TNG Season 1

Traditions are only worth holding onto if they make sense.

Today marks a turning point for Vaka Rangi, at least in terms of its structure. With Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’ve entered the longest and most monolithic stretch of the entire Star Trek franchise. There is no point between 1987 and 2005 where Star Trek is not airing new episodes in some form or another, and this makes analysing and historicizing it the way I’ve been approaching it up ’till now unfeasibly difficult in any reasonable amount of time. Especially considering the fact that, to be brutally honest, not every episode of Star Trek from here on out is a historical milestone, and not every one really needs to be treated as such. Actually, I don’t even consider that to be true of the Original Series, but you could at least craft a somewhat compelling argument that this might have been true in this instance. For these shows, however, three of which were comprised of seven seasons of thirty episodes each and one of which was comprised of four, it’s really not plausible for me to tackle them episode by episode and expect to be done with all of this before Vaka Rangi itself becomes a historical relic.

So from now on, I’m going to start looking at whole sections of a season together in one essay instead of one at a time. I’ll group the episodes together around a central theme that I think characterizes each of them and, instead of going into elabourate detail for all of them, I’ll pull examples that support my thesis from each of them. Not every post will be like this; there are still a fair few episodes that I think warrant posts all to themselves, but this is going to become a regular feature from here on out. In particular, I simply can’t conceive of any other way to sanely cover the byzantine complexity of the Dominion War’s stubborn fixation on serialization *while also* writing about Star Trek Voyager at the same time. Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 is the first moment I think the time is right to approach the critique this way because there’s a noticeable chunk of the year that’s quite frankly completely superfluous, mediocre and eminently passable. And, er, I’m afraid it’s this one. It wouldn’t feel right for me to skip over these episodes entirely, but there’s simply no way I can squeeze 1.5-2,000 words out of any of them, and I don’t want to waste your time with an entire day’s post that’s just like 500 words or so.

It’s not that any of these episodes are reprehensibly terrible; there’s nothing in any of them quite as ghastly as “The Naked Now” or “Code of Honor” (although “Justice” and “Angel One” have moments that push it). What they all are, however, is rote and forgettable, and in a very particular way. I have a distinct suspicion that when people malign the first season, it’s probably this crop of episodes they’re thinking of, and I’ve personally skipped over these episodes so many times during my past revisits of this year I actually barley remember them.…

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Almost as iconic to my memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the timespace it inhabits as Data is his brother Lore. I always found him to be one of the great antagonists of the show, even trumping the Borg. It’s him who I think of along with the Klingons, Romulans and Ferengi as people the Enterprise would frequently and regularly come into contact with, and the two-part episode “Descent”, in particular the climactic scene where Data debates Lore in a darkened, bombed out corridor before shutting him down, is permanently burned onto my psyche as one of the show’s most legendary and unforgettable moments.

As a result, this episode, Lore’s first appearance, is always one I eagerly look forward to rewatching whenever I revisit Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season…And it’s one I’m always profoundly let down by. Most recently, this happened when I was trying to introduce my sister to the show as I excitedly talked up how cool Lore was, how brilliant Brent Spiner was in the role and how important a role he played in my personal history with the series. After I put the Blu-ray on and we’d seen it, my sister and politely, yet firmly pointed out that, no offense, but “Datalore” was crap, the evil twin story was precisely the sort of artificial conflict we both hate in scripted drama and Wesley Crusher rendered the whole thing essentially unwatchable. She’s right, of course: There are a few episodes of any show that really aren’t very good, but you have to begrudgingly recommend to a new viewer because they lay the groundwork for later, far superior story arcs. Unfortunately, the very best I can say for “Datalore” is that it’s in that category.

“Datalore” is actually Gene Roddenberry’s final contribution to Star Trek as a writer and, well, it shows. This is absolutely the worst Wesley has been yet, and it’s impossible *not* to lay that at Roddenberry’s feet. He’s obviously responsible. And, all the usual criticisms of Roddenberry’s style of writing apply here too. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that Data’s origin is established to be on an old Earth colony as the creation of an eccentric human inventor instead of “unknown aliens”, but that’s definitely the case now. At the very least it gives Brent Spiner a lot more to do in the future, so that’s good (though interestingly, Noonien Soong was originally supposed to be played by Mike Okuda. Seriously. That would have been cool in its own right). However, the one part of the script we can’t blame on Roddenberry is its stock nature: The idea to make “Datalore” an evil twin story actually came from Brent Spiner. In the original script, Lore was apparently going to be Data’s twin sister, a good android who was even going to join the crew to do mechanical work in environments humans couldn’t go, like the exteriors of starships.…

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“The Big Goodbye” is not the first Holodeck story, although it has that reputation among fans. We’ve seen the Holodeck used in a few episodes already for both training and recreation, but of course what fans mean when they say this is that “The Big Goodbye” is the first Holodeck malfunction story, which, shall we say, goes on to be something of a cliche in 1980s and 1990s Star Trek. Though even that’s not technically accurate, considering “The Practical Joker” from the second season of Star Trek: The Animated Series was for all intents and purposes the debut of both the Holodeck and the Holodeck malfunction plot, even if it wasn’t called that at the time.

