Tom Salinsky

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?

TNG S01E11 Haven (). Troi’s mother sends the Enterprise a message via a Time Lord who accepted Borusa’s gift of immortality. I think this is the first episode to centre on a character who isn’t Picard or Riker. Majel Barrett, who has been heard throughout the show as the ship’s computer, is here in person as Lwaxana Troi, but this episode sadly continues the new show’s seaside postcard obsession with nudity, from the scantily-clad inhabitants of Rubicun III to the Ferengi’s dismay at seeing clothed females (have they traded with no other sexually dimorphic species?) to now naked Betazoid wedding customs. There’s a glimpse into a fascinating alien culture here, but it can barely peek through the tired girl-of-my-dreams plot which never rises above the level of daytime soap opera.

TNG S01E12 The Big Goodbye (). The presence of the Holodeck makes this kind of story much easier. TOS required all sorts of implausible justifications in order to stick the crew into the middle of a Damon Runyon tale. The single word “Holodeck” is all that’s necessary to put Picard into a sub-Raymond Chandler story. As with much of the science in this show, it’s basically magic. The holographic lipstick remains on Picard’s face when he leaves, which is hard to rationalise. What’s also hard to understand is how Picard is so bowled over by technology we saw in the pilot – and in The Animated Series, set decades earlier. The bigger problem though is that none of this is particularly interesting, and nor is Picard’s diplomatic tongue-twister challenge. Elevating things slightly is Brent Spiner, who finally gets to put Data through his paces. But there will be much better Data vs the Holodeck stories in the future. And disappointingly, Picard opts to bring along a red-shirted historian who naturally is the first to bite the dust when things go south. Wesley saves the ship count = 4.

TNG S01E13 Datalore (). Data practising sneezing is very silly but once Lore is revealed, this becomes an excellent showcase for Brent Spiner’s talents as well as those of the effects team (maybe except the fake Brent Spiner head). And if the doppelgänger story mainly goes through familiar beats, well those are fun beats which have become familiar for a reason. That Data’s origins were so mysterious before this episode is cool – and early episodes have barely hinted at this backstory so whether or not it was in the show bible I don’t know. It does raise some awkward questions about how this machine of unknown provenance was allowed to progress through Star Fleet academy and given a senior position on board the Federation flagship. What lets this one down is that nobody believes “the boy” Wesley, a dull trope this series is usually excellent at avoiding. Chief Engineer Argyle makes a return appearance. Roddenberry gets his final on-screen writing credit. Wesley saves this ship count = 5.

TNG S01E14 Angel One () is set on a planet which is oddly similar to mid-twentieth century Earth, because of course it is. Computing a journey time which takes around half a year down to the last second is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person would say. Speaking of which, here we have the planet of the mega-bitches which is a misogynist’s version of what a feminist might write. This might not be quite as bad as Code of Honor, and the cast are more comfortable here than there, but it’s pretty dreadful, with yet another virus serving as the all-purpose extra-bit-of-plot-generator. This one has a particularly novel mode of transmission which almost completely foxes Dr Crusher – it’s airborne. Geordi saying “make it so” when he has the con makes me want to slap him. We’ve gone from the stiff, all-business crew of the early episodes to having them behave like giggling teenagers. Another stupidly precise countdown is in place by the end of the episode – 48 minutes to develop an “inoculant” against the disease. Any other show would have been cancelled by this point.

TNG S01E15 11001001 () The gag of slathering young women in makeup and then dubbing over deep voices is literally the oldest trick in the Star Trek book, going as it does all the way back to the pilot episode. Originally planned to run prior to The Big Goodbye, and explain the Holodeck malfunction, this episode was moved to later in the season and the actions of the Bynars retro-fitted to be a repair job instead. This doesn’t explain why Wesley crusher and friend were allowed onto the known-to-be-dangerously-malfunctioning Holodeck to chuck snowballs at each other in the last episode. Essentially, this story attempts to ring mystery and suspense out of the question of whether the weirdly secretive aliens monkeying around with the Enterprise have the ship and its crew’s best interests at heart or not. Spoiler – they don’t. With Data now established as the shows MVP, Geordi begins slipping into his role as Data’s Best Friend. This is explored here in the form of Data daubing paint onto some glass. Riker’s jazz obsession starts here too. And his holo-sex doll looks weirdly like Kate Mulgrew. I sound like I’m slagging this episode, which probably is just due to the fact that it’s late and I’m tired. It doesn’t do a whole lot wrong, but it just isn’t all that interesting. Wesley saves the ship count = 6.

