“Well, this is a new ship, but she’s got the right name.”
The entire gulf between the male and female of our species might be mapped in the lack of understanding in my girlfriend’s eyes, as I attempted to explain to her why the high-definition upgrade of Star Trek: The Next Generation – and particularly, its visual effects – was so bloody well done. Whereas the blu-rays of the original Star Trek took the opportunity to re-render and re-design every visual effect as a kind of glossily overproduced vidja game cutscene, the Next Gen upgrades hew so faithfully to the original designs of the shots that one would scarcely notice the changes were it not for minute signposts along the way, like being able to read the word “Enterprise” at the base of the dorsal as the ship flies by, or the fact that the space-anemonae in “Encounter at Farpoint” must apparently be part of a gendered species – because one of them is now slightly blue, and the other is slightly pink. I hope in space-anemonae civilization, it is marginally easier for the blue ones to explain to the pink ones why Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray is cool.
It was in popping my old DVD of “Encounter at Farpoint” into the player to check it against the new blu-ray that I inadvertently, but instantaneously, committed myself to around $800 worth of blu-ray upgrades for the entire series. I am overwhelmingly familiar with this show; I own every episode on DVD, but watch one of them less than once every couple of years. Nonetheless, the blu-ray presentation is so definitive that it argues for its own necessity without even a cursory struggle. It’s a much more complete read of the series, but it is so faithfully built on the original materials without newly-imposed authorial enhancements ([cough] Special Editions [cough]) that the blu-rays of Next Gen turn out to confirm two things: firstly, that the original version of the series, finished on Beta and interlaced as fuck, looked terrible; and this new presentation, re-scanned from the original film and rebuilt from the ground up and so squeaky clean that it looks like it was shot yesterday, is the way Star Trek: The Next Generation has always looked in my head.
As a pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint” is such an unrelenting cascade of bizarre ideas – in the storytelling less so, but much more overwhelmingly in the worldbuilding; with weird, sweaty Groppler Zorn; and the male Enterprise crewmember who struts the decks in his red miniskirt over bare, muscular legs; and of course, the space-anemonae. And all of this cerebral vomit is just background detail against the standing tropes of the show that are simultaneously being established throughout the episode, like Geordi’s VISOR, and the new Enterprise-D, and the Holodeck, and Data, and the Battle Bridge, and Riker and Troi’s Imzadi brain-bridge – all of which fly by with such casual, yeah-so?-whatever insouciance that they nearly outclass the real Big Idea of this “big ideas” show, Q’s kangaroo court and its Trial of the Human Race. Ostensibly taking place in 2079, during something that is charmingly referred to as our “post-atomic Horror,” the courtroom scene in “Encounter at Farpoint” is a standout for the entire season – and follows a hum-dinger of a Trek trope, where the then-immediate future of our species is spelled out for 1987 audiences with a whirlwind tour of the depravities of the 21st century via Q’s wardrobe changes.
It would all seem like high-minded silliness if it weren’t, oddly enough, for the commitment in the design of Q’s judges robes and the tactility of everything within the courtroom’s sphere; and of course the commitment to Q himself. John De Lancie wraps his tuna-soft lips around Q’s oily, feline goadings with stalwart American-television-guest-star formidability, which turns out to be a brilliant match against Patrick Stewart’s old-Shakespearean skill at turning any soliloquy, order, or even Captain’s Log into the poetic musings of the noble heart of the entire human race. Picard establishes his viability as the best possible Star Trek captain early on – an ideal man, a role model, and a questing spirit – “the heart of an explorer and the soul of a poet,” as Tasha will later intone – all bound up in an actor who can deliver the fuck out of the lines. Casting, casting, casting. Even in and around the rest of the crew, “Encounter at Farpoint” establishes TNG’s manifest destiny by simple dint of who’s sitting in the Captain’s chair. Star Trek is such a bigger idea than Kirk and Spock.
Why does Data flex his fingers before attacking his control panel in the very first shot in which he is featured? Why are Wesley’s sweaters so gigantic? How many times per season is Turtlesmack going to pronounce, “I am a Klingon?” Why are both Tasha and Troi sobbing openly within the first fifteen minutes of the episode? Wait – did that ensign pointedly, and lingeringly, check out Riker’s ass?? In high-definition, performance beats pop out of the screen and I begin to realize that I’ve never seen them before – because the video versions of these shows did not have fidelity high enough to present them. Here, everything is definitive: enhanced, enriched, and enshrined. Bottomless. The pilot episode, which not only launches the series proper but initiates the very idea that Star Trek could go beyond the original crew – consider the franchise implications of that when you have a moment – is slick and weird and curiously off-model, and curiously on-model at the same time. Corey Allen (the director) even includes some kind of iris on two key shots of Picard and Q, closing darkness in around them as they have the conversation which, in a way, spells the next seven years of the show. Visual and dramatic, “Farpoint” holds up, even when it’s failing miserably – it has a pronounced, curious, long reach into everything Star Trek became from here forward.
And – bless every single second of it – the show is so entirely bound up in Gene Roddenberry’s insanely idealistic belief in the continued validity of human exploration… that exploration, itself, would someday be our primary occupation, in bright, glowing starships in the sky. There are only two pieces of Star Trek canon that are complete, unexpurgated Roddentopia – Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and this episode right here. Neither piece completely works, but they both offer terrifying glimpses through the big stained-glass window into the World of Star Trek as envisioned by its alpha male. With complete creative license and the freedom to do as he wished, ol’ Gene tried for the second time to introduce a Star Trek universe that was blissfully Utopian, unabashedly idealistic, engagingly adventurous and thrummingly sexual all at the same time. I’ve long nursed a suspicion that Roddenberry was a through-and-through sexual libertarian, and that in his version of a perfect future, every person would or could fuck every other person with the same level of prurient social non-interest as we currently level at sending emails. Sex, exploration, adventure, and staunch moral idealism, bound up in red, blue and gold. It is so chillingly oldschool and painfully hopeful that it smarts a bit – a language we’ve turned away from, that we can somehow still read. Star Trek: the naïve, beautiful optimism.
Update: For kicking things off in compelling style, I’m giving “Encounter At Farpoint” four Enterprises out of five.
My first presence on the internet was a Geocities site back in 1997, and having nothing better to do with it, I blogged about the new episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager that aired each week. Blogging The Next Generation is like that – for Star Trek: The Next Generation, every single episode, on blu-ray.