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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