TNG S01E16 Too Short a Season (). Clayton Rohner was barely 30 when he shot this tired retread of the age/rejuvenate to death plot, and he fools exactly no-one as the 85-year-old Admiral Jameson. The whole plot device of his and the Governor’s past bad blood similarly failed to engage me, feeling like a lot of talk about people I didn’t know doing things I didn’t understand. It seems to me as if no lessons were learned at all from Kirk’s actions in A Private Little War and, again the script is its own best critic, as when Governor Karnas exclaims “This story you are telling me is unbelievable,” all I can do is nod in agreement.

TNG S01E17 When the Bough Breaks (). There are kids on board the Enterprise – remember? The Enterprise follows a trail to Space Atlantis and discovers a race of vastly advanced beings who haven’t figured out sunglasses. Riker, Crusher and Troi are the chosen three. Jerry Hardin is the chief Aldean (who will have a more significant role in a later two-parter). Bizarrely, they believe that importing children will help them to solve their reproductive crisis – which as far as I can see it won’t. It will give them children to nurture (for a few years) and then what? Breed humans from the human children? Why not ask for young, sexually mature adults in that case? But won’t that result in humans supplanting the Aldeans? And what’s this “humans are unusually attached to their offspring” nonsense? Looking after children is an evolutionary necessity. Luckily for all concerned, the Aldeans give Wesley access to their central computer in case he needs to escape.

TNG S01E18 Home Soil () relates to terraforming, a lengthy process involving industrial lasers. Evidently the Genesis device was a technological dead end (surprising given how well it worked, for the most part). Troi, watching a very nervy and defensive General Gogol on the view screen: “He’s concealing something.” Yar beams down to the planet (yay!) and gets a single line, finishing someone else’s sentence to supply factual information to boost the status of another regular cast member. This may be the exact moment Denise Crosby decided to quit. The brief exterior shot of the terraforming station looks a bit Thunderbirds. When a laser drill goes berserk, Riker is sure to turn off the power first, and only then get emergency medical aid to the injured man. That the laser blasts stopped when the cries of distress stopped is a nifty clue that this was not a simple malfunction, and Data vs the laser drill is a cool showcase for his unique talents. There’s a swagger to Patrick Stewart’s performance here. He really is the MVP of this series, making poor episodes watchable and elevating good ones to near greatness. “Ugly bags of mostly water,” is a classic line, but Data’s Wikipedia entry is off – humans are nearer to 60% water than 90%.

TNG S01E06 Where No One Has Gone Before () brings us another new chief engineer. Kosinski is that reliable character – the cocksure overbearing scientific maverick (most recently seen in Discovery in the form of Tarka) and this neatly hides the true nature of The Traveller. It’s a good bit of character building that Riker doesn’t take any of his shit and it further conceals what’s really going on. Shooting the Enterprise millions of light years off course is a suitably apocalyptic problem for the crew to solve, and a device which will also be returned to in future episodes as well as being the premise for a future series. There’s some wonderful imagery here too – Picard opening the turbo-lift onto empty space is incredible – even if much of the rest of the running time is taken up with what feel like off-the-rack hallucinations. Still, I remember thinking at the time that there really was promise here – not that I think I would have given up watching, but this story left me newly hopeful. Kosinski, speaking technical gibberish, claims to have applied the functions “asymptomatically” instead of “asymptotically” which may be gobbledegook too far. And the need for the whole crew to think happy thoughts for the magic to work is a bit sugary. Wesley saves the ship count = 2.

