TNG Season 1 vs Season 7 Deathmatch Tournament!

Star Trek: The Next Generation ran for seven seasons, and it’s often said by the fans that the show didn’t really hit its stride until season three, maybe even four (mileage varies). Some fans (including myself) are more generous and count season two as its first decent-to-good season, including as it does The Measure Of A Man and Q Who, both classics, as well as a bunch of enjoyable episodes like Elementary Dear Data and A Matter Of Honor. Basically, it’s the season where Riker gets a beard, and it’s an immense improvement over season one, which is universally regarded as terrible.

 

(I’m also amazed by the high regard for a lot of episodes that I find mostly just pretty-good-not-great, namely Darmok, The Inner Light and Tapestry. I mean, I enjoy them, but people rave about those episodes and how deeply moving they are, and I just don’t have the same reaction. Okay, now you know my terrible secret; you can shoot me now.)

When I started hanging out a lot on the internet (and I’ve had a LOT of time in hospital this last year to browse the old comments pages of the AV Club and Jammer’s Reviews) I was interested to find that season seven seems to be held in pretty poor regard too. Surprised because, I guess, I hadn’t realised other people felt that way. Trek in all its incarnations has always been a rollercoaster for quality control, amazing one week, garbage the next, and that’s understandable. Twenty-six episodes a year is a lot. Finding twenty-six stories a year worth telling would be hard enough, but telling them well on a TV budget would be miraculous. British TV has largely avoided that kind of punishing schedule, and we still manage to make an awful lot of dreck.

Season one of TNG was based on a 20-year-old predecessor – it’s no wonder that a lot of it seemed dated even at the time. It had to find its feet and establish its own identity. Watching it now, it seems like a totally different series altogether compared to what followed.

 

By season seven, they’d established a base level of quality – an understanding of the characters, story construction, what worked and what didn’t – so a terrible episode is terrible for different reasons. Season one is bad because they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and were trying to replicate the original series' chemistry. Season seven just seems tired. But is it really worse than season one? Does the fact that the series had reached a certain level of quality just make season seven seem worse by comparison?

 

So, because I’m bored in lockdown and need to keep my brain active rather than spend every waking minute in a sobbing heap, here’s a rundown of season one versus season seven, episode by episode, with entirely biased and selective reporting based on what’s currently pissing me off most about any given instalment of a TV show that ended over 25 years ago. Enjoy!

 

Encounter At Farpoint vs Descent Part 2

 

Encounter At Farpoint is actually one of the better episodes of season one, believe it or not.

 

It introduces Q, one of the series’ strongest and most entertaining adversaries, and “the mystery of Farpoint Station” is pretty straightforward and unmuddled. It’s also uninspired and obvious, but as a vehicle for introducing the characters, it serves its purpose.

 

There’s a lot of the weird, judgmental moralising that characterised the first season. Apparently, sometime between the original series and the birth of TNG, Gene Roddenberry decided that Trek would be more than just “Horatio Hornblower in space”; its vision of a progressive future couldn’t be limited to racial diversity and women on the bridge, no, now we have a vision of humanity that has evolved. Humans in the 24^th century are free from conflict, don’t need money, they’re just plain better than their 20^th century predecessors, and they like to tell us so at every opportunity. A weird choice for a TV show, to have its characters denigrate the audience on a weekly basis. So here we have Q decrying humanity as a savage, barbaric child race, and Picard angrily denying it before adding the caveat that yes, “we still were when we wore costumes like that” – that being an American army uniform from the mid-twentieth century. The villain insults the heroes, and the heroes insult, um, us. Whose side are we supposed to be on again?

 

The “meet the band” moments are trotted out competently enough, though most of the regular characters seem a little bit off. This is obviously perfectly natural so early on in the show, but the idea that someone sat down and conceptualised these characters in this way intentionally is quite bizarre, since none of them are particularly compelling or pleasant. When they do register, they’re smug and weirdly distant. Who thought that these characters would be worth spending time with?

 

Data smiles and is creepy, and tells Riker he knows he’s superior in many ways but “would gladly give it all up to be human”, which is a really weird character beat for an android that’s supposed to be incapable of emotion – right from the start of the series, Data is expressing a desire for something that is illogical and physically impossible. (I’ve read theories that maybe Data was initially intended to be something more than an android, something more like the replicants from Blade Runner, which would certainly explain how he manages to get intoxicated in the next episode. Some fans really are very generous in the extent to which they will go to excuse the inconsistency of the TV shows they love.)

 

Troi and Riker’s prior relationship is famously ripped off from the Decker/Ilia relationship of Phase II and The Motion Picture, and undercuts what little authority Troi might ever have had – the moment where the away team splits up and she asks to go with Riker, and he rebuffs her, is painful. Are they high-schoolers or something? Troi gets so many scenes where she has nothing to do except stagger and sob and cry “pain…such pain” or variations thereon. Is this better or worse than the episodes in which she has nothing to do at all, or is absent altogether? Considering the number of times Troi was psychically victimised through the series, it really seems sometimes as if they invented her character just because they liked seeing a beautiful woman cry.

 

Yar practically hyperventilates in Q’s courtroom trying to defend the good name of the Federation – props to Denise Crosby for trying to wring some feeling out of the terrible dialogue, but the character comes across, not for the last time, as emotionally unstable. Wesley seems to be written and directed about five years younger than the character’s actual age, grinning winsomely and almost pathetically eager to please. (No criticism intended here of Wil Wheaton, who was fighting a losing battle from day one.)

