I haven't watched this since it came out in '87. Age and a little maturity has shown me how bad this show is. The dialogue is extremely cheesy and most of the acting is atrocious. If I recall, it gets much better. But initially, it's a mess.
shareGo straight to Season 3 then, it gets better from there.
But yes, the show still has issues throughout its run, namely annoying side characters, as I've mentioned elsewhere on this board.
I'd agree, but I would recommend anyone interested to watch two season 2 episodes: "The Measure of a Man," which is right up there with the very best of the whole franchise, and "Q Who" which introduced the Borg, and is just a good episode in its own right. The rest of season 2 is nothing special, and I can't think of a single season 1 episode I like, including the pilot.
The show did finally get good in season 3, and not coincidentally, this was largely because increasingly poor health forced Gene Roddenberry to hand over creative control after season 2. We owe that we have Star Trek to him, but if you ask me, by the eighties, he was a spent force, creatively speaking. Part of the problem may have been age, but as I've said elsewhere, I also genuinely think most of the problem was that he had spent the seventies and eighties going to Star Trek conventions, and listening to so many fans tell him what a creative visionary he was that he started to believe it. He imagined this better future he was dreaming of was one where human beings have "moved beyond" interpersonal conflict, and he refused to allow any between the crew of the Enterprise, which really put the writers of the show in a creative straightjacket.
Darren, You've said a LOT of what some fellow fans and I have said before. I agree.
Roddenberry's whole vision of humanity becoming wonderful and people treating each other so well because we now had enough STUFF was bas-ackwards in the extreme.
The crew would go on and on about, since Earth had no hunger, disease or poverty, everyone got along like peas in a pod and there was NO need for war or aggrssion. Since when do humans need a reason to be aggressive? LOL It's part of human nature and Roddenberry's vision of a Pollyanna galaxy was totally at odds with the way people behave in the real world, no matter how rich they are in material goods.
Khan got it right in Space Seed when he told Kirk how sad he was to see the future. He told Kirk that he was inferior. "Oh there has been technological advancement. But how little man himself has changed."
Ironic words coming from Khan though. He was a superior physical specimen but his nature was just as bad any human.
I think Roddenberry was one of those many people who believe in the philosophy espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said that "man is born free but everywhere is in chains.” In other words, all the ills in the world arise from unjust social institutions. Or in still other words: the human mind is a blank slate, and if only we imprinted the right social conditioning on it, man would be intrinsically better. Mankind, in short, is perfectible.
Roddenberry certainly seems to have subscribed to this view, but it's simply not so. What we call human nature, and what Rousseaueans deny even exists is a set of behaviors and instincts hardwired into us by millions of years of natural selection. Yet ideologues aplenty since since Rousseau have co-opted this notion that we can be perfected. Sadly, they end up carrying out genocide after genocide trying to force an ideal on creatures inherently incapable of attaining it.
Indeed, I think the influence of Rousseau has been so pernicious, that I agree with the quip that if I were in a room with Lenin, Stalin, and Rousseau, and someone gave me a gun with two bullets in it, I'd shoot Rousseau twice.
That's very interesting. I remember hearing something about Rousseau and his philosophy. But yes, he's got it wrong. I subscribe to the view (I got it at church) that man has an essentially sinful nature and no amount of things or money will make him behave better...if he doesn't want to!
TNG kept harping on Earth as a Paradise with plenty of stuff to go around so no one had any material needs. As if that makes people behave better! Ha!
I used to liken the TNG version of Earth to people from the middle ages (or earlier) being transported to the 20th century by time machine. Today we have a Paradise compared to the villages the peasants inhabited
They would marvel at indoor plumbing so you wouldn't have to haul water from a stream a mile away, heated homes so you wouldn't freeze in the winter, vast amounts of available food all year round so you wouldn't starve, amazing medical care and entertainment at the tips of your fingers, etc., etc.
And then they'd look around and wonder why all these people who live in a Paradise are STILL fighting and killing each other!!
Human nature doesn't change just because you have money. How else would you explain politicians? LOL
Nog to Jake/// "if you don't need money, then you don't need my money."
shareI remember being crushingly disappointed with the first season, and watching only to see Patrick Stewart, and out of a weird sense of fandom duty. And a vague hope that it'd get better.
Which was finally rewarded when the episode with the binads came on, that was the first time I perked up and said "Hey, that was actually GOOD! Maybe the series will end up worth watching after all!".
