Actor John Larroquette has a storied career, including four seasons of The John Larroquette Show, but he may best be known for his multiple Emmy-winning role as acerbic prosecutor Dan Fielding on the NBC sitcom Night Court. Before that series, he appeared in one of the classic TOS movies as a Klingon. NBC has brought Night Court and Larroquette back, and this week he is also dressing up as a Klingon again.
Larroquette goes Klingon (again) for Night Court
In the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, John Larroquette played Maltz, an officer under Commander Kruge (Christopher Lloyd), the main antagonist of the film.
Christopher Lloyd, Stephen Liska, and John Larroquette in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Paramount Pictures)
In 2023, NBC brought back Night Court with Larroquette reprising his role as Dan Fielding. It’s now in its second season, and this Tuesday’s episode is titled “Wrath of Comic-Con,” a nod to the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. For the Comic-Con episode, Larroquette dressed up as a Klingon.
John Larroquette as a Klingon in Night Court “Wrath of Comic-Con” (Photo by: Nicole Weingart/NBC)
The official episode description explains: “When Dan finds a potential love connection with a woman who has sworn to destroy him, Dan takes drastic measures, which include fully embracing the wondrous world of Comic-Con. Meanwhile, Abby [Melissa Rauch] is forced to confront the fact that she might actually dislike someone when a childhood ‘friend’ (Jessica St. Clair) comes to visit.”
Wendie Malick (dressed as Catwoman) as Julianne with John Larroquette as Klingon in Night Court “Wrath of Comic-Con” (Photo by: Nicole Weingart/NBC)
Larroquette’s Maltz was the only member of Kruge’s Bird of Prey to survive. After killing Kruge, Kirk tricked Maltz into beaming him up, which allowed the Starfleet crew to commandeer the Klingon ship (and later redub it the “HMS Bounty” in Star Trek IV). You can see Larroquette’s Maltz tell Kirk he does not deserve to live in the clip below.
In a 1989 interview with Starlog (via Memory Alpha), Larroquette said he was hoping to play Maltz again: “I just kept telling […] [Kirk actor] Bill Shatner–since I was the last surviving Klingon, I smell spin-off. I could take this to a series. Maltz starts off and he has a little hot dog stand on Yakka III out there in the Doofus Galaxy.” 35 years later, he finally gets to play a Klingon again.
Wendie Malick (dressed as Catwoman) as Julianne with John Larroquette as Klingon in Night Court “Wrath of Comic-Con” (Photo by: Nicole Weingart/NBC)
Night Court season 2 episode 6 (“Wrath of Comic-Con”) airs Tuesday, January 30th on NBC at 8 pm. Night Court also streams on Peacock.
John Larroquette as a Klingon, Lacretta as Gurgs, and Nyambi Nyambi as Wyatt in Night Court “Wrath of Comic-Con” (Photo by: Nicole Weingart/NBC)
Classic Night Court and Star Trek
This isn’t the first time Night Court has dabbled in Star Trek references. The 1989 sixth season episode “Yet Another Day in the Life” featured some Trekkies brought in after fighting at a Star Trek convention. You can watch that clip below.
Before he became the android Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Brent Spiner had a recurring role on Night Court as the sad sack character Bob Wheeler, who often found himself in front of Judge Stone. He appeared a total of six times, including in the clip below.
Keep up with news for the Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com.
Fun read. ‘I do not deserve to live.’ ‘Fine, I’ll kill you later.’ Great film.
One of my favorite Kirk lines ever. :D
Love Larroquette in all the stuff he’s done from Night Court, to The John Larroquete show, to The Practice, and then Boston Legal (where he was obviously talking to Bill Shatner).
Actually, I think they missed an opportunity to bring Shatner back for this episode as Comicon speaker! They could have had some TWOK references between the two. Maybe a repeat of “Fine, I’ll kill you later?”
Hey, anybody watching the new Night Court? That’s the one Larroquette show I haven’t seen yet. I was hesitant to watch it because I’d miss Harry Anderson and Markie Post. :(
And Richard Moll, who I had the joy of meeting and working with on a fiilm in 1988. :(
RIP Bull – just a few months ago
Looks like Worf’s ridges.
I thought the very same thing! Plus I can’t imagine a sitcom commissioning a brand new make-up appliance for one episode. But what the hell do I know? I liked “Boston Legal,” after all… :P
Yeah, it’s too bad they didn’t give him back his OG forehead.
a guy that annoyed at the Constitution class being called a piece of junk wouldn’t say ‘Vulcan Death Grip’ and then pinch the nerve…he’d know what was up about the VDG
Seriously though, I don’t remember Night Court as running so late into the 80’s / 90’s that it could do a TNG reference. Wow.
I didn’t see all of it, but from what I saw, it was a really fun sitcom. Good writing and a great cast.
