By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
From the very beginning, Star Trek has been a franchise about exploring strange new worlds. Often, that’s literal, with our intrepid crews learning about new life and new civilizations on one planet after another. More often than you might think, however, the most interesting explorations were more metaphorical, as our characters discovered new facets of their own humanity. However, there was one final frontier this franchise never explored for decades: nudity!
Until its more recent pivot to streaming, Star Trek had always premiered on network television. That meant that it had to abide by certain broadcast standards and practices. As you might imagine, there are plenty of restrictions regarding nudity, most of which focus on how much skin can be shown. That’s why, when Q showed up naked in The Next Generation episode “Deja Q,” we only see so much: one cheek, no crack, and (perhaps most importantly) no genitals. No matter how much they wanted it otherwise, fans could only see so much of Q actor John de Lancie’s body. The actors, however, saw everything because de Lancie stripped completely naked on set!
The Naked Now
“Deja Q” is the Next Generation episode where Q loses all of his godlike powers and is rendered human. He is being punished by the Q continuum for abusing those powers to torment various alien beings who can’t fight back. Aboard the Enterprise-D, Q is attacked by an alien race that he had preyed on before (the Calamarain), and they end up damaging Data. Realizing that he is putting the entire crew at risk, Q steals a shuttle and tries to sacrifice himself to the aliens to keep everyone else safe. Impressed by altruism, the Q Continuum ultimately restores all of Q’s powers.
In previous appearances, Q had always made himself look imposing by dressing like a judge, a soldier, and even a Starfleet captain. To visually underscore that his powers had been stripped, the Star Trek: The Next Generation producers stripped him, and Q showed up completely nude on the bridge. To make that happen, John de Lancie was given a g-string to protect his modesty. According to visual effects supervisor Dan Curry, de Lancie decided to forego the g-string, and nobody else knew until the actor showed up on set.
Star Trek Icon Bares It All
As recorded in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365, Curry said, “The script said ‘Q appears nude.’ We planned to have John de Lancie lay on a wooden board that couldn’t be seen due to Patrick Stewart’s position in the shot.” However, things soon went off-kilter in the most hilarious way. “As we were prepping the shot, John showed up on the set with his bathrobe on. When we were ready to go, he dropped his bathrobe, and he was stark naked. That caused… ummmm… a bit of a stir.”
Curry didn’t elaborate further, so we can only imagine what costars like Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner felt about seeing the full de Lancie. However, the visual supervisor did note that despite (or perhaps because of) the actor’s unexpected antics, the scene went exactly as planned. “It’s one of the few shots we’ve done that came out looking exactly like the storyboard. I’d picked the spot for the camera in advance, and the scene played out just as I drew it.”
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Q is a chaotic trickster god, and you never know exactly what he’s going to do next. Now, you know that John de Lancie has the same temperament as his omnipotent onscreen alter ego. While the actor doesn’t, sadly, have his character’s fantastic cosmic powers, he did demonstrate one astonishing ability on the set that day: just like that, he transformed “Deja Q” into a special after-hours rerun: “The Naked Now.”
