Category: Features
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Eye of the Beholder”
“Mr. Worf, you sound like a man who’s asking his friend if he can start dating his sister.” To tie off the strangest romance inception in series television history – in which Worf went to a parallel universe where he was married to Counselor Troi, then figured he might want to try to hit that…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Masks”
“Masaka is waking.” Buckle your shit up everyone, because things are about to get terrible. With “Lower Decks” behind us, it’s now a nearly straight run of unadulterated garbage from here to “All Good Things…” with only a couple of so-bad-it’s-good reprieves in the meantime. “Masks” is not one of those reprieves. Now, I admit,…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Thine Own Self”
“You are an ice man.” This is such a straight-ahead idea for an episode that it’s somewhat surprising it didn’t turn up earlier in the run of the series: Data crashes on an alien planet, develops amnesia, and is adopted by a local pre-industrial society, where his android skill set allows him to solve the…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Lower Decks”
“Now what do you think that tells me about your character?” If it weren’t for “All Good Things…,” “Lower Decks” would be the clear standout of the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s a phenomenal episode, brilliantly structured and entirely forward-looking in its approach. It anticipates the best years of Deep Space…