Star Trek: The Next Generation season 1 review

[TMC]

https://mutantreviewersmovies.com/20...ason-1-review/

When recommending Star Trek: The Next Generation to friends, the usual approach is to urge them to skip past seasons 1 and 2 to go right to the point where the show hit its stride: Season 3. This is what I used to say all the time, but now? Now I’m not so sure.

I’ve been toying around with an ambitious project of watching and reviewing every season of Star Trek, starting with the two series (TOS and TNG) that defined my childhood. And so when I subjected myself to the first season of The Next Generation, it was with the heavy sigh of someone who must suffer before being rewarded.

Except that it wasn’t as painful as I anticipated. In fact, Season 1 is downright fascinating and even entertaining for all of its well-known flaws. But before we get into why I think this is so, I do want to be fair and acknowledge that there are so many problems with Season 1 that you can’t just hand-wave away. For starters, the cast and writers are still finding their footing, as is the tone of the show. The Next Generation’s debut was the first live-action Star Trek series since the ’60s, and it was difficult to bring that to the era of 1987 without some significant adjustments. Gene Roddenberry wouldn’t let them create interpersonal conflict, decades-old scripts were dusted off to be used here, and every character is still ill-defined and finding their footing with their respective actor.

And yes, it is absolutely silly (and so very ’80s) to have a therapist be a member of the bridge crew, not to mention that the much-hated character of Wesley Crusher still offends the viewing senses today with his smirking “I know better than everyone else because I’m a Gene Roddenberry surrogate.” Picard is way too grumpy, Tasha and Worf basically the same interchangeable person, Crusher shoved to the background, Data is trying too hard to be quirky, and they have something like sixteen chief engineers over the course of these episodes.

Story-wise, there are far more bombs than hits. It’s a very uneven season of television with only a few episodes that you can hold up as TNG’s better outings, and a couple that are downright racist or sexist. In fact, you could easily get away with watching the pilot and then going right past the rest of the season without missing too much in terms of character or plot development.

And yet. And yet you WOULD be missing out, because TNG Season 1 offers a bonanza to the fan. We may like to dunk on it, but it’s always a fond, shared-joke kind of dunking rather than an acerbic, we-all-hated-this-piece-of-trash rant.