TNG S01E19 Coming of Age (
). Yay, it’s a Wesley episode. Nice of them to pair him with one of the worst young actors I’ve ever seen on American television to make him look good. Acting Ensign Crusher doesn’t have a com badge and so has to respond to his mom’s shipwide call by touching a panel on the wall, like Kirk and Spock. Admiral Gregory Quinn sports yet another bizarre admiral’s uniform, which always look to me like swatches of black and red material and gold trim stitched together in the dark. He and sidekick Remmick get introduced to Tasha Yar, but she doesn’t get a line in response, natch. Remmick spends his time onboard pointing out plot holes in previous episodes to every member of the regular cast (except Tasha Yar, natch). Remmick would be excellent at #trekaday. He’s such an obvious bad guy it’s almost comical. Debut of the Riker Maneuvre, and other seeds are sown here for a future arc which will get killed off during the turmoil of Season 2, so this all feels like bits and pieces of a bigger story, rather than a coherent hour of television in its own right. There’s a nice Worf scene on the Holodeck though. Speaking of which…
TNG S01E20 Heart of Glory (
). RIKER: I’ll prepare an away team. PICARD: Lt Yar, you stay at your post. YAR: Aye sir. And fuck you. TNG’s delve into Klingon mythology starts here, which will persuade Michael Dorn to stick around and give rise to many fan-favorite episodes. I’m not so interested in Klingons and generally find their posturing and honour codes furiously uninteresting, but that’s on me. Arguably, it’s this episode, more than any other in this season (save the pilot), which points the way forward for the show. That said, I do have further quibbles besides my personal lack of interest in the Klingons. The 24th century hasn’t come up with helmet cams yet. As soon as you recognise this, it’s infuriating that the captain has to keep asking the away team what they can see. Great emphasis is placed on the fact that Geordi can detect androids at a glance. This useful trait is never referred to again in any subsequent episode or movie (in a later episode he reveals he can detect liars too, but this also never comes up again). Apparently the Klingon here is gibberish as the script was thrown together in two days and there wasn’t time to get it translated by Marc Okrand who had developed the official Klingon language during production of Star Trek III. Pacing issues here too, it takes forever to find the Klingon survivors on the wrecked freighter and start the actual plot.
TNG S01E21 The Arsenal of Freedom (
). As well as doing much to establish the Picard/Crusher will-they-won’t they, there’s another character thread here – Riker rejecting a ship of his own – but delivered with the standard Season 1 lack of grace and subtlety. Here’s Vincent Schiavelli classing up the joint, but stuck delivering heavy-handed satire such as “Peace Through Superior Firepower”. It’s a bit of a soggy teaser too, smashing into the opening titles off the back of a conversation about away team logistics. Before long, we’re on a particularly unconvincing Planet Sound Stage, with a chromakey blue sky and plenty of hopeful dry ice. In fact, this feels a lot like TOS, with the captain beaming down to a planet where a previous ship has vanished and Riker finding an AI imposter. “My ship is the Lollipop. It’s a good ship.” Ha! At the bottom of that pit, with Beverly and Jean-Luc, there’s a grace and feeling for character which is frankly astonishing, but when we’re not with Picard, this often feels disjointed and uncertain. Another new chief engineer shows up, who looks about 12, but Geordi puts him in his place. Virtually Troi’s entire contribution is concerned looks at Geordi, but there’s a sense of family and teamwork here that was talked about in Coming of Age but wasn’t felt. Picard’s last line to Geordi is just great.
TNG S01E22 Symbiosis (
). Hey look, it’s Khan’s second in command and Kirk’s son as a feckless junkie freighter captain and one of his passengers. There’s almost nothing that Star Trek hates more than hippy druggies – see The Way to Eden for more of this – but I’m rarely diverted by the Enterprise playing crèche to squabbling aliens and it’s another opportunity for the implacable moral superiority of the Federation to be on full display, as well as another demonstration of the ship’s lazy attitude towards pathogen screening for unexpected visitors. Denise Crosby’s last filmed episode, so presumably she DGAF about that ghastly Just Say No Speech to Wesley. Watch for her waving goodbye to the audience in the back of one shot. In HD, the much-vaunted felicium is clearly red lentils.
TNG S01E23 Skin of Evil (
). Denise Crosby wanted out. She could see that the bridge was top-heavy. She was turning down other work to say “Hailing frequencies open Captain,” once every other episode. Roddenberry and Paramount could have held her to her contract, but they had no wish to keep her at her post against her will. That created an incredible opportunity. Among all the things that pop culture mocked TOS for, the one that was hardest to fix was bumping off red-shirts. If you don’t bump off anyone, that lowers the stakes. But you can’t have a member of the regular cast beam down and get bumped off without resetting it later (which also lowers the stakes). Until now. Evidently, the temptation was irresistible – she gets just 11 lines of dialogue before she bites the sound stage dust. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s about as much as she’s had in the last half-dozen episodes put together. But as clever and daring as this device looks on paper, on TV it’s a sour moment in a clumsy and borderline-ridiculous, episode which doesn’t earn any of its hoped-for tragedy at the end as the crew gather at the Windows 95 Desktop of Perpetual Remembrance. Even in death, Tasha Yar gets sidelined, and the effects work is cheap-looking and lousy too. Denise Crosby will be back – all too briefly – in far better episodes of what will have become a far better show. A new chief engineer is in place – who would have failed Wesley’s Star Fleet Academy exam as he sets a matter-antimatter ratio of 25:1.
