Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) Review
6-7/10
Seven seasons in first-run syndication, no network to answer to, and a production that spent two years failing before it worked out what it was. The most commercially successful Star Trek ever made and the one with the widest gap between its best and worst work.
The 6 to 7 is the real band. Individual episodes here would rate a 10 and others would rate a zero, and an average across a hundred and seventy-six hours describes nothing anybody is going to watch.
My reaction to this show splits right down the middle.
At its best I’d put it against anything on television, and at its worst it bores me into the floor. Most of that frustration traces back to the captain. Picard is a philosopher and a diplomat who happens to wear a uniform. That’s an interesting character and a structural liability for a series that needs somebody to give an order.
What the show has instead of a decisive lead is an idea rate. When it puts real stakes under a philosophical question it’s excellent, and when it’s a bottle episode with a holodeck malfunction it’s unwatchable, and the schedule delivered both every year.
The First Two Seasons Are Mostly Unwatchable
Season one is bad in a way that’s hard to convey to anybody who started later. The dialogue is stilted, the show writes the crew as uniformly reasonable people who agree with each other, and the plots resolve because somebody explains something.
The two-part pilot is the clearest evidence. Encounter at Farpoint is vile, is visibly assembled out of parts, and has a courtroom framing device bolted onto a first contact story that’s nothing to do with it. It was enough to start a series and that’s the most anybody can say for it. Code of Honor is the floor of the entire franchise, never mind this season. An all-Black planet played as pulp-novel Africa, with a chieftain who abducts Tasha Yar to marry her, and the episode is the one everybody involved still apologizes for. The production history explains it without excusing it. Katharyn Powers wrote the Ligonians as reptilian samurai, and the African theme and all-Black casting were director Russ Mayberry’s decisions. Roddenberry fired him partway through filming and first assistant director Les Landau finished the episode. Jonathan Frakes has called it a racist piece of expletive, Brent Spiner called it just a racist episode, and Frakes has said it should be pulled from streaming. Spiner’s other observation is the useful one: it was fortuitous they did their worst that early and never got quite that bad again.
Season two is better and circumstances crippled it. The 1988 Writers Guild strike cut it to twenty-two episodes and produced Shades of Gray, a clip show assembled from existing footage to save money. That’s the cheapest hour of television the franchise has. Gates McFadden was also let go after season one and replaced by Diana Muldaur’s Pulaski for the year, which is a personnel decision the show reversed in season three, and the reversal is part of a larger pattern of the production correcting itself late.
A rule that forbids conflict among your principals will destroy your first season. Roddenberry’s instruction that the crew shouldn’t have interpersonal disagreements removed the engine every ensemble runs on. The writers were left with external problems only. That’s why the early episodes resolve through explanation instead of through anybody wanting something. An early catastrophe is survivable and a late one isn’t. Doing your worst work in episode four means almost nobody’s first exposure is that hour. When a single crew decision turns a mediocre script into an indefensible one, that’s a case for knowing who’s making choices below the writing. The script here wasn’t the problem.
Season One Only Works in Its Last Four Hours
The three watchable episodes of the first season are numbers twenty-three, twenty-five and twenty-six. That’s a fact about the season worth stating plainly. Skin of Evil is the first. A creature of pure malevolence on a barren moon kills Tasha Yar in the first act, casually, for no reason it’ll explain, and the show discovers what a death without meaning does to a crew that’s been written as unflappable.
That killing happened because Denise Crosby asked out of her contract. That’s the kind of production accident that improves a series. A regular removed without warning is the first real consequence the show ever carried. Conspiracy is the second and it’s the strangest hour of the seven seasons. Picard discovers that neural parasites have infiltrated the upper levels of Starfleet Command, the people giving him orders aren’t the people he thinks, and the episode ends with a head exploding on screen.
Nothing about that tone was ever repeated, and I wish it had been. A Starfleet secretly captured from the inside is the only time the organization frightens me, and that exploding head is the most gleeful thing this cautious show ever put on screen. The franchise abandoned the premise immediately, and I think that was a real mistake.