Considering that, as a narrative device, the Holodeck offers basically limitless potential for intriguing and captivating storytelling and the overwhelming majority of Star Trek’s writers default back to this one basic plot from a not-even-all-that-good episode from Star Trek: The Animated Series‘ decline period is concerning, but not the issue at hand today, because “The Big Goodbye” does work, and work very well. One obvious reason why is the actors, who are in top form: They’re always in top form so it’s quickly going to become irrelevant to keep mentioning that, but the specific way they’re in top form this time around is because the structure the Holodeck offers allows Star Trek: The Next Generation to crash into period piece drama and genre pastiche. The common explanation given for this, echoed famously by Wil Wheaton in his own review of this episode, is that actors love this sort of thing anyway so naturally it’s fun for them to throw themselves into a brief like this and just go nuts with it. And there certainly is some of that: I’m convinced the majority of the reason Data has a part here is so Brent Spiner can do his best hard-broiled gangster routine, which he’s of course amazing at.

But Spiner is actually a really good example of how the actors go above and beyond, not just in this episode, but every day on set. Data’s part isn’t just an excuse for Spiner to do funny voices, he’s a kind of Harpo Marx archetype who’s constantly comically bewildered by his situation. Spiner’s skill at impersonations actually gets written back into the character as Data’s awkward efforts to blend in and get into his role. He’s done this before, obviously, but this is the first time where the production starts to work with this and give him the room he needs. Gates McFadden does something very similar: A natural comedian, McFadden is clearly relishing the opportunity this episode gives her, and this is Bev’s best outing yet. Gates doesn’t play Crusher at all straight here, between her fumbling and tripping in the Holodeck to the exaggerated and pouty way she conveys the alleged “romantic tension” with Captain Picard, Gates turns Bev into basically a pantomime character here, it’s wonderful and it’s right up her alley.…

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“Too Short a Season” is one of the most criminally underrated episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first year, if not the whole series. It’s the first unabashedly, hands-down brilliant episode since “Haven”, which makes sense as it’s the show’s second contribution from D.C. Fontana. Well, second *official*, at any rate: She did the teleplay for “Lonely Among Us”, which I also loved, and she did clean-up work on “The Naked Now”, but understandably took her name off it and used a pseudonym there. Though “Too Short a Season” is still an adaptation of somebody else’s work, it’s still very much a story that’s very recognisably hers: It’s got every ounce of that trademark Fontana bite and cynicism and, as we’d expect, it’s a story where the real villains are the Federation. In fact, it’s the first story like that in the entire franchise.

I seem to recall once either reading or hearing a rumour that the role of Admiral Mark Jameson was written with Captain Kirk in mind. Now, I can’t substantiate this anywhere and have no idea where I might have initially picked that up, so I could very well be imagining things, but after having just rewatched “Too Short a Season” in lieu of the critique I gave the Original Series it seems truly uncanny to think about. Because one level on which to read this episode is as a very firm reaction against the sort of ethics that permeated *huge swaths* of the Original Series, especially under Gene Roddenberry. Jameson is not an obsequious pencil-pusher, like previous obstructive Starfleet admirals have been. He’s not some incompetent desk jockey removed from the “real” action on the front lines, he’s every bit the unorthodox renegade and rogue Kirk is. In fact, “Too Short a Season” almost seems like a flat rejection of “A Private Little War”, for what Jameson does here is almost the exact same thing Kirk did in that episode, only while the narrative lionized Kirk, it condemns Jameson.

(That Jameson is destined to fall from grace is made obvious fairly early on: Not just in the way the teaser emphasizes his impulsive commandeering of the mission, but thanks to Marina Sirtis. “Too Short a Season” is an excellent showcase for her theatre-honed expressiveness: When Jameson is first speaking to Karnas on the bridge, the camera keeps cutting to Deanna Troi, and Marina goes out of her way to telegraph his ulterior motives to us purely through her facial expressions: Marina plays Troi as if she can sense Jameson’s deceit and ambition right from the outset. Granted, I suppose this raises the question of why she wouldn’t have expressed her concerns to Captain Picard, but it’s Marina Sirtis’ considerable acting prowess that’s primarily responsible for getting us to think her character might be under-served in the first place.)

