10 MORE Star Trek Moments You Never Knew Were Improvised

You can only really be an actor if you embrace the strange. After all, pretending to be someone else is fraud until you make it a profession. Not unlike the Starfleet officer, weird is the job. The best actors lean into it. The even better lean into it and do a forward roll. That is, in any case, what Garrett Wang did during filming of Deadlock.

If the OG Harry Kim had to die, at least his duplicate did things with panache. As the episode reaches its climax, Harry arrives in sickbay and comes face to faces with two Vidiians. For the scene, director David Livingston initially proposed that Wang phaser one of them, duck down, then come back up to phaser the other. It was Wang who suggested adding the forward roll, a move he had learnt "in stage combat class back in college," the actor noted in Star Trek Monthly, issue 106.

In a very different sense, a good chunk of the episode was improvised — created as the need arose. As Jeri Taylor commented in Captains' Logs Supplemental: The Unauthorised Guide to the New Trek Voyages, "[Deadlock] came out […] eight or nine minutes short, and we kept writing scenes, and they just kept getting gobbled up on those stages".