My Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation
SEASON ONE

Reviewed by Matt Brown
March 26th, 2002

I was 12 years old, just back from camp where a new friend had spent 2 weeks espousing the virtues of this new Star Trek series. I had seen Star Trek IV on cable and liked it a great deal, but was sceptical about this new spin-off: a blind guy flying the ship? An android instead of a Vulcan? And a bald captain?

I dutifully tuned in as I said I would. It only took an hour. With all hyperbole genuinely laid aside, I went into warp speed... and never came back.

This year, the seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation will be rolled out on DVD. To commemmorate this, I will offer my thoughts, season-by-season. The year will conclude with the arrival of Star Trek: Nemesis, the tenth (and final?) installment in the film series, but I have no prevailing hope about the quality of that movie. I am delighted, instead, that I'll get to spend a lot of time this year watching the real TNG, the good TNG.

I was not the only sceptic in 1987. Keep in mind that back then, the idea of a new incarnation of a long-deceased television series was foreign territory; there was no precedent for what Paramount offered Roddenberry the chance to do. Many other producers since Roddenberry have tried to do what he did, with little success, because few other series have the malleability of Star Trek.

At the time, and in the wake of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a new Trek, which did not include the aging (and expensive) original cast, must have seemed like a very dicey proposition. Indeed, for several years after its launch, Star Trek: The Next Generation was widely looked upon as Trek's poor cousin, a well-meaning, but ultimately foolish, attempt to replace the original series.

This thinking was rooted largely in a belief that it was the cast of the Original Series that made Star Trek so great. The classic characters: Kirk, Scotty, Sulu, were certainly great, and have transcended into our pop culture's mythic consciousness. But the characters alone did not define Star Trek's appeal: it moved further than that, and indeed, the structure itself - voyaging vessel, strange new worlds - was ripe for reinterpretation.

Armed with a wide latitude of creative control and a heady determination to finally make a Trek the way he originally intended the series (back when "The Cage" was his best foot forward), Roddenberry set forth to regenerate his baby, and the result was not just my favourite television series of all time, but the transformation of Star Trek into an invinceable franchise. That, of course, carries has its downside - witness Enterprise - but at the time, Roddenberry's success was nothing short of miraculous. It is entirely conceivable that Trek will never die: it can now, as Roddenberry proved, be spun off into as many new incarnations as a television audience will permit.

Season One of TNG has a lot going for it, but was notably marred by an enormous inconsistency in tone and quality. Roddenberry's vision of a perfect future human society was understandably difficult to put on screen, and the final result was something of a compromise. The writing and production staff for the first season was debilitated by a constant revolving-door changeup of personell, and that instability resulted in a large portion of very flawed episodes ("Lonely Among Us," "The Last Outpost" and "Home Soil" notable as being among the worst of Trek, ever).

The show also suffered badly by its failure to launch a convincing villain species for the series. The Ferengi was a smart concept, but was so poorly executed in performance and design as to render the effort meaningless. (Don't get me wrong, the Ferengi makeup is a fantastic design, and the species was developed into one of the great hallmarks of Trek in later years. It just didn't work as what it was supposed to be, at the beginning. Ferengi are many things, but they ain't scary.) It wasn't until the re-introduction of the Romulans, later in the season, that things started to get moving in the right direction.

The first season was burgeoning with so much optimism and creativity, however, that it was only natural that some of it trickled down into some fantastic television. "Where No One Has Gone Before," co-penned by frequent Trek novelist Diane Duane, was the series' first outstanding episode, and it holds up brilliantly, fifteen years later. Tracy Tormé was a staff writer for both the first and second seasons, and his episodes, including (in Season One) the magnificent "The Big Goodbye" and "Haven," remain standouts. I deeply wish Tormé could have stayed with the series longer, and would love to see what he could do with Enterprise.

Other first season standouts include "11001001," where the Enterprise is stolen while Picard and Riker are cavorting in the holodeck; "Conspiracy," the ever-so-memorable Exploding Head Episode, and my personal favourite, "We'll Always Have Paris," which has the distinction of being the first episode of the series I ever saw.

Season One introduced two narrative devices that would become staples of Trek almost immediately: the holodeck, which began as a fantasy environment simulator but became one of the saga's most enduring science fiction puzzle-boxes, and Q, the omnipotent superbeing whose presence in "Encounter at Farpoint" sets up a much wider arc that will bring the series to a close, seven years later.

Season One also introduced the series' two most fundamental sexual tensions, the "we can't do this because we work together" romance of Riker and Troi, and the "we can't do this because you brought my husband's body home from the mission where he died which oh by the way you sent him on you BASTARD!" affections of Picard and Dr. Crusher.

The production design was hilariously over the top, including one of my favourite concessions to pop culture, ever: after such a big deal about the miniskirts on women in the Original Series, many male crew-members are seen sporting an even-more-revealing skirt-tunic combo uniform alternate in the corridors of the Enterprise.

The cast was top heavy with characters, which unfortunately left several of the junior officers (Worf, La Forge, Tasha, Troi, Wesley) with little to do until Denise Crosby asked that she be written out of the series. The death of Tasha Yar was a great loss, both to the storyline and the show, but it did free up enough story time to allow the other members of the crew to be fleshed out in great detail.

(I am not, by the way, one of the innumerable Wesley-bashers out there. You have to understand, I was a precocious, awkward pubescent boy at the time, only a few years younger than Acting Ensign Crusher. I would have killed to be allowed to fly the ship.)

The show's headlining stars, however, were never a problem. Patrick Stewart, as Captain Picard, completely erradicates all memory of Kirk, and sets the standard by which all Trek captains, past and future, will always be judged. And of course, while I wouldn't suggest that Data outdoes Spock... well, he does. As interesting as Spock could have been, Data was explored in such greater detail that I can't help but love him more.

So much of the producers' efforts in later years has been directed towards introducing loopholes into Roddenberry's vision which allow for interpersonal conflict between the principal characters. TNG, however, employed an entirely different narrative mode: the conflict was always external. The ship went to a place, encountered a thing, dealt with the thing, and went on to the next place. TNG was truly an adventure series, and a science fiction series, in a way that Voyager and Enterprise could never hope to be. This is Trek storytelling at its best.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the happiest memories of my life, and I am thrilled to be given the chance to re-explore it, episode-by-episode, over the course of this year.

"My Generation" was my ongoing review of all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The complete series is now available on DVD. You can access each season's review on the left.