Category: Blogging The Next Generation
Want more posts like these, straight to your inbox?
-
Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Remembrance”
“I don’t want the game to end.” The first episode of Star Trek: Picard is a huge episode of television. Premieres were never this show’s problem. Each season begins formidably, with intent writ large across entertaining hours, which see us reconnecting with old friends who find themselves in new surroundings. That’s an elaborate way of…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — NEMESIS rewatch
“It seems as though we are truly sailing into the unknown.” What, then, of Data? The reason I needed to hit both First Contact and Nemesis on my way into Star Trek: Picard‘s first season was that while the modern incarnation of the captain began in the former, everything else about the Picard series, for…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — FIRST CONTACT rewatch
We’ve been here before. Quite literally in this case — I covered Star Trek: First Contact, the second Next Generation feature film, as part of Blogging the Next Generation. More broadly, I started, and finished, that project a decade ago: a three-year tour through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, then on Tumblr,…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: “All Good Things…”
“And the sky’s the limit.” There’s that shot at the end of “All Good Things…,” the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Captain Picard starts dealing a poker hand to his crew – he’s never, in seven years, sat at that table, though he was always welcome – and as the cards…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: “Preemptive Strike”
“Laren, what’s going on?” The penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation ties off the series’ last great recurring character, with a final visit for Ensign Ro, here promoted to Lieutenant. Since her introduction in Season Five, Ro transitioned quickly from thrilling new blood in the post-Wesley cast, to disappointing non-starter. Michelle Forbes was…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: “Emergence”
“I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth…!” The seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is awful. I’m on the record with that throughout: people grouse about Seasons One and Two, and there are certainly some magnificent misfires in those years; but in its early days, Next Gen was possessed…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: “Bloodlines”
“You’ll never look at your hairline again in the same way.” For reasons I’ve never been able to suss out, Star Trek: The Next Generation spends one of its very last episodes doing a sequel to the ridiculous first-season episode “The Battle,” and does so by conjuring up a David Marcus-ish, long-lost son for Captain…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: “Firstborn”
“I don’t want to be a warrior!” And now that we’ve concluded things with Wesley Crusher, we move along to Alexander Rozhenko, Son of Worf, Nephew of Kurn, problematic “puppy” addition to a long-running series, who has all but disappeared since the middle of the sixth season. And what a dispiriting conclusion he gets: Future…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: “Journey’s End”
“I think that’s the first time anyone’s used that particular word to describe me.” With the end barreling towards us, Star Trek: The Next Generation takes the time to tie off three of its recurring characters: Wesley, Alexander, and Ensign Ro, starting with the former – and in the case of “Journey’s End,” it’s a…
-
Blogging the Next Generation: “Genesis”
“He transformed into a spider and now he has a disease named after him.” In the “so bad it’s good” files, few delight me more than “Genesis,” which isn’t just a bizarre attempt to do body horror on the USS Enterprise, but is also Gates McFadden’s sole directorial credit on Star Trek: The Next Generation.…