“Telepathic / Kevin’s Waltz” by Dennis McCarthy

“The Survivors” is one of those early(ish) TNG episodes that sometimes flies under the radar. When people do think about it, they tend to remember the end, where it’s revealed that the Douwd Kevin Uxbridge is responsible for the destruction of the entire Husnock race.

I’ve always been torn on how to feel about “Kevin” because, on the one hand he’s an incredibly sympathetic character who refused to fight when the Husnock attacked his and his wife Rishon’s colony. But when his wife was killed he, in a fit of rage and despair, slaughtered all Husnocks everywhere1.

On the other hand, Kevin is responsible for the extinction of an entire race of beings, which is unforgivable2.

Leaving this final reveal aside, we spend most of the episode seeing Kevin and Rishon simply wanting to be left alone on their square plot of green on an otherwise destroyed planet. Kevin, much like Q, is a highly advanced being and knows that Counselor Troi will likely sense his true nature given her empathic abilities3.

To prevent this, Kevin plants the seed of a music box waltz in her head in an attempt to distract her to the point where she can no longer sense his own abilities. What starts out as an annoying earworm4 soon becomes torture for Troi, to the point where she needs to be sedated, and even then we suspect that she still hasn’t received any relief from the treatment. While this has given us an endlessly meme-able moment, it certainly doesn’t help Kevin’s cause to see Troi in such agony. Even when he claims this was not his intention, I’m forced to ask the question of what did he think was going to happen?

The waltz itself shows up in multiple guises throughout Dennis McCarthy’s score both in music box form and in the orchestral writing as well. This cue plays out as Troi begins to hear the music in her head—the music box melody playing in a somewhat etherial form as the orchestra slowly becomes more tense and off-kilter as the persistent melody begins to affect her. This transitions to a fully orchestrated version of the theme that scores Kevin and Rishon dancing together in their home, thinking that they have finally rid themselves of the pesky Enterprise crew.

This turns out to not be the case, of course. While not related to the waltz music, the cue below continues to score the later scenes of Enterprise watching the “destruction” of Kevin and Rishon by a mysterious ship as part of a ploy by Kevin to get Picard and company to leave.

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