[Morgan]

Here's a very cool figure, Thomas Riker autographed by Jonathan Frakes. The Thomas Riker figure itself was always pretty rare -- some shops wanted as much as $200 or $250 back in the day -- and even though I have a few of these now this is the only autographed one. The figure itself is one of my top 10 faves from the whole line, so it was a big deal to find an autographed one.

If you haven't seen the episode here's the plot in a nutshell: The Enterprise visits a planet that Will Riker visited years ago on a mission on his prior ship, and they discover that a transporter duplicate had been accidentally created through a transporter snafu. So one Riker remained down on the planet, unbeknownst to the crew of the ship, while another Riker beamed up and didn't know that that had happened. The Riker that stayed down on the planet takes on the name Thomas and joins another ship. Tom Riker later came back in one of the highest-rated DS9 episodes ever, after he had joined the Maquis, and hijacks the Defiant to whup some Cardassians.

Frakes is from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and has an MA from Harvard. Even though he is best known for TNG in the pop culture universe, he happens to be mostly a director now, having directed several Star Trek Discovery episodes in recent months, but in the last years of TNG he was already directing episodes of several series. He directed First Contact, which is considered to be the best TNG feature film by a long stretch, and he also directed the follow-up Insurrection, which was fine really but certainly not a massive Borg battle. It was a smaller, visually quieter story, let's put it that way. I would have loved to see more TNG films, but I understand why more didn't happen at the time as Insurrection and Nemesis didn't make that much money. Sci-fi itself kind of died off after the peak of the late 1990s.

Frakes' TV directing credits are pretty massive, spanning numerous series, and not all of them sci-fi at all. He has directed TV series that I haven't even heard of. But his filmography following the TNG films is a little sparse -- TV directing and film directing are two different things, and very few directors make the crossover really.