The entire reason there’s a hostage crisis in the first place stems directly from Jameson’s actions negotiating for the resolution of a similar situation forty years prior.…

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“Yep. Looks like a soundstage to me, Commander.”

A lot of times on television shows, particularly very expensive and VFX heavy science fiction shows such as this one, certain concessions must be made to financing. Sometimes you’re forced to shoot an entire episode on pre-existing sets or re-use old special effects shots in order to make the cut that week on time and on budget. Star Trek of the Long 1980s tends to be pretty good at this: Just recently, Star Trek: The Next Generation used a bottle show brief as an opportunity to turn “Lonely Among Us” into a minor classic, and six years later Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, facing a similar mandate, will take “Duet” and turn it into an unmitigated classic.

And then there’s “Hide and Q”.

I won’t say “Hide and Q” only exists to re-use the effect for Q’s force field from “Encounter at Farpoint”, but I will say it’s odd how a character who carries such weight and gravity suddenly reappears only ten episodes after his debut in a story that seems to be little more than a pointless (and far inferior) retread of his previous appearance. Because it’s really difficult to make the case that this isn’t what “Hide and Q” is: Q shows up, captures the Enterprise and puts the crew through a series of tests in order to determine whether or not humans are worthy of being a spacefaring civilization. The reason given for why Q is back is apparently because his people, while no longer worried humanity is a threat to itself and others, might now progress to such a level that their power might come to rival that of their own, and would like to test to see if humans are responsible enough to wield such abilities. But this amounts to little more than a diegetic explanation of the symbolic power Q already had: Q was already a manner of god and the issue at stake was *always* whether Star Trek: The Next Generation was deserving of that title and honour. That’s what it means to be a utopian ideal: You become a role model and idol others try to take into themselves.

Furthermore, this not only adds nothing to Q’s symbolic power, it actually does measurable harm to his efficacy as a character. Although Q was always going to be a reoccurring foil for the crew, from this point onwards, there are going to be two kinds of stories that feature him: The first kind are stories like “Encounter at Farpoint” that actually recognise the potential metatextual challenge Q can offer the series that force Star Trek to prove it’s capable of living up to the ideals it claims to embody, and furthermore, that those ideals are ones worth holding on to. The second, and regrettably far more common, type of story is the one where Q becomes, in the words of John de Lancie himself, Captain Picard’s (or Sisko’s, or Janeway’s, but that’s another couple of books) “wacky sitcom uncle” who happens to be omnipotent.…

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It’s beyond a cliche to say that history repeats itself. In fact, I’m not sure it’s ever been the case where that hasn’t been beyond a cliche. The phrase is usually invoked when someone wants to make a sweeping generalization about human shortsightedness or failing to learn from the past.

In Star Trek, the past tends to be spoken of as something we must move beyond. Indeed, that’s the central thesis of “The Battle”, and the episode gives us two contrasting perspectives for how this manifests in people. In one corner we have DaiMon Bok, who has spent the last nine years obsessed with his son’s accidental death and with coming up with a way to punish Captain Picard for it because he can’t move on and needs someone to blame for his grief. In the other we have Captain Picard himself who, while touched to be able to return to the USS Stargazer, also frequently makes it clear that this is something from his past that must remain there. The torture he undergoes at the hands of Bok’s thought-maker is simply a metaphor for how dangerous it is to “live in the past”, how it can consume a person and keep them from moving forward. And here again is that theme of progressing, of going forth: What I have always taken from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and how I choose to read this theme as it appears here and elsewhere in the Star Trek franchise, is one of continually growing *as a person*. Of constantly striving to be learn a little bit every day, and always striving to improve oneself as a human being. Of never settling or becoming complacent.

But there is another reading of this, a reading that is, from my perspective, altogether less savoury, yet one that’s not quite reducible out of the larger conceptual framework of Star Trek this series does inherit. And that’s the notion of progress, and history itself, as teleology. The idea that one must go forward for this is the right and natural way to go, or indeed the *only* way to go, and that this will ultimately get us to the best possible ending point. “Boldly going forward because we can’t find reverse”, as it were. What this does is impose a hierarchical, modernist master narrative over the theme, and this is more than a little disturbing considering the technofetishism that does surround Star Trek, and that’s only going to increase as Star Trek: The Next Generation goes on. The franchise has had gravely concerning run-ins with Modernization Theory and managerial progressive thought at times, and those are not so easily forgotten, especially at the comparatively young state of our new show at this time. It’s the self-absorbed, manifest destiny style of futurism that has dogged the entire genre of Western science fiction since its earliest days, and Star Trek: The Next Generation will have to grapple with it one way or another.…

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The Star Trek: The Next Generation toy line I was most familiar with was done by Playmates in the early 1990s. But they weren’t the first to get the license to make tie-ins to the show: The first company to get the job was Galoob who, early in the first season, put out a line of 3-inch toys (savvily designed to compliment the popular Kenner and Star Wars toys of the time) along with accessories based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. We’re still a little ways off from looking at the line in detail, but for our immediate purposes it’s worth mentioning the first figures Galoob released based on characters not among the main crew were of the Anticans and the Selay from “Lonely Among Us”.

