Star Trek’s Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Justice (Review)

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also next year’s release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, I’m taking a look at the recent blu ray release of the first season, episode-by-episode. Check back daily for the latest review.

I’ve been harping on quite a bit about how too much of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is trying to hard to be classic Star Trek, without acknowledging that the original series was the product of a very different society and outlook. You can’t literally map familiar beats and metaphors on a one-for-one basis and expect them to work perfectly inside a storytelling engine that is radically different. It’s easy enough to imagine Justice working as a classic Star Trek episode.

Indeed, it seems quite similar to The Apple, among others. However, it’s the differences that are telling, and it’s the differences that serve to take what might have been an entertaining piece of fluff from the sixties and turn it into a near-catastrophic misfire in the eighties.

“This show is about Riker trying to what an alien?”

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Star Trek: The Next Generation – Lonely Among Us (Review)

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Darren

Lonely Among Us actually embodies quite a few of the problems with these early episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. While it’s hardly the worst episode of a season, it is certainly not among the stronger episodes. It’s a story that doesn’t really have a centrally defined conflict, and plays into the worst of the smug “humans are special” subtext that pervades episodes like The Last Outpost. At one point, possessed!Picard observes, “The search for knowledge is always our primary mission.” Based on episodes like this and The Last Outpost, it seems more likely the ship’s primary mission is lording it over alien cultures they deem inferior.

However, more than that, Lonely Among Us simply lacks a compelling narrative drive to make it entirely worthwhile. The ideas here aren’t half-bad, but the execution is downright dull.

Has Picard’s judgement been clouded?

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Star Trek: The Next Generation – Where No One Has Gone Before (Review)

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Darren

I remember that I never really like Where No One Has Gone Before when I was younger. Even now, I have a bit of a tough time counting it among the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, despite that, I’ve actually warmed to it quite a bit on this rewatch. It’s not brilliantly constructed as an hour of television, and I wouldn’t even count it as the best produced in this first season of the second Star Trek series. However, it does something that a lot of other episodes in this run try to do, and fail to accomplish.

It manages to evoke the spirit of Star Trek.

Into the wild purple yonder…

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Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Last Outpost (Review)

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Darren

You know, a lot of people would argue that Star Trek is about understanding. That it’s about embracing and respecting cultures, even when they hold values different than your own. Sometimes that is to a fault, like in the last episode (Code of Honour) where Picard allowed his Chief of Security to engage in a fight to the death to avoid violating local custom. (Which he then violated by reviving the loser.) However, it appears that such open-mindedness only applies when you look and act appropriately human enough.

If you are a Ferengi, then your culture shouldn’t be respected and acknowledged. It should be mocked and ridiculed.