TNG S01E24 We’ll Always Have Paris (
). Time eddies. A distress call. An old friend of the captain’s. Once again, TNG is playing the hits – and there’s no mention of Tasha Yar, natch. On Troi’s orders, Picard relives some backstory on the Holodeck in a tediously sentimental episode which wallows in secondhand nostalgia as Picard leers over a barely legal blonde in a top which isn’t so much low-cut as hardly there. “Enough of this self-indulgence,” growls Patrick Stewart. Quite. The science-fiction time loop stuff is more interesting, but only just. Data uses a brilliant piece of deduction to work out which of the three versions of him needs to take the required action. Alas, we are never told what this piece of thinking might have been. Denise Crosby’s name is the opening credits for this and the remaining episodes of Season 1. Dammit.
TNG S01E25 Conspiracy (
). Here we pick up the crumbs scattered in Coming of Age but over just two episodes, this doesn’t feel real or earned – another example of the show at this stage either not knowing what to do with good ideas, or not yet having the confidence to execute them with any real force. This would love to be Invasion of the Bodysnatchers or The Parallax View (or David Cronenberg) but the world doesn’t feel lived in. The climax should be a shockingly transgressive end to the season, calling back numerous details from past episodes. Actually, it’s a little too hasty and a lot too ridiculous to feel like it really matters. It’s not at all clear how Riker’s deception fooled the other slug creatures, there’s no sense of a bigger organization behind all this (Federation or alien slugs) and Picard and Riker phasering an intelligent adversary to gory death is just about as wrong as can be. Still, it’s a step up from soggy oil monsters and mooning over lost loves, it is at least exciting, and we haven’t seen much from Wesley for ages. Geordi tries to teach Data about jokes which is pretty ghastly.
TNG S01E26 The Neutral Zone (
) Oh, wait, that wasn’t the season finale? Okay, I guess. In what feels like a do-over of Space Seed, the Enterprise happens across an ancient craft onboard which there are people in suspended animation. Talking about the fad for cryonics in the late twentieth century, Beverly Crusher marvels that “People used fear death – it terrified them.” Uh-huh. Luckily, she’s found a cure not just for their terminal conditions but for death itself. They wake up and see Worf and promptly faint, and a music cue tells us how funny this is. Actually this strand does a decent job of using the 24th century to satirise the 1980s. Meanwhile, no-one has seen the Romulans in years and the Enterprise is flogging across space for a reunion, which is the subject of endless speculation about what they might do, say and want. Actually, despite all my snark, both plots have something to recommend them but – not for the first time – the cross-cutting is unhelpful. “You’re feeling profoundly sad,” intuits Troi, staring into the face of a woman with tears running down her face.
Stray thoughts (Season One)
- Wow, that was rough. The characters are thin, the pacing frequently off, and the dramatic situations often weak. But there’s also a confidence about the world-building and the look of the show. All the decisions they couldn’t get away from turn out great. All the things that are easy to fix will be. But it will take time.
- There’s a lack of familiar names in the credits. It seems as if this was the wrong team for the job. Maurice Hurley, Hans Beimler, Tracy Tormé, even DC Fontana and god-bless-him Gene Roddenberry couldn’t make this work entirely – but let’s not forget how close they got to the goal line.
- In the second half of the season, Data and Worf begin to come into focus, but the episodes which highlight them look like trial runs for better-remembered stories to come. Dr Crusher and Deanna Troi are routinely sidelined. Strong performers like Crosby and Burton are given little or nothing to do – it’s amazing Crosby was the only one to quit (Michael Dorn came close).
- It’s hardly a new insight, but Patrick Stewart often bears the entire weight of the whole operation on his classically-trained shoulders. He’s exceptional, a truly unexpected and bold piece of casting which pays repeated dividends.
- Stand-out episodes are few but Where No One Has Gone Before, The Battle and Home Soil are decent, and if you like Klingons you’ll probably like Heart of Glory more than I do. But Code of Honor, Angel One, We’ll Always Have Paris and Skin of Evil are among the lousiest episodes in the franchise. Average rating for Season One: 2.68, about the same as TOS Season Three.
- Right, they got away with it. Ratings were strong, fans were happy. Star Trek was back. The question now is – where next?