TNG S01E07 Lonely Among Us (). The Enterprise plays host to two squabbling alien races – but before long, there’s a mysterious blue glow-y thing on the view screen. Jack of all trades Geordi is showing Worf a thing or two about sensor arrays. It’s all very sedate and tepid compared to the high-octane teasers of TOS. Finally, Worf is zapped by something – which would mean more if he’d had more than three lines in the last four stories. Sensing that he’s not the character anyone’s invested in, the zappy thing jumps ship to Dr Crusher, who behaves so oddly that nobody could fail to notice that something was badly wrong. Captain Picard fails to notice that anything is wrong. Data gets to do the Spock “I believe I said that” gag, and it’s wildly unfunny. A reference to Sherlock Holmes provides a thread to pull on which will reap great dividends in later, better episodes, but this is routine stuff on the whole. The climax in which the intelligence inside Picard negotiates with the senior officers is very striking, but it’s a long time coming. Once more, the transporter functions as a death-proofing body back-up.

TNG S01E08 Justice (). “Nice planet.” Two words which just might have persuaded Michael Dorn to stick around. At the time, aged barely 15, I can remember being so impressed with the message of this episode – there can be no justice without exceptions – that I attempted to pass it off as my own (and was immediately found out). Decades later I see this as trying awfully hard to wring a moral dilemma out of a pretty thin and contrived situation, but at this stage it’s still very refreshing to see a television sci-fi series reaching for something complex and nuanced, even if its grasp isn’t quite there yet. Alas, the ending is perfunctory to the point of stupidity. Wesley doesn’t save the ship, in fact he endangers it and himself.

TNG S01E09 The Battle (). The Ferengi are back, and not quite as idiotic as last time – they are also a bit more like their eventual selves – albeit more malicious and less purely profit-oriented. We fill in some of Picard’s backstory aboard the Stargazer, including “the Picard manoeuvre” and Patrick Stewart gets to show more of what he can do, although the trade-off for that is that for the second time in three episodes, Picard gets possessed by an alien force. Data is starting to ascend in prominence, but the production team still has next-to-no interest in Crusher, Worf, LaForge, Yar or Troi, all of whom go through the same dull motions every episode. Even Riker only gets screen time by sheer force of being second in command, but his interactions with the Ferengi first officer are excellent. Wesley saves the ship count = 3.

TNG S01E10 Hide and Q () Dropping Troi off before the story starts helps conceal the fact that a) she’s never given any character or relationship stuff and b) she should be able to solve any and all plots involving deception. Any way, the dreadful title gives away that Q is back and transporting an assortment of regulars to planet Sound Stage, minus Yar who is spirited off to a “penalty box”. Poor Tasha Yar. The story meanders its way to The Temptation of Riker, but since I never believed for a second that Riker would be tempted in any way, and since Picard’s blithe acceptance of the test completely gives away the ending, even this not-uninteresting idea falls flat. And making a dead child the motivating force to initially change his mind about Q’s offer is just ick.

Stray thoughts

• These episodes do look fantastic. It’s TNG’s immense good fortune to go into production at the precise moment that it was possible to produced great-looking episodes of science fiction on a television budget but before the CGI revolution, which means that all these model shots on 35mm film can be cleaned up to Blu-ray resolution – wait till we get to DS9, yikes.
• Like everyone says, these early scripts are often pretty weak, but the world-building is exemplary, and the cast does a lot of heavy lifting. Data hasn’t really started coming into his own yet, but Stewart (of course), Frakes, Burton and – dammit – Crosby pop off the screen and often find much more to play than is on the page.
• It also takes a while for everyone to find their station. Yar is where Worf should be, Worf and LaForge take it in turns sitting next to Data. O’Brien is sometimes mentioned even if he doesn’t appear.
• This is very clearly a case-of-the-week show, in an era where serialisation was just beginning to be taken seriously by shows like St Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues (but before Murder One and Babylon 5 introduced the idea of a television novel). But serialised threads do crop up, and from very early on – even if most of them surround the precocious adventures of Boy Genius Wesley Crusher.

