what you want me to be," says Daniel Davis, speaking as the charming and dangerous Professor Moriarty, "but I know that I am more than that." Indeed, Professor Moriarty's quest to be so much more than fiction has made him not only one of the most popular of Star Trek: The Next Generation's litany of villains, but one of the few to return to do battle with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D a second time.

When Arthur Conan Doyle created the Napoleon of Crime over a century ago, he envisioned him very different from the charming and elegant hologram that twice seized control of the starship. Doyle's Moriarty was a wizened, almost skeletal old man, a vision quite familiar to Daniel Davis, who had studied reproductions of the original Holmes stories, with their illustrations. As Daniel explains, "when I first read the whole script for Elementary, Dear Data, it was very clear that Moriarty was simply a point of departure, that it was not going to be the Moriarty that Conan Doyle had created." This Moriarty, created by Geordi La Forge's accidental programming of the Holodeck, was for Davis 'a place to begin'.

From this launching pad, Moriarty grew into a character who, although capable of great villainy, was also capable of great passion. "The character became, and evolved into something more vital," says Davis, who voices similar passion for the role he played, "an almost romantic, Byronic character in his search for identity and for his understanding of himself as a fictional character trying to become real.

"The episode was intriguing because it became more of an existential examination than any sort of an examination of the villainies of Moriarty. his ability to figure out the ship and take it over from inside the Holodeck and all that stuff - they were wonderful devices that Moriarty got to use, but he was developing into something beyond himself at the same time that he had his villainy to fall back on. He as a person or he as a character was more interested in exploring the persona beyond the villain persona. Is he even a villain at all or just a person, like all us, capable of doing bad things, if necessary, to survive? Because almost everything he does in the episodes is a way of survival - a way of staying who he is and becoming even more than he was intended to be."

By going beyond the 'nefarious, two-dimensional criminal', the writers hit upon a theme of universal appeal. It was an unlikely choice that paid off big. Another unlikely choice, perhaps, was Davis himself. The man chosen to give life to the legendary British villain is from the American South! The Arkansas born actor says that he fools British people all the time.

"I'm constantly meeting British actors at auditions who ask me how long I have been over, and it's like 'all my life' because this is where I'm from, and they're always sort of startled by it." Davis is currently playing Niles, the Butler on CBS's highly successful series The Nanny, shown in 54 countries around the world, including all the English speaking ones. Like Moriarty, Niles is also English. Davis says that his 25 years working in the theatre were responsible for his peculiar accent, or lack there of. "When you do Shakespeare, Chekov or Shaw, the rule is always to use what we used to incorrectly call in this country a 'mid-Atlantic accent', but it's really standard American speech which sounds more like standard British speech. In other words, standard American without regionalism is the same as standard British speech without regionalism. So I have this accent - people keep referring to it as an accent, but it's really just good American speech.

"When I step into the role of an Englishman, I usually go some place which is not specifically English - there's no sort of regional sound that I'm doing, I'm just sort of making up as I go, and it's usually based on my sense of theatricality about the character that I'm playing. So Niles, my character on The Nanny, is British and Moriarty was British, because he was British, but it's a more theatrical British sound than real British people speak."

The popularity of Davis's first appearance in ST:TNG prompted decisions to bring him back - but the reprise was a long time coming. According to Davis, in his second ST:TNG episode, Ship in a Bottle, Moriarty felt that his four year imprisonment on the Holodeck was due to Picard's negligence. But the real reason the villain took so long to make his return has more to do with 20th Century legal technicalities than 24th Century holo-technologies. When the first episode had been prepared, it seems someone incorrectly assumed that the characters of Holmes and Moriarty were in public domain. They were, in fact, the property of the Conan Doyle Society.

Sorting out the legal red tape delayed Moriarty's return to the screen considerably, which presented its own problems for Daniel Davis when Ship in a Bottle was finally recorded. "Time had not stood still for Daniel Davis. It had for Moriarty, still inside the Holodeck, but I had, you know, aged four years, put on a few pounds and gained a few grey hairs, and suddenly I was supposed to reappear as I had disappeared! It's something you worry about until you realise there is absolutely nothing you can do about it! We recreated the image as best we could with the make-up and the hair and everything."

