Review - Star Trek The Next Generation

Just finished seeing all episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) on Netflix. Here are my thoughts:

This series winds up surpassing the original series (TOS) in most respects. Disregard the fact that Captain Picard is less of a cowboy than Captain Kirk. The characters of TNG are more believable, despite the fact that more of the characters are non-human.

Recurring villains and antagonists include Q, Cardassians, Romulans, and Ferengi, among others. Overall, I found the antagonists to be acceptable. Situations were often the key as opposed to making the antagonist the main focus. TNG featured a lot more of the Klingons than I ever saw in syndication.

I had seen most of the episodes either when they were first released (Seasons 1 and 2), or later during syndication. Not a lot of Season 7 episodes appeared in syndication. However, Season 6 seemed to be a favorite.

A lot of Season 1 seemed to revolve around setting Picard up as being old and weak... as if he was about to retire, get killed off, or promoted. It had the definite feeling that Riker was being groomed to take over the Captain's chair. Seems that the writers made a deliberate move away from that in Season 2, and by Season 3, that notion was all but gone.

Season 1 also featured a revolving cast in the engineering department. It was a definite upgrade to move Geordi LaForge into that role. Still would have liked to have seen him make Commander in the series. Same for Data (although I understand the difficulty in moving Data to the rank of Commander while Riker was still on the ship).

One of my personal favorites was the episode where Riker and Data are assigned their own ships to help the Federation meet a challenge (yes, I know what happens - no, I'm not giving the plot away). The interplay of personal reactions of human crewmembers reporting to an android were neat. 

I liked Voyager better overall than I did TNG. That said, TNG is the standard by which modern Sci-Fi programming is measured. That said, I never had any idea that there were about as many Voyager episodes as there were TNG episodes.

Overall, I'd give it an "A."
Two thumbs up.
4.5 / 5 stars.


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