The Naked Montague

After placing a seismic sensor on the ocean floor, Mark returns to the Cetacean, warning that the sea life is scattering: a sign that a huge earthquake is about to strike. Mark returns to the water to investigate the resulting new rift in the seafloor, only to be trapped by a rockslide. He awakens on dry land, and meets a man named Romeo, who is embroiled in a conflict with the family of the girl he intends to marry. Anyone else from the Cetacean would know how this struggle will play out, but Mark doesn’t…and perhaps Shakespeare got it all wrong.

written by Stephen Kandel
directed by Robert Douglas
music by Fred Karlin

Cast: Patrick Duffy (Mark Harris), Belinda J. Montgomery (Dr. Elizabeth Merrill), Alan Fudge (C.W. Crawford), Lisa Eilbacher (Juliet), John Shea (Romeo), Ahna Capri (Cordelia), Norman Snow (Tybalt), Lewis Arquette (Friar Laurence), Scott Porter (Mercutio), William Glover (Guard), David Gautreaux (Guard), Richard Laurance Williams (Jomo), J. Victor Lopez (Chuey), Jean Marie Hon (Jane), Anson Downes (Allen)

Notes: Writer Stephen Kandel, a veteran of dozens of ’60s and ’70s TV scripts (including all of Harry Mudd’s appearances on the original Star Trek), might have given Shakespeare a co-writing credit here. John Shea would later gain some genre fame for appearing as Lex Luthor in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman, while Norman Snow would menace the universe as The Last Starfighter‘s arch-nemesis, Xur, before guest starring on such series as Quantum Leap and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ahna Capri (1944-2010) was already a veteran of TV guest appearances, including I Spy, The Man From UNCLE, and had perhaps made her greatest impression as Tania in Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon (1973). Actor David Gautreaux’s greatest claim to genre fame is a role that never made it to the screen: he was cast, earlier in 1977, as Lt. Commander Xon, a full-blooded Vulcan science officer intended to replace Spock in a TV revival of Star Trek, but that series was cancelled before an episode was ever shot, and its pilot script was rewritten to become Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a 1979 movie in which Gautreaux was given what amounted to a bit part as the commander of a doomed space station.