TNG S01E01-2 Encounter at Farpoint (). Star Trek had gone to the big screen and it wasn’t coming back. Television sci-fi had had its day with expensive series like Manimal, Automan and Battlestar Galactica surviving a season or two and then being cancelled. But Gene Roddenberry didn’t give up. Having been turfed off the movies by Harve Bennett and unable to get a new series started, he returned to the show that had made his name, and got Paramount to sign on to produce a new television incarnation of Star Trek. At the time, the idea of a new version of the show without Kirk and Spock sounded like madness. Shatner and Nimoy were what people wanted, but Roddenberry was convinced that the concept was bigger than the actors, and he designed a new series set 70 years on from the original show.

What Paramount failed to secure was a network. Desilu had backed Roddenberry and co. when NBC had little idea what they had on their hands, but when it wasn’t pulling in the ratings, they killed it off. They turned down the new show too – and so did every other network. American television isn’t quite like UK television where (in the analogue age, at least), most channels were served by centralised stations which transmitted the same content across the country. But in the US, the system was more like the old ITV regions we used to have, only more so. The big networks programmed new shows in prime time, and local stations would receive and pass on those episodes, but then they were free to fill the remaining hours with whatever they wanted – and that usually meant re-runs of old shows (“in syndication”) or local programming.

Without a network to support it, Paramount decided to bankroll the new series on its own and stitch together a national network by doing dozens of individual syndication deals. This “first run syndication” approach was almost unheard of, but Paramount had a big bargaining chip to bring to the table: take the new Star Trek if you want to keep re-running the old Star Trek. It worked and in 1987 Encounter at Farpoint debuted on screens across America.

As with The Man Trap it’s kind of amazing how much they got right first time. So much of this works – the new uniforms are great (and would get better), the com-badges are perfect, the new ship looks gorgeous, and that captain is a baller. Even the cut-and-shut theme music works a treat (although I remember for some people it took a bit of getting used to). We’ve moved completely away from the Nicholas Meyer Das Boot aesthetic to a bridge which looks more like the lobby of a four-star hotel and the captain’s chair is now flanked by a second officer and – for some reason – a ship’s counselor. In fact, there’s a definite attempt here to get away from the things that the old show was parodied for: the captain doesn’t beam down at the head of every away mission, there’s an attempt at least to cut down on the number of red-shirt deaths, and since we don’t have the budget for big space battles, the emphasis is on kindness, diplomacy and strong sci-fi concepts.

This is also more of an ensemble show, so let’s run down the regular cast – a total complement of nine, ten if you include O’Brien – which is a lot especially compared to the old show which, as noted, was a central trio plus some largely interchangeable hangers-on. Patrick Stewart is inspired casting as the captain, grounding every moment of what is sometimes a wobbly first episode with complete conviction, and sonorously intoning the lightly-rewritten opening monologue with delicacy and gravitas. His “I don’t like children” stuff is weak but he makes it work – just about. Riker and Troi are an obvious riff on Decker and Ilia from The Motion Picture, with Betazoid standing in for Deltan. And they aren’t the only old flames on board – if a thing’s worth doing… Marina Sirtis looks a fright in her 80s mini-skirt and thigh-high boots and is working so hard to hide her East-end Greek accent she’s almost comatose. Brent Spiner as Data is harder to pin down at this stage. Here, he comes across as little more than Diet Coke Spock and silly things like the gaps in his vocabulary strain credulity – although he and Stewart develop some easy chemistry early on. Michael Dorn as Worf will need to bide his time. His makeup looks wrong here, and he gets almost no lines. Denise Crosby is very appealing and she makes the most of her big speech during the trial, hardly ever giving away that she knows the script is heavily overwritten. And of course, the new show is barely six minutes old before we meet a quixotic alien with godlike powers (even Picard refers to it as “the same old story”), but in the expert hands of John de Lancie, this overfamiliar idea is freshened up considerably.