In the end, it didn't really matter. Ship in a Bottle is every bit as intriguing as Elementary, Dear Data, and was well worth the wait. But while the actor aged in the real world, what intrigued Daniel Davis the most about this second episode was that Moriarty himself, supposedly frozen in the computer, had changed as well. "The character had almost evolved inside the Holodeck, which was interesting, the notion that he had gone inside the computer and had continued to be conscious and aware, without a physical life of any kind. That mental capacity had stayed alive somehow in the computer as a program somewhere so that when he was able to come to life again inside the Holodeck, this was a fairly powerful entity.

"There are so many intricacies within this script and levels on which it works that it takes so many viewings to see them. It's always fascinating to me, for example, the notion of what changed Moriarty in the very first episode almost immediately after he first appeared; Geordi was unhappy with the way the game was going, so he reprogrammed Moriarty and endowed him with all the knowledge that the ship's computer had. So you're walking around with an entity, a physical being, that has the mind of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D and knows everything from all the data banks and has all that information and yet doesn't know what he is yet.

"It was a fascinating character to give life to in that regard, because he was super brilliant, brilliant beyond and Human being's ability to be. Only Data was capable of being a match for him in any way. The way the episode turns out, data is able to overcome him and win the day, but Moriarty remains fairly formidable."

Playing so successful a character has had unexpected affects on Daniel Davis's personal life, too. "The Nanny has enabled me to travel, which is something I've wanted to do all my life. I've either had the time and no means or the means and no time, and now I have a little bit of both. So there I was walking on the banks of the Seine in Paris and there was this young Parisian couple intertwined with each other walking towards me, and as they got close the boy looked at me and 'Moriarty!' And it's that was everywhere I go! I mean, The Nanny in on every week and it's brought me a lot of attention, but still, when people come up to me and say something like 'We watch you on The Nanny, but we really love you as Professor Moriarty' and it's only two episodes - that really is a testimony to the power of the Star Trek phenomenon, that it has world-wide appeal."

Besides being the episode that introduced Moriarty, Elementary, Dear Data is notable for another, more humorous reason. It contains one of the most glaring bloopers in Star Trek history. Data carries a drawing of the U.S.S. Enterprise out of the Holodeck. As any devoted fan knows, holomatter cannot exist outside of the Holodeck. If it could, Moriarty's dilemma would not exist. "Two or three weeks after I finished the episode, they brought me back to do some reshoots and I thought, 'oh well, we're going to get that one cleared up', but all Gene wanted to sort out was a syntactical error that upset him - it upset his ear to hear it, so he wanted to reshoot the bad piece of grammar.

"There was a scene about, but it was edited out. This had Data saying, 'As smart as he was, he never realised that he could have left the Holodeck', and then he produces the drawing. But of course he couldn't say that, because the science didn't exist for him to leave the Holodeck and so they couldn't say that for the piece of paper because the science didn't exist for the piece of paper to leave either!"

Moriarty's character was so popular that at one time Star Trek Executive Producer Michael Piller was hoping he would be the holographic character on Star Trek: Voyager. When asked if he would have been open to this had the possibility arisen, Davis replies, "oh, I would have loved it. In fact, when I read that they were going to have a Holodeck character I immediately got my agent to find out if they were talking about Moriarty. But they said no, they weren't. I don't know if it had anything to do with the fact that there are still people, still audiences and fans of that character, who still prefer the dark side of Moriarty, as opposed to the side that could be rehabilitated into a character that could be there every week."

Putting aside what might have been, there's no doubt that fans would have liked to see Davis return. "I think had ST:TNG not ended, there would have been a point where something in the program would have deteriorated, where the character he goes off with would have deteriorated and broken down, and he would have realised what was going on. Though that last season I kept waiting for the phone to ring so they would do one more episode, because I thought that it was a sure thing." Alas, it was not to be. "In the minds of a couple of the writers they had concluded the story and they couldn't come up with another idea."

The writers' creative block aside, Star Trek fans the world over have supplied ample ideas to facilitate the holo-villain's return. There have been several fans who have said how much they'd like to see Moriarty and Q in the same episode - that maybe the universe wasn't large enough to contain those two. John de Lancie and I know each other, so that would have been fun for us as well. maybe one of these day's we'll see them all get together in a feature... maybe Q could get curious about what that little cube on Picard's desk is all about..."

Let's hope so. Daniel Davis is a delightful actor and, as he says of the Professor, "he's far too universal to be confined to a box!"
 

Quelle: Star Trek Monthly, 
March 1996, Vol. 1, No. 13