 

Picard’s grouchiness would not survive the first season, thank goodness. The weird initiation ritual where he challenges Riker to reconnect the saucer to the drive section is, I imagine, supposed to prove something about Picard, that he challenges his crew, or about Riker, that he’s just really really awesome, but it just makes the captain seem like a timewasting dickhead. Yeah, an omnipotent superbeing has dropped by to kick you back to your home planet and keep you there, but feel free to dick around putting the ship back together manually, no rush. Q even calls the Captain out on it, and he has a point. (Also, like Saavik in Wrath Of Khan, it’s presented as a massive risk to let Riker oversee the hugely difficult reconnection of the ship, but in reality it’s not as if either of them is actually driving.)

 

The episode ends with the mystery solved (touchy-feely space squids ahoy) and Q comments that it was too easy a puzzle. He’s not wrong, but on the whole, Farpoint is one of the better episodes of the first season. At least it tried. It aimed for the Original Series’ sweet spot – humanity striving to be better, to understand and communicate with the unknown in a universe of wonders. It still sucked in a lot of ways, but it was trying its best.

 

Skip ahead to season seven, and the opening episode really feels like they stopped trying altogether. The Descent two-parter just seems muddled to me, and lazy. We need a cliffhanger. What about the Borg? That worked before. Only we don’t want to just repeat ourselves, so let’s bring back the Borg AND Lore!

 

Okay, there’s some mileage there; I don’t dislike the idea of Data’s evil brother finding the helpless Borg drones and turning them into his private army. I just don’t get where this “destroy the Federation” thing comes from. Lore’s a dick, but he’s never been bent on galactic domination before. It comes out of nowhere as a too-obviously-villainous motivation with no basis in character. Siccing the Crystalline Entity on the Enterprise to save his own skin, or stealing Data’s emotion chip, or even assaulting Dr Soong and leaving him to die – those are character-based. They established Lore as a self-serving, egotistical, jealous, petulant sociopath who didn’t care in the slightest for anyone except himself, and would sacrifice anyone else if it meant his own preservation. So how do we get from that to Descent? Not all madmen want to conquer the universe. Not all of them have to want to conquer the universe in order to make good drama. Destroying the Federation just seems like too much effort for Lore.

 

I also like the idea of bringing back Hugh – I loved Hugh! - and actually addressing the monumental fuck-up made by the crew in I, Borg. I especially enjoyed the scene in part one where Admiral Necheyev (whom I also love) tears Picard a new hole for his failure to rid the Federation of a “mortal enemy”. TNG didn’t often get the chance to do anything close to a serialised storyline, and usually the decisions made one week never come back to haunt the crew, so this was refreshing. If the two-parter had focused exclusively on Hugh, it could have been amazing and complex. Maybe Hugh could have represented a faction of newly-individuated Borg who wanted to live peacefully, versus a faction that was really, really pissed off at Starfleet for destroying their link to the collective.

 

(Although I never really bought the idea that sending Hugh back with his “newfound sense of individuality” would be so damaging to the collective anyway. Surely every newly assimilated individual – including Picard himself – arrived in the collective with a sense of individuality? Then again, maybe the Borg have a kind of firewall to prevent it from infecting the collective before the assimillee is fully integrated, a firewall that wasn’t in place in Hugh’s instance. Hey, I just stitched up my own plothole! That was fun. Every once in a while, declare peace.)

 

The episode also struggles to convince because Data’s “emotional addiction” turns him into an easily-manipulated monster, willing to torture Geordi to death at Lore’s command. Just because his ethical subroutine is disengaged, he’s willing to torture someone? His best friend? That just seems like such a stretch. Is a sense of ethics such a simple, compartmentalised thing? Even for Data? Turning off one subroutine alters his whole personality so completely?

 

I once had a strange, short debate with someone online who claimed to be a Christian, who said that I – as an atheist – had no morality, that without the Bible there could be no morality. His view, as he expressed it, was that the word of God was the only thing stopping him from behaving amorally. “Without the Bible, what’s stopping us from doing whatever we like?” This was a view that baffled me – was he really chomping at the bit to go out and rape, rob and murder everyone in sight, if only the Bible would allow it? That’s what the Data storyline puts me in mind of. Turn off Data’s ethical subroutine and he instantly becomes the android Jeffrey Dahmer? Do considerations of ethics and morality and the infliction of pain exist as an easily-isolated subroutine in Data, and literally nowhere else in his programming? 

 

In fact, as I recall, it’s pretty unclear exactly what’s going on with Data in this two-parter – does he ever feel a genuine emotion, or is it all the work of Lore? Is he amplifying or manipulating real emotions that Data has developed, or is he just transmitting them to him?

 

I mean, I also don’t care, so I’m not going to waste much time on it – the emotion subplot is clearly a means to an end, and the end is boring. Lore uses emotion to manipulate Data to betray the Federation which, as I mentioned, is apparently Lore’s new raison d’etre. It’s like a pick-and-mix of plot elements that never coheres into anything of interest. We have a two-part episode in which Data finally feels, or seems to feel, emotion, which was basically his lifelong quest, and this profound event is robbed of any significance, used here just as the motor for a bunch of boring action scenes. (Better than the way it’s used in Generations, I guess.)

 

WINNER: Encounter At Farpoint.

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