“Night Court” ran from 1984 to 1992.
“Night Court,” along with “Magnum PI,” “Cheers” and “M*A*S*H” is one of those shows that holds very special place in my heart because it was one of the few shows I remember watching with my father as a kid. I remember distinctly Dad stopping my my bedroom one night with popcorn and telling me to get out to the living room because “Night Court” was on. The sound of that theme song takes me back to a happier time when Dad was well. Then again, Dad once told me, “Yeah, i used to watch ‘Star Trek’ (TOS) when I was a kid.” To which he followed up with (employing impeccable timing), “Of course, I wasn’t a freak about it like you are.”
That’s a great memory to have, excellent.
Not to mention “Geordi” isn’t wearing red there so this would have had to have been TNG S2 or beyond,
How cool if they went and got permission to use the name Maltz? That would be a great easter egg.
Wasn’t there some interview where Lloyd or Laroquette said they hoped for a line like, ‘bring me some chocolate, Maltz?’
Don’t think we need to get into puns about maltz balls, though malt balls were my favorite concession snack back when I bought food at movie theaters (must have stopped right around 1985 or so.)
I still get “Whopper” malted milk balls at the grocery store every now and then.Haven’t been to a movie theater since Iron Man & Wasp, which like all/most Marvel movies, put me right to sleep. (No, I didn’t want to see it in the first place.)
Except for SEBERG, the awful BEGUILED remake, THE BOXTROLLS and THE KILLER, where I had theaters to myself for solo press screenings, and STAR TREK BEYOND with an actual (though tiny) audience, I haven’t been in a theater since the 2nd time I saw GRAVITY. I really thought I was going to go to 2001 in 70mm (because I haven’t seen it that way since the late 80s) but didn’t want to risk exposure.
Some of my best memories are from being in crammed-full theaters, going back to the theatrical Adam West BATMAN when I was 5-1/2 (given that the movie apparently bombed, I’m guessing San Jose was the only place where it did killer business, at least on opening weekend) and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS at Cinema 150 theater, but it is a thing of the past for me.
Just remembered that the Saratoga 6 movie theater — right across the street from Century 25, where you and I saw WHEN TIME RAN OUT right after I bought the K’tinga model kit — had smooth uncarpeted floors and that a mutual friend — either Paul Schultz or Chuck Reynolds — went with me there and opened the wrong end of a malt ball box and they all fell out on the floor and rolled to the bottom of the the theater. It was this weird loud bowling ball times 1000 effect that made the whole audience bust out laughing (and this was in a movie that wasn’t a gut-buster, probably THE FRONT or maybe a lesser Chuck Bronson movie that was only redeemed by its Goldsmith score, like perhaps ST. IVES.)
Have no idea why we were seated way up at the back of the theater in such a small cinema, but the sound was just so damned funny.
Was it WHEN TIME RAN OUT or BEYOND POSEIDON that we saw there, with the incredible falling-and-crashing-through-decks block of machinery scene?
I think you’re right, poseidon. I thought you saw wtro with Nelson at a preview. He told me how the audience murmured appreciatively when Newnan and basset names appeard but the a great groan was heard in the theatre when uncle irwin’s name came up.
I sure don’t remember seeing anything with Nelson, except for that tense time we all went to see ST:TWOK. Ot the time we went to Kaufman’s body snatchers, which I really wanted to walk out on. The wtro sneak preview is one I was alone at, thanks to a heads-up from Irwin’s secretary. The worst part was having to sit thru electric horseman to see wtro lol. In fact, I think that you, Nelson and either Susie or Monks were on a trip to LA of some sort, because when you returned to the bookstore on monday, I told you I had met Irwin at the screening and you both freaked. That’s what i recall, but ymmv. Long-term is better than short-term, not saying much. But there was a mass walk-out when Irwin’s name came on the screen. It was truly a sneak preview, which only irwin’s guys and theater crew (+me) knew. I think if Nelson said he was there, he was only passing along a description I gave to him of the theater’s reaction to wtro.
Mmm, could be, could be. Though is it possible you saw JC’s THE THING with him? He and I had largely stopped speaking by then (at least until CRITICAL ORBIT started filming in spring 83 and he came on to take the part I had written for Dal Jeanis) and I remember you complaining afterward that the score just sounded like Carpenter, not Morricone.
It’s weird how some parts of that stretch — say mid-78 when we met up through 83 or so — are incredibly vivid to me while other parts are like fog. Maybe that’s when the undiagnose-till-1998 diabetes effects really started up on me, not a decade later when I started not being able to write creatively.