Part of the reason why the Anticans and the Selay got action figures that early is surely because they were likely the only new extraterrestrial characters created for Star Trek: The Next Generation apart from Q Galoob would have had access to when they were prepping designs. But I personally think it may have been at least partly because the Anticans and the Selay are genuinely well-done and memorable creatures. Makeup artist Michael Westmore credits them as his favourites among the characters he designed for the first season, in spite of a few of the Selay masks being a bit too rigid to be able to properly emote. And it really is entirely due to Westmore’s work: Culturally speaking, neither group is “something to write home about”, as Data would say-They basically exist to hate each other and serve as suspects when the cloud starts wrecking shit in the ship’s internal systems. The show’s not quite gotten to the point where it can portray an entirely alien culture with conviction and nuance. What is interesting about the diplomacy part of the story is how it’s used as another showcase for the show’s progressive post-scarcity utopianism. In this case, the crew’s unfamiliarity with disputes over territory, resources and religion (and memorably “economic policy”, as Captain Picard points out) are contrasted with the latent mutual hostility between the Anticans and the Selay. We also learn from Riker that humans no longer need to domesticate animals for food (the word he uses is “enslave”, which is wonderfully loaded).

But even though the script paints them as entirely forgettable and one-note, the Anticans and the Selay still stick in my mind. They’re among the most iconic images and signifiers of this part of the show for me: Later on in the year, the show will throw out some truly questionable material on the aesthetics front, but this time the imagery and mood is more than enough to carry the story. Aside from the delegates themselves, there’s also the cloud tank trick that were used to create the Beta Renner being and the straight-out-of-Star Wars lightning bolt effects (clearly, ILM were showing off). Whenever I think of season one, I immediately think of the Anticans and the Selay, and indeed this episode on the whole.…

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For a brief period of time when I was younger my family owned a small local toy store. Apart from my more cosmopolitan cousins, visiting their store was one of the only ways I had to keep abreast of the developments in pop culture, or at least the segment they catered to.

Because they were set up as vendors, this got my parents invites to the annual Toy Fair in New York City every year they owned the business. On a couple of occasions I accompanied them on their business trips, and oftentimes they were my only opportunity to be exposed to a genuine world city. One one occasion I recall quite distinctly, we went to go visit the flagship store for international toy retail giant FAO Scwarz on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Just like everything else in New York, FAO Schwarz was mostly known for very high-end, luxury things, in particular their life-sized stuffed animals, which they likely at least partially got from German toy manufacturer Steiff, whose products they also carried (and was also probably one of the reasons my parents went there, because their store carried them too).

My memories of FAO Schwarz are twofold. Firstly, I remember making a beeline for the video game and cartoon show tie-in action figures. We didn’t have anything on a remotely comparable scale back home, and this was potentially my one opportunity to get physical representations of some of my favourite characters. But secondly, I was struck by how enormous, grand and lavish it all felt: In hindsight this is at least a little understandable, considering it was the flagship store of a major brand on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, but I still remember marveling at how upscale and aristocratic it felt. FAO Schwarz seemed to be one of the most New York places we went in New York, if that makes any sense at all; it had every ounce of the archetypical gold-rimmed, art deco feeling that characterizes Manhattan, and it radiated that from every corner. It was at once exciting, but also more than a little intimidating. I guess in hindsight, my visit to that toy store in Manhattan embodied for me all the excess and decadence that capitalism naturally leads to, in spite of the nice things it can also make for us.

I think Andy Probert’s work on Star Trek: The Next Generation is criminally overlooked. His fellow designers practically worship him, deservedly and understandably so, but I’m not sure it’s as recognised outside of those small and select circles as it really ought to be. His three starship designs in particular are genuine works of art, and look like absolutely nothing else. I’ve already talked a bit about the Enterprise, though I could talk about the Enterprise basically forever, but “The Last Outpost” gives us the second of the three: The Ferengi Marauder. What strikes me the most about this ship is the thickness of that inner ring, how there are so many tiny windows, and how they all face outward towards us.…

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All utopias are, at their most basic levels, ideas. Regardless of whether or not people have felt the need to take physical action to translate it into the material realm, the idea remains and is ultimately what’s important.