It’s not until we cut to Farpoint Station, a third of the way through the run-time, that we meet Riker and the Crushers. Jonathan Frakes is warm and charming but will take time to find any depth to the character. The friction between Riker and Picard is the best character stuff in the whole episode, even if it doesn’t lay any useful groundwork for future installments. Gates McFadden, as usual, gets nothing to do (except pay for some cloth in this money-free century). Wil Wheaton is a disaster both in concept and in execution as Boy Genius Wesley Crusher (sorry Wil). Last to show (most of) his face is Levar Burton as Geordi La Forge, who similarly gets little to do here, although even without his eyes, his appeal as an actor is easy to identify. The biggest problem this show has is that everyone is desperately professional all of the time. We can look forward to seeing them cheerfully playing poker together, but it will be a fairly long time coming. In this episode they’re written mainly as just positions, with glimmers of personality coming from the actors (mainly Stewart, Burton and – of all people – Crosby). It’s a credit to the strength and confidence of the episode that even the brief appearance of Admiral McCoy, blessing proceedings with his latex-covered presence, can’t manage to upstage the new characters.

Here we also return (but not for long) to the idea that Star Trek is a series about exploring the unknown – Deneb IV is at the farthest limit of known Federation space. Don’t worry, before long we’ll be ferrying around diplomats and charting stellar anomalies. And we join this story with both Picard and Riker new to the Enterprise, and each other, a move which manages to strike a good balance between the need to get the adventure going with the need to establish this new world and these new characters. 1960s television shows were generally based around a single hero or a small core of characters. 1980s television shows tended to have larger ensembles and to base individual episodes around different members. The Next Generation is going to take a while to figure out which model works best for it – but in the meantime, it doesn’t have a network which can decide to take it off the air on a whim. If one local station drops it, Paramount can find another serving the same area who will take it. Thus, this often uncertain series gets the time it needs to find its feet.

As to the episode itself, the Q/trial plot feels recycled and more of a mechanism to deliver background about the century and the crew than to tell its own story – and yet it carries much more drama and jeopardy than the far more original and interesting Farpoint Station strand which often comes across as tepid. The saucer separation sequence feels like the same kind of narrative busywork we suffered through in the first half of The Motion Picture – lots of “action” but no consequences. It also sets up countless future encounters which would have benefited from this trick, but with no time or production budget to do it again.

Even in ninety minutes, this episode is trying to achieve an awful lot, which makes the stilted pacing doubly disappointing. If you can overlook that, then as an introduction to the world of the 24th century, it’s quite effective, and there are some noteworthy flourishes in the production design and direction, even if overall it doesn’t entirely work as a self-contained slice of episodic television. The closing titles scroll up the screen. That seems completely unfamiliar. Something to do with this being cut into two 45 minute episodes after its premiere?

One other change for this series was that red became the uniform colour for command instead of gold. I’ve heard it said that gold didn’t suit Patrick Stewart, whatever that means. My personal belief is that for the last three movies we’d got used to seeing the captain in red and so that’s what we got here.

Right, strap in. One motive for this project was a desire to re-watch Deep Space Nine from the beginning. But there are six whole seasons of TNG to get through before then, all of which I saw on first transmission, and all of which I re-watched when the Blu-rays were released. I remember there being some very good stuff, but not much of that is in the next fifty episodes, so let’s not fall at any of these fences…

TNG S01E03 The Naked Now () Even the title gives away which story this is – a sexed-up, navel-baring, underboob-showing, fully-functional reprise of The Naked Time, underlined by the fact that researching what happened on Kirk’s ship is key to helping this crew solve the puzzle. Once again, the (slightly odd) thinking seems to be: let’s get to know our new cast of characters by having them act completely out of character. It doesn’t bode especially well for the new crew that more or less the first thing they do is beam aboard a ship which they suspect of having suffered an explosive decompression without any spacesuits or other survival gear. But they survive and make it back on board where there are no quarantine regulations in place. And before long, all bets are off.

