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DC TNG Volume 1

Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Reading Guide

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Longtime Vaka Rangi readers may remember that I have a small tradition of making episode guide/reading list posts whenever I finish covering Big Eras of the project. The hypothetical situation is that someone who is new to the show and yet for some reason *doesn’t* want to marathon binge-watch it as is the standard way of consuming TV these days could theoretically be interested in my recommendations for the best stories so as to emphasize the cream of the crop while avoiding filler and missteps. Each entry has a link to my essay on the story for those who might want to revisit them.

I first did something like this when, following a joke Kevin Burns made to me about Futurama, I was challenged to find “20 Good Episodes” of the Original Star Trek. TOS fans will likely be annoyed as there’s probably more episodes from that show one could recommend (and I *still* would have chosen different episodes after publishing Vaka Rangi Volume 1), but I wanted to limit myself to 20 following the conceit of the game so I was far harsher in my choices than I might otherwise have been. I didn’t do a list post for the Animated Series, but really, you’re pretty much good with anything on that show that wasn’t written by Margaret Armen.

After I finished Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1, I did another post to drive home my argument that the inagural year was very unfairly maligned and in truth had a robust crop of stories that deserve anyone’s attention. That post also has a list of my picks for the best episodes from the Dirty Pair TV series, as I had recently finished watching it for the first time and was about to start on the Original Dirty Pair OVA Series.

The Dirty Pair franchise itself got what in many ways is the prototype of the post you are about to read today: A master post of all my favourite stories I’d experienced so far, with links to where you could get your hands on copies of your own. It’s not linked from Eruditorum Press, but it’s still archived at my old blog. The links to my essays on all these old posts do link back to the old site, but all of my essays are archived right here too and can be read by searching or following the tags. It’s a bit dated now (especially the webstore links, though Dirty Pair should still all be on YouTube), but my picks are still pretty much the ones I’d pick today.

And so now, having come to the end of a long and winding road revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it’s time to give this phase of the project the same dues. Listed below, for your reading pleasure (or perhaps displeasure), are what I consider to be the best Star Trek stories between 1987 and 1996, including TV episodes and comic books.…

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Myriad Universes: DC Star Trek: The Next Generation Volume 1

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As we discussed last time, much of the initial tie-in merchandise and spin-off works based on Star Trek: The Next Generation were created before the actual show was so that they could actually tie in to things. This poses an interesting case when discussing things that are actual textual narratives, as it means the authors are working with prototypical assumptions about the characters and setting, and are as a result operating from the exact same position of uncertainty as the people working on the show itself are.

DC’s first Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book, a six issue limited series that ran from Fall, 1987 until Summer, 1988, is one such work. The first issue, “…Where No One Has Gone Before!”, was quite obviously penned before “Encounter at Farpoint” had aired (as you can probably guess just from the title) and is endlessly fascinating because of it: The characters are all drawn from broad-strokes assumptions about what they’d be like, presumably because the creative team only had access to Gene Roddenberry’s writer’s guide. Captain Picard suffers the most from this, being even grouchier, angrier and more stringent than he was early on in the show, although the series does do a decent job balancing this out with a sense of hardened isolation and introspection he feels brought on from his years of experience in deep space. Commander Riker, by contrast, tends to alternate between being barely visible and forgettable to being a generic heroic Star Trek lead.

The other characters, however, are eminently more interesting: Deanna Troi is more prominent, commanding and fleshed out than I think she ever is until season six of the show (well, discounting for the moment her development in the later DC comics, that is): Perhaps owing to DC being a publisher mostly known for superhero books, Deanna is treated as an essential member of the team whose psychic powers, which are far, far more powerful than they are on the show (think Professor X but without the telekinesis) prove absolutely critical on more than one occasion. She also gets a whole lot of speeches, and brings every other character down to rights at least once over the course of the series. Data, meanwhile is fascinating because he is quite overtly emotional, and *extremely so*: He gets emotionally overwhelmed at every little thing (he’s even sad to have “adrenal pumps”), both positively, or at least inoffensively, in the first issue to dangerously negatively in issues four and five.

Die-hard fans might recoil with shock and horror at this, but let’s stop an actually think about Data for a moment. Is it ever actually said anywhere at any point in the first season, in particular this early on in the year, that Data is emotionless? Sure, he doesn’t understand a lot, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel anything. At the very least if Brent Spiner is supposed to be playing an emotionless character he does an abjectly terrible job of it, because Data is permanently smirky and wry for the entire year.…

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“The penal code! The penal code!”: Court Martial

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“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!”

If “Miri”, “The Conscience of the King” and “The Galileo Seven” were about pushing the boundaries of what Star Trek was and could do, than “Court Martial” is about taking a long, hard look at what the show was originally conceived of being and the implications of that central concept and running with it to its logical limit.

This isn’t like “Balance of Terror”, which was about firmly putting its foot down and loudly, overtly protesting the show’s militaristic roots (not that there was anything wrong with that): Instead, “Court Martial” feels like Gene Coon and his team doing a lot of introspection and putting a lot of thought into what a show about the Space Air Force (or indeed the Space Navy, which seems to be increasingly the more accurate description, especially in this episode) would actually be about and what the world of that show might look like. This likely wasn’t the original intent, given as this story’s genesis came about by Coon approaching writer Don M. Mankiewicz to come up with a money-saving script that could be filmed with one new set. The extent to which this was successful can be easily deduced by observing that this episode features four new sets, a slew of new uniforms, some new matte paintings and the fact the next episode is a two-part clip show.

While it fails rather spectacularly at being a bottle show, “Court Martial” is a significant episode in several other regards, in particular, it’s a canon compiler’s dream as it introduces numerous new world building elements that will quickly become beloved parts of the “Star Trek Universe”. Most important of these from a modern perspective has got to be the debut of Starfleet and Starfleet Command. This is, to understate things considerably, the single most important development in the series so far from the perspective of the future, and indeed it’s so titanic a moment there’s only one more that can top it (but we have to wait a bit longer for that). For the first time we have an actual name for the service the Enterprise is a part of and that of the body that governs it. It may seem surprising to those who haven’t seen Star Trek in awhile, but this is the first time anything resembling the word “Starfleet” has been mentioned in the show, two years and 14 weeks in. Previously we’d occasionally heard references to Earth or an Earth Command, but with the introduction of the phrases “Starfleet Command” and “United Star Ship”, Star Trek has expanded its scope considerably.

Although primarily a nomenclature change, this does alter the way we look at the world of Star Trek a bit. In the past the Enterprise seemed to have been representing the interests of some kind of colonial power based on Earth: While that reading is still possible, this new terminology encourages a more nuanced and complex way of interpreting the version of the galaxy this show takes place in-This is also helped by having the entire episode basically be devoted to world building, showing exactly the way Starfleet’s chain of command and and governmental organisation works.…

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