The blurb for “Where No One Has Gone Before” describes the plot as “A warp drive experiment transports the Enterprise to a region of space where thought becomes reality”. Except, that’s not true, is it? On multiple levels. Kosiniski’s experiments are nothing but, as he does nothing except unwittingly take credit for the work The Traveler surreptitiously does and there’s no actual theory to test here as it’s all common knowledge to him. But more relevantly, it’s The Traveler’s contention that there’s really no difference between time, space and thought. It’s merely the *acknowledgment* of such that allows the Enterprise to do the seemingly impossible things it does in this story. M33, that is, Messier 33, is a real place: It’s a spiral galaxy that’s the third largest in our local group, after the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. There’s no evidence that, if you were able to go there, it would appear any different than our own galaxy does, yet alone the indescribably beautiful psychedelic mindscape Rob Legato dreamed up for this episode. The reason it looks the way it does is because The Traveler helped the Enterprise attain a higher state of consciousness in order to comprehend reality. The world and the dream are one.

And it’s a captivating dream to be sure. There are a handful of images from the first season that are truly iconic, transcending the episodes they were apart of to become larger signifiers for the series on the whole. The M33 of “Where No One Has Gone Before” is one of them, the second of the year for me (the first being Q’s crackling energy net from “Encounter at Farpoint”). And yet while a few of them will take on lives of their own such that the stories they hail from seem middling and forgettable by comparison, these first two are equally as powerful as those episode they represent. Much of what I remember about Star Trek: The Next Generation is intensely surreal and abstract, especially in later seasons that deal quite explicitly with darkly psychological and speculative elements. In spite of Star Trek having a reputation for being “realistic” and the archetypical materialist Hard SF action series, The Next Generation‘s sojourns into the staunchly immaterial are just as real and important to me, despite this aspect of the show constantly being glossed over. Of course, they are real, because there’s no difference between the spiritual world and the physical one and nothing exists which is not divine.

And “Where No One Has Gone Before” is the first time in the series I start to get that same feeling. Apart from the shots of the galaxy itself, the show’s cinematography and visual effects perfectly capture how the Enterprise‘s own history plays out upon it.…

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And I knew you would be this brave.

Humans claim to always be in search of truths, yet all too often we blind ourselves and refuse to accept the ones we find. I am increasingly of the belief we overcomplicate our lives, not just in a material sense, but in a spiritual and philosophical sense. To go back, look back, to remember things we may have once known intuitively but have since forgotten…This is not sacrifice, but gaining an understanding of who we are and what’s truly important. And sometimes we need our routine disrupted to remind ourselves of that. If the universe seems to be trying to tell you something, perhaps you might listen: We all find our own paths in time.

The issue at stake for Deanna Troi and Wyatt Miller, and indeed of Star Trek: The Next Generation on the whole, is one of destiny. In Westernism, we tend to think that our entire lives, our past, present and future in the common parlance, are either entirely up to chance and individual will or, conversely, planned out for us in advance, spelled out to the letter. An arranged marriage can than be seen as a metaphor for this in microcosm: The young couple’s lives are planned out for them by forces entirely beyond their control and they have no say in the matter, seemingly bound by fate. And the show itself is caught up in this, threatened with the loss of a major character four episodes in. Given the washout of “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor”, it does seem worryingly as if Star Trek: The Next Geeration is in the process of rapid implosion. Even Captain Picard seems to sense this, opening the episode apparently preoccupied, musing as to whether the titular Haven will provide some much-needed, yet “all too brief”, reprieve for him and his crew.

This subtle awareness seems to permeate much of this episode, almost as if Star Trek: The Next Generation is in some way aware of its recent transgressions and its desperate need to move onward and upward as quickly and as dramatically as possible. And “Haven” is in many ways the exact story this show needed to do now: It’s the first episode since “Encouter at Farpoint” that unquestionably exists in its own world and doesn’t make sweeping, obvious callbacks to the Original Series. If “Haven” does resemble any Original Series high water mark it might arguably be “Journey to Babel”, both being character studies about one of the regulars who has a strained relationship with their parents set against the backdrop of a diplomatic incident. But unlike its immediate predecessors, if it does, it’s only on the level of basic storytelling structure, not a whole plot reference. And “Haven” goes above and beyond anything “Journey to Babel” ever did, by weaving all of its subplots together into an elegant demonstration of cosmic synchronicity.…

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