The Neutral Zone is the third and it carries two plots. The Enterprise recovers a derelict with three cryogenically frozen twentieth-century humans, and at the same time investigates Federation outposts along the Romulan border that have been scooped off the surface entirely.
The Romulans appear for the first time in the series and both sides deny doing it. The show left that unexplained and retroactively assigned it to the Borg. That means the franchise introduced its best antagonist as an absence in a season-one finale.
Picard Is a Command Problem
He was a terrible captain and I wouldn’t want to serve under him, and the case is a command assessment instead of a matter of taste. Picard is excellent at the things a diplomat does. First contact, a negotiation, a hearing, an argument about principle, and in any episode where the problem is a conversation he’s the best lead the franchise has had.
When something goes wrong he’s frequently paralyzed. He deliberates past the point of usefulness, is moralistic to the point of inaction, and the show repeatedly has Riker run the ship while the captain decides how he feels about it. The structural cost is that somebody else has to supply the decisions. Riker exists to be the officer who acts. That makes him the functional captain in a large number of episodes and leaves him with nothing of his own to want.
Patrick Stewart isn’t the problem and is in fact the reason the ceiling is as high as it is. The performance is disciplined, the voice does an enormous amount of work, and in The Inner Light and Chain of Command he’s doing better work than the series deserved.
The comparison with Kirk is the one I’d draw. Kirk was reckless and often wrong and you never once wondered whether he’d act. That’s worth more to an hour of television than being right. The show never treats the hesitation as a flaw. Picard’s caution is presented as wisdom in almost every episode, and a series willing to say that his deliberation cost somebody something would have been a considerably better series.
A protagonist who deliberates generates discussion and one who acts generates plot. You can build a series on the first only if the deliberation has a price the reader can see. This show charges nothing for it. Picard hesitates, the situation resolves anyway, and the hesitation is framed as judgment.
If a secondary character has to supply your protagonist’s decisions, you have two incomplete people instead of one complete one. Riker is the clearest case of it in television. Give the trait its cost. A cautious lead whose caution loses something once becomes a character instead of a position.
The Crew
Data is the character the show is remembered for and he began as a straight replacement for Spock with considerably thinner writing.
The early version is a walking question about humanity that everybody answers for him. What makes the later material work is that the show stopped asking the question and gave him relationships. That’s the correct instinct arrived at three seasons late. The family episodes are the good ones. Brothers puts him with Lore and their creator Soong in the same room, Descent has Lore leading a Borg faction, and The Offspring gives him a daughter he builds and loses in forty-two minutes.
Troi is the character with no function. A counsellor on a bridge whose ability is to announce that somebody is feeling something, which either tells the crew what they can already see or removes the tension from a scene that needed it. Marina Sirtis is fine and the part isn’t there.
Q works twice and then becomes furniture. The first appearances are a real threat with a real argument, and by the later seasons he’s a plot device who arrives to start an episode and leaves when it needs to end.
Guinan is a better idea than the show usually deserved. A bartender with no rank who can tell the captain he’s wrong, an unexplained history, and a sense of time that the series used properly exactly once in Yesterday’s Enterprise. Worf is the character who got the most out of being underused here, and everything good about him happened later on Deep Space Nine. It’s covered separately on this site.
Yesterday’s Enterprise Is What It Should Have Been
This is the best episode of the series by a distance and it’s leagues above everything around it.
A temporal rift opens and the Enterprise-C comes through it, twenty-two years out of its own time, having fled a battle instead of finishing it. The bridge changes around the crew mid-shot and nobody notices, because in this timeline nothing has changed.
The rift produced a Federation that’s been at war with the Klingon Empire for decades and is losing. The ship is a warship, the crew are soldiers, there are no families aboard, and Tasha Yar is alive and serving as a tactical officer.
The reason is the Enterprise-C. It was destroyed defending a Klingon outpost at Narendra III, and that sacrifice made the peace possible, and because it fled through the rift instead the peace never happened.
So the decision at the end is to send a ship and its crew back through to die, knowingly, to restore a timeline none of them will remember. Yar volunteers to go with them. That’s the show paying off a death from two seasons earlier.
Everything the series usually refuses to do is in this hour. Consequence, a crew with something to lose, a captain who makes a decision that costs lives, and a resolution nobody gets credit for because the universe it saves has no record of it.