That one, "Datalore," "Heart of Glory" and "Conspiracy" gave hope that the series could develop into something as good or better than the Original Series. Same thing with "The Schizoid Man," "A Matter of Honor," "The Emissary" and the mind-blowing "Q Who" in the second season.
shareI agree. The whole season was a disappointment. And as a longtime Star Trek fan, imagine how disappointed I was on first viewing, since the first episode I was able to catch was "The Naked Now." People not around then may not remember, but a lot of people back in 1987 were extremely dubious about TNG. This was before Star Trek had become this huge franchise. Up to then, it had only been the original series and its subsequent movies, and the now little remembered animated series (on screen at any rate). To a lot of us, TNG wasn't real Star Trek. And after I saw that very first episode I ever watched, I remember shaking my head and saying "this is the best they can do? A tired retread of "The Naked Time."
The show finally got good in season 3, but I was honestly surprised it lasted that long, given how bad I genuinely thought seasons 1 and 2 were.
I never watched the original run, but I did catch many episodes in syndication on occasion.
When COVID quarantines hit last year, I started watching this on Netflix. I didn't get through the second season before giving up and moving on to other more interesting things.
The "Season One Sucks" myth. Actually, Season One is quite good.
shareNo, season one really does suck. There isn't a single episode in it I actually liked. Season two only had two decent episodes. The rest of it sucked too.
shareSucks that you missed out on the enjoyment. Oh well, your loss.
shareI didn't "miss out" on anything. I saw the same episodes you did. I just didn't like them. They weren't to my taste. I thought them dull, unimaginative, and lackluster. I was away at college when the series premiered, and so I missed the pilot. The first episode of TNG I ever saw was "The Naked Now." After watching it, I saw a pale imitation of the original series, poorly copycatting the TOS episode "The Naked Time." I didn't find any of the rest of season one any better. Season two did give us "The Measure of a Man" which was one of the few times early TNG managed to be as imaginative and thought-provoking as TOS, and "Q Who" which was a genuinely tense, gripping episode that introduced a terrifying new enemy. The rest of season two was, like season one, unmemorable.
The problem was that Roddenberry creatively hamstrung his writers by decreeing that they avoid any interpersonal conflict between the crew, or indeed most human characters on the show, because homo sapiens was supposed to have "moved past" that sort of thing -- which is nonsense of course.
Thankfully, TNG did find its feet in season 3, and became a great show in its own right. But sorry, season 1 and 2 just aren't that good.
I'm loving it. And I used to hate it. Because of that, I've only ever seen it twice before. So this is all pretty fresh to me now. It's super cheesy and stiff, but there's an undeniable charm to it. And there's some very scifi driven episodes. It's admirably ambitious, even if a lot of it falls flat.
share
I was there when NextGen was first aired, and everybody I knew loved it.
Those who come into NextGen through re-runs will notice the show got better as it went along, but those of us who couldn't wait for the first episode were not disappointed. I think the first season suffers by comparison to the excellent later years.
Although I didn't watch the original run, I do remember that it was generally well received.
It had the benefit that there was no other Star Trek content at the time and it was a fresh new perspective. When you add the production value of TNG as compared to the original series being leaps and bounds better and it made for really compelling TV.
Take the next layer that there were no streaming services and not much alternative content to broadcast and cable networks and it all lined up for a successful entry into the franchise.
I agree with this assessment. I also started watching TNG when it first aired and really enjoyed it, and I also recognize as pretty much all fans nowadays do that season 3 through 7 were vastly superior to 1 and 2. The first two seasons were definitely weaker in comparison, but I think a lot of people forget the context of what sci-fi on TV in the 1980s was like back then.
Prior to TNG, the two most prominent sci-fi shows in the previous ten years were Battlestar Galactica and V. Seasons 1 and 2 of TNG were far superior to both those shows, and those were the two that were considered relatively successful even though they were both canceled after one season! TNG seasons 1 and 2 were literally the pinnacle of sci-fi television in the 80s.
To me, one of the most endearing aspects of TNG is that you get to see it go from charming, occasionally very cheesy 1980s sci-fi in the first two seasons to some of the most dramatically powerful and thought-provoking sci-fi ever made in the 90s for its last five seasons. It's a fascinating evolution, and it just makes me love the series that much more.
To me, one of the most endearing aspects of TNG is that you get to see it go from charming, occasionally very cheesy 1980s sci-fi in the first two seasons to some of the most dramatically powerful and thought-provoking sci-fi ever made in the 90s for its last five seasons.
The only episode of the first season I really liked was Symbiosis.
shareAgreed, that was a great episode. The Enterprise crew are absolutely confused by one society's absolute dependence on another society's product, at a price, until they learn about narcotics. I particularly loved Yar's and Wesley's exchange over the concept.
I liked a few from season 1. The Big Goodbye was interesting as it introduced the Holodeck and it was a decent story. There were others like the Binars, the one with the humans in medical freeze, the powerful aliens who kidnap the Enterprise children, etc. and of course Symbiosis was a good one.
But it definitely hit it's stride in season 3 and past.