TNG Season 1

It’s so bad.

Would you believe it actually gets worse?

Let’s square away the obvious right away. “Code of Honor” is catastrophically, disgustingly and inexcusably racist. I don’t think anyone disputes that. Jonathan Frakes describes it bluntly as a “racist piece of shit”, and his castmates emphatically agree: Michael Dorn calls it “the worst episode of Star Trek ever filmed” while Brent Spiner muses that “It was the third episode so it was fortuitous that we did our worst that early on and it never got quite that bad again”. Somewhere along the way, somebody, most likely an assistant casting director or wardrobe designer, made the absolutely unthinkable decision to make the Ligonians an entire culture of space Africans, when they had never once been specified as such in the original script, and on top of that has them kidnap a white woman. Story editor Tracy Tormé points out the obvious, saying “Code of Honor” features a “1940s tribal Africa” depiction of Africans. Even Gene Roddenberry, a man not always known for his enlightened and progressive view of nonwestern, nonwhite societies, fired the director halfway through filming for being racist to the cast, although he was apparently fine with the rest of the episode.

The bottom line is nobody important wanted this episode to happen, and indeed *everyone* important was trying desperately to ensure that it didn’t happen. So let’s take it as read that “Code of Honor” is utterly abominable at a conceptual level, try to forgive the people we’ll be spending the next seven years with (because it really wasn’t their fault) and take a look at everything else that sucks about this repulsive train wreck. The first thing we notice after stripping away the most obvious hideousness is that the plot is basically an apathetic retread of “Amok Time”, with a member of the Enterprise forced to fight in ritual combat, with the clandestine administration of a neurosuppressor agent to one of the combatants a key part of the battle. Not only does it eschew absolutely all of the complex sexual and world-building themes of “Amok Time” in lieu of fantastically shitty and racist ones, as Wil Wheaton points out, “Code of Honor” aired the week after “The Naked Now”…Which was another twelfth-rate rehash of an Original Series episode. Not exactly the message the all-new Star Trek striving to stand apart from its iconic forebearer wants to be sending three weeks into its run.

But for me the worst part of all of this is that this is an episode I once actively sought out and looked forward to seeing. Let me, uh, try to explain: I was badly, badly mislead by Starlog magazine in this case, and I don’t think I’ve quite gotten over that even now. “Code of Honor” was not an episode I saw when I was first introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn’t watch it when originally aired, or even during the syndicated reruns various networks would often run in later years.…

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In space, no-one can hear you scream.

Bob Justman once said he felt the original “Naked Time” should have been the premier episode of Star Trek. Given Justman was on staff as a producer, perhaps that’s why “The Naked Now” went out as the second, but first regular, episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This does not make that decision any less catastrophic.

It is not, I stress, simply that “The Naked Now” is a shitty remake. It unquestionably is a shitty remake, the shittiest, in fact, but there were underlying problems with the structure it inherits that the original still had in droves and this one merely doubles down on them. The absolute best you reading you could pull out of “The Naked Time” is that it was probably a bad idea to drive a starship while space drunk (although it’s hilarious when it happens) and the worst is that confronting your emotions is distracting to the point of self-destructive and everyone should man up and bottle those emotions away somewhere because they interfere with duty. Let me address this as bluntly and succinctly as possible: I have witnessed firsthand what happens when people try to deny their feelings and hide their emotions from others because they’re ashamed of them. That can be utterly devastating to a person’s mind and mental health. Furthermore, this is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The entire point of the show is to demonstrate how humans can deal with their emotions in an idealistically healthy and fulfilling way. There is essentially no brief more contrary to the series’ foundational thesis statement than this.

There’s also the matter of leading off the series with an episode that is unabashedly a remake of an original Star Trek episode, complete with Picard and Data looking up Kirk’s logs from the first episode to come up with a solution to their own problem. Gene Roddenberry wanted no overlap between the two Star Trek shows *whatsoever*, feeling, rightly, I might add, that Star Trek: The Next Generation needed to prove itself and stand on its own. Obviously, he was voted down in this case by his Star Trek fan producers who wanted to throw in continuity references to the Original Series whenever possible in lieu of actually telling a story. Perhaps the idea was that skeptical OG Trekkers would appreciate the nods to the old show, in much the same way the main viewscreen has running lights deliberately reminiscent of the ones on the set from the Original Series. But that’s the fundamental mistake: The existence of “The Naked Now” is proof positive Paramount is misjudging and misunderstanding who its target demographic is, which isn’t obsessive Star Trek nerds, but mainstream audiences for whom The Next Generation is their very first Star Trek who are being introduced to the franchise’s concepts and ideals for the first time. And anyway, serious Trekkers would just look at something like this and use it as further evidence the new show is a pale imitation of the “real” Star Trek.…

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“Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time.”

-Cesare Pavese

Some of you might be old enough to remember TNN. Known as “The Nashville Network” It was one of the many hyper-niche basic cable stations that cropped up in the early 1980s capitalizing on the new booming cable and satellite television market. The idea was for it to be a kind of MTV for country music, playing mostly music videos, prerecorded concerts and the like, with the occasional country music-themed talk show. What set it apart from its competitor CMT, which launched the same year and was almost exactly the same thing, was that it had the rights to use the Grand Ole Opry and its associated properties, one of the oldest and most respected establishments in country music.

Eventually, TNN went the way of all hyper-niche cable channels and suffered massive, massive network decay in an attempt to court an increasingly shrinking audience. In 2000, TNN rebranded itself as “The National Network” and made overtures to the generation of viewers who had grown up in the 1980s. It got the rights to the WWE and started airing reruns of popular 1980s syndicated and network TV shows, like WKRP in Cincinati, The Wonder Years and Diff’rent Strokes. The network eventually went so far down this road that the entire connection to country music was lost, and it turned into “Spike TV: The Network for MEN”, about which the less said the better. Network decay 101 notwithstanding, one of the shows TNN picked up as part of its somewhat ham-fisted grab for relevance was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although looking back I bristle at TNN’s executives seeing it as an archetypical “male-oriented” show for “young men ages 18-25”, the fact remains this was Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s return to television, and it wouldn’t be an understatement to call this one of the most important moments of my life, perhaps rivaled only by my first discovery of the show all those many years ago.

I don’t think there’s been a single work of fiction that’s had as long-lasting and profound an influence on me as Star Trek: The Next Generation. Why, I’m not sure I could tell you. I could point to the obvious, like the philosophical utopianism or the absolutely unparalleled cast who elevate a bunch of recycled one-note stock characters to some of the most iconic and unforgettable pop culture characters in recent history. I could once again mention LeVar Burton. Then there’s the more esoteric, like the sense of cosmic wonder I frequently attribute to it, or how the show’s art design and look-and-feel left an indelible impression on my psyche and that I have trouble even today properly articulating. It was a common shared reference point for myself as well as many others: My parents watched it, my grandparents watched it and everyone else I knew watched it too.…

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