That’s the way the whole show should have been made. When the Enterprise-C turns back toward its death, I’m completely invested, and that hour is the reason the top of my rating reaches as high as it does. It used the same cast and the same sets as the holodeck filler, and that tells me the rest of the series chose to be smaller.
An alternate timeline is worth doing only if it makes the familiar version legible. This one shows what the crew are when the peace they take for granted never happened, and the ordinary timeline reads differently afterward. The cheap version is a costume change. This one changes what the characters are for.
A sacrifice nobody will remember is the strongest kind. There’s no credit available, no monument, and no version of events in which anybody thanks them.
Pay off an old loss when you can. Bringing Yar back to die on purpose repairs a death that had been arbitrary, two seasons after the fact.
The Essential Episodes
A hundred and seventy-six hours is too many to recommend, so here’s the list that justifies the ceiling.
Yesterday’s Enterprise first, then The Best of Both Worlds, the two-part Borg story that closes season three and opens season four. The Borg take Picard, convert him into Locutus and destroy the fleet at Wolf 359, and the cliffhanger ran through a summer in which the audience didn’t know whether Stewart was returning.
The Inner Light is the other one people name first. Picard lives an entire second life in forty minutes, has a family, learns an instrument, grows old, and wakes up on his bridge twenty-five minutes later having lost all of it.
Chain of Command is the two-parter where he’s captured and tortured by a Cardassian, and it’s the most uncomfortable thing the series made. Four lights, and a final admission that he was close to breaking.
Anything with the Romulans is worth watching. That’s a pattern instead of a coincidence. The Defector, Unification, Face of the Enemy and The Pegasus all work, because a Romulan scene is a negotiation with somebody who has a reason to lie.
Tapestry, Darmok, The Measure of a Man, Cause and Effect, Relics, All Good Things and Lower Decks round it out. That’s about fifteen hours out of a hundred and seventy-six. That’s the ratio the 6 to 7 is describing.
The floor beyond Code of Honor is deep. Shades of Gray, The Naked Now, Justice, Angel One, Sub Rosa and a considerable quantity of holodeck malfunctions, most of which exist because twenty-six episodes a year is more than any writing staff can fill.
What Changed in Season Three
The show becomes good abruptly instead of gradually, and the cause is documented. Michael Piller arrived as head writer for season three. Maurice Hurley left, Roddenberry’s day-to-day involvement reduced as his health declined, and the staff was considerably rebuilt.
The single biggest change was permission to write conflict. Once the crew could disagree with each other and with Starfleet, the episodes had an engine, and almost everything on the essentials list is from season three onward. Piller also opened the show to unsolicited scripts. That’s close to unheard of in television. The spec submission program is where Ronald D. Moore and Rene Echevarria came from, and both went on to run large parts of the franchise.
That’s the most useful fact in this review for anybody writing. A staff that reads the slush pile found two of the best television writers of the following twenty years in it.
The seven-season shape is therefore two bad years, four good ones and a final season that’s uneven with a superb ending. All Good Things closes it properly. That’s rarer than it should be. It never fixed the thing at the center. A captain who won’t act, a counsellor with no function, and a schedule of twenty-six hours a year that guaranteed filler alongside the best work anybody was doing on television.
Removing a rule can transform a work faster than adding anything. The conflict prohibition went and the show became good within a season, with the same cast and the same sets. Look for the constraint you’ve accepted as a premise. It’s frequently the thing holding the work down.
Read the unsolicited submissions. This production found Ronald D. Moore and Rene Echevarria in the slush pile, and almost nobody in any medium does this.
Twenty-six episodes a year guarantees filler. Volume and consistency are in direct tension and no staff has ever beaten that arithmetic.
Should you watch Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Selectively, and start with Yesterday’s Enterprise. I land on a 6 to 7 because I can’t average an episode I’d give a 10 with one I’d give a zero, and this show has plenty of both. The ceiling is as high as anything on television in its era. The floor holds Code of Honor, a first season with three watchable hours out of twenty-six, and a captain still deliberating while Riker runs the ship. Watch the fifteen hours on my list and skip the holodeck.