It would have been Paul Vallerga on any trip though — Monks was somebody we cut loose well before that time. It is one of the only times I’ve ever had to totally blow someone off so explicitly and Vallerga and I felt bad about it (Nelson less so, obviously.) I remember either Paul or I was echoing the WHO MOURNS FOR ADONAIS line ‘I wish we hadn’t had to do that’ afterward.
Did you ever see the hexagonal hall I built in an apartment I lived in behind Kiddie World? (toy store, not perv store.) It was a PVC framework, but then I covered the entire thing in those little pieces of microfiche and lit it from outside. EVENT HORIZON has a kind of Jeffries Tube at one point with Sam Neill in it that had a very similar looks, except this was obviously very BLUE. Man do I wish I’d taken more pictures of that stuff, you were smart to document your shoots as much as you did. My mom wound up with all my pictures and I’m pretty sure she or my stepdad destroyed all that stuff when we fell out over a decade back over politics.
Or maybe you and he saw THE ISLAND, that was Morricone also, right?
Yes! That’s the one I saw with Nelson. I knew we saw something together once upon a time. As for a Morricone score, I think that was it.
I will forever hold that the THING score was created by Carpenter, not Morricone. I knew that when I got the Vinyl LP early on during the film’s release. I mean, could it BE more obvious that Carpenter hired Morricone for some unknown reason, trashed most or all of the Morricone score, and doodled the final score himself, on what? A Casio?
So unfortunate that your folks trashed your work! But I don’t recall the hexagonal hall. Sounds interesting! I most remember the STARS cockpit rig with the overhead track to hold the camera.I shot that with my Canon 814E. My best Super 8 camera, on the majority of my best short films. As close as I can reckon, I made a number in the high-90s of short films.
My long-term memory is better than my short-term, and my memory still tricks me into thinking that we went in my car to L.A. and that I dropped you off somewhere near Paramount (for the pitch meeting), and I went on to meet with either Pierce or Hunt. I don’t know if the latter is alive or not.
I think you were cross country with Lew Place when I lived behind Kiddie World, so you wouldn’t have seen the corridor.
I think maybe you drove somebody else down to L.A. (that Ron guy maybe?), cuz I definitely flew down (cost almost 400 bucks) … that was the day when another plane cut us off on the runway prior to takeoff, and then after takeoff while we were still climbing, the door to the flight deck fell open, after which the pilot announced flight time to the wrong city and country!
I’ve often thought that I waited too long to go down for the pitch session, that I should have booked right after getting the invite … I know the guy who sold them the premise for SILICON AVATAR did so about a week before I came down, and I kept thinking that if Piller hadn’t been called out beforehand things might have gone very differently … but ‘say levee’ (sic)
At least I got to see whilewaiting that Meyer had an office there in the building (as did Wise, which seems weird, given we’re more than a decade out from TMP … maybe he was there to do a DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL commentary with Meyer?), and used that info to send him a query letter that got answered, so semi-win ..
Actually, they did. When Wendie Malick’s character asked Dan-as-Klingon his name, he said “Maltz.” And when we first saw him made up as a Klingon, he remarked, “This feels oddly familiar.” And at the end of the episode, Dan lamented the whole Comic Con thing by yelling, “Connnnnn!!!!!” Yep, they definitely understood the assignment. 😁🖖🏻
Larroquette and Shatner also worked together on Boston Legal.
Yeah, I loved that show. Shatner was hilarious and it was great that they got Larroquette in the final seasons of that show.
It’s kind of a shame. There was a episode of Boston Legal that got meta where Larroquette’s character was doing representing an older actor or something like that where he was arguing in favor of shows with older actors. Boston Legal, I think, was cancelled in the end due to ratings and I think David Kelly was arguing for whos like it, with a lot of older but best-loved actors in its cast, to have a place on network tv.
Speaking for myself, I was a lot younger but I loved TOS, enjoyed Night Court, remembered Murphy Brown (Candace Bergin was on the show), and DS9 (Rene Auberjanois was too and Armin Shimmeran guest-starred) so I loved Boston Legal (and the Practice which it spun off from which also had Larroquette playing a great character).
I remember Rene Auberjanois from Benson – which also co-starred Ethan Phillips
Shame that Robert Guillame never got a trek captains chair, he would have been great
Y’know, Larroquetter looks very dignified and cool with this Klingon makeup.
Get him on a ST episode ASAP! Maltz lives again!
And Wendie Malick was in season 4 of LDS!
So used to seeing Malick with that shellacked THAT GIRL bang-hair I didn’t recognize her in the still!
Maltz, cho-e-chu!
Ricky said the same thing before seeing it in the comments!
me 2?
Funny, I was just recently thinking about “The John Larroqutte Show” as the-just-introduced-to-Netflix” comedy “Loudermilk” features a similarly dark tone and damaged-goods protagonist. I hadn’t recalled that it nevertheless managed to run for four seasons.
“Night Court” wasn’t exactly appointment television, but I usually enjoyed it when I did tune in.
LOUDERMILK is out of sight! We’ve watched it all the way through twice since the pandemic and just wish they could get some more episodes made, especially since it was intended to run 7 seasons instead of 3.
The Laroquette show had maybe the worst visuals I’ve ever seen on a first-run TV series, to the point that even though I enjoyed the show, I stopped watching because it was just too much trouble. (it’s funny, the way I remember it is that it looked like a more bright version of the terrible bridge scenes in Pic s3.) It was like they shot it on some kind of terrible video format and then did awful stuff to make it look even worse. And that was for a major network! I remember a syndicated show from around that time, ACAPULCO H.E.A.T., was another series where the imagery looked awful, apparently as a result of a post process, because it was shot by a Bond/STAR WARS DP so it couldn’t have looked that bad right out of the gate. There were some serious growing pains with the film-to-pre-digital-video era, that’s for sure.
I’m one of the rare folks who liked pre-Markie NIGHT COURT best, when Ellen Foley was on. I also liked it before her when Karen Landry was on. I wound up watching nearly the whole run, as it felt like a second-tier BARNEY MILLER at times and I needed something in that vein or at least trying on occasion. I remember thinking that Marsha Warfield would have been great as a surly engineer on a privateer spaceship (the kind who ‘came with the ship’) and was disappointed to not see her in more stuff after that series ended. We only lasted about 10 minutes on this new revival though.
Now that I think about it, I really liked the precursor to NIGHT COURT, which was called SIROTA’S COURT, a helluva lot. It had Michael Constantine, the principal from ROOM 222 and some kind of evil gypsy in THINNER, and must have been on in the mid-70s when I was still in high school. Fred Willard was the DA so kind of the Dan Fielding guy.
My brother recently turned me on to “Loudermilk.” We’re in complete agreement that it’s awesome. I wouldn’t have pictured Ron Livingston playing this type of sad-sack character, but turns out that he’s awesome. The rest of the cast and their oddball characters (the foulmouthed priest, especially!) are awesome. The willingness of the producers to let the plot amble any which way in the interest of laughs, even to the extent of sidelining its major character, is awesome. And finally, I assume we’re agreed that “Time Traveling Lumberjacks of the Confederacy” *would*, in fact, be an awesome name for a band.
I mainly knew Livingstone as a very dislikable company man in THE COOLER (still my favorite Alec Baldwin role, for when he tortures RL while whispering, ‘you hear that? That’s pain coming through on a subsonic level’), but after seeing LOUDERMILK got to discover him in BAND OF BROTHERS too. Who knows, I may even give OFFICE SPACE another go, though I haven’t seen that a second time, mainly because Gary Cole’s antagonist in that is just a little too real to be funny.
Whereas I knew him mainly from BoB and his guest stint on “Sex in the City” (yeah, I watched a fair chunk of it, guilty as charged). In “Lowdermilk” he seems to have perfected the “cynical-damaged-by-life-but-with-a-heart-of-gold” look that women seem to like. I wish I could manage it, especially since it describes my interior landscape at this point pretty well.
I know that landscape too (looks in mirror and watches face fall).
You guys just need a defective telepod or Janice rand on transporter duty to bring out the best from within yourselves!
Not exactly what I had in mind when I was hoping that people might one day see the real me. You’re not helping, Martin.
Sincerest apologies, and I do mean that. Sometimes I try too hard to lighten moments instead of respecting them. It’s kind of like how Shatner hurt Nimoy’s feelings during DEVIL IN THE DARK. Nimoy was trying to be supportive when Shatner came back after his father’s death, but when Nimoy was doing the meld and saying, ‘pain,’ Shatner ad-libbed ‘get that man an aspirin’ in an attempt to get a big laugh and it utterly flubbed.
Naw, man, that was just a joke. No worries.
Worry, Martin! (j/k)
Yeah, Martin. ;)
I started worrying right after I made the post that it might have sounded wrong, but couldn’t figure out how to edit it from my phone (have only recently started doing anything with the phone besides calling people.) When I got home, it was too late to edit it and I felt so bad I thought I should just take a week off from this site (god knows I’ve gotten enough suspensions from blu-ray.com and t__kbbs.com down through the years) but geez, I’ve signed off from the only other site I participate at (bondandbeyond) — just to limit my time online — and Ive gotta have some way to spew.
I don’t participate in forums at all, other than when I check in here to see what you’re up to, and we chat. My contact info is all different since I was hacked last year and I changed everything. I believe yours changed also.
I liked John Larroquette’s narration on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
P might as well stipulate this is canon given all the weak comedic crap they label as canon these days…lol
Equally important here is Wendi Malick as Cat Woman. >growwwl<
Needs a tan