But this does work as a self-contained episode, and it is nice to see this ultra-professional, just-the-facts-sir, team letting their hair down and, yes, it does shine a light into who they are beneath the spandex. It’s a good episode for Data, who will quickly become one of the leading lights of the show and even Crusher gets somewhere near centre-stage as befits a medical emergency plot. Meanwhile, Yar disappears once she’s done deflowering Data and Worf may as well not have been in this one. The race-against-time climax is effective, but it’s a pity that the best thing this new series can think to do in its second-ever episode is a Karaoke version of one of its progenitor’s best-remembered stories. Thank heavens Harry Mudd and/or a plague of Tribbles aren’t heading this way any time soon. Chief Engineer this week is a cross looking blonde lady who packs a “sonic driver”. Wesley saves the ship count = 1.

TNG S01E04 Code of Honor () Oh fucking hell. I said of some TOS episodes that I didn’t remember seeing any Berman-era stories about alien civilisations which were patterned after Earth history. I’d evidently scrubbed this out of my memory, and with good reason. While (some of) its intentions are noble, the sight of half-naked African Americans playing primitive tribes who can’t believe that a woman could be head of security is horrifying now and must have raised eyebrows then. Among a great deal of nonsense, Dr Crusher segues from a tense conversation about the dire consequences of the mission failing, and the need to get Yar back safely to make a cheerful bargain about getting her son back on the bridge. Later, Data tries out a playground joke on Geordi which would be toe-curlingly embarrassing if it didn’t come as a welcome relief to all the flat-out racism on display. It all builds to a limp re-staging of Amok Time, without any of the interest inherent in probing into Vulcan customs.

This is another Yar-centric episode and although the character is used as little more than a McGuffin for the most part, Denise Crosby is great – such a fucking shame she didn’t ride out the rough years along with the others. At this stage it’s Michael Dorn who is being serially underused, not her. I don’t think he’s in this episode at all – maybe he looked at the costumes the guest cast were being made to wear and phoned in sick. In these early outings, the captain’s chair has various pop-up flaps and doohickeys. I don’t remember these and I would bet good money they were phased out because they kept breaking.

TNG S01E05 The Last Outpost () With the Klingons now Federation allies, the new series will need new antagonists, and here they come – the evil capitalists in a post-money society. Mentioned once or twice in earlier episodes, the Ferengi make a pretty poor showing here in their first on-screen appearance, giggling and cackling like pantomime villains. It’s almost impossible to believe that that one of them is Armin Shimerman, Quark himself, setting the standard by which further Ferengi will be judged. Instead of Rules of Aquisition, these Ferengi have hand-me-down codes of honour which seem more suited to Klingons or Romulans. Another fine Star Trek tradition is the planet exterior shot on a soundstage which makes its TNG debut here, a move which adds to the overall shoddy nature of this episode. Also of scant interest is the laboured reveal of the real reason behind the Mexican stand-off, which requires sit-com farce levels of double talk from Picard when negotiating with the Ferengi whom he believes to have the upper hand. Yet again, the Enterprise crew is put on trial but this axe-twirling dervish has none of John de Lancie’s class. Data’s finger puzzle is the source of zero laughs.

I don’t have the energy anymore. I’m sure there’s a detailed, beat-by-beat exploration of this story which no doubt I could write and probably would if I were a bit more motivated, but I am not going to do that today. Instead, please accept these disjointed ramblings and let’s hope for better things to come.

A statue either appears out of thin air, or is just regarded with astonishment by a pirate chick who kills a dude and then releases a thing from the statue. The TARDIS arrives in the wrong place. This is possibly due to some space/time/magnet/gravity thing. Everybody delivers some exposition and then Yas and the Doctor wander off to the TARDIS, to give Dan time to wander off. They make a short jump to the past, secure in the knowledge that they can definitely come straight back, despite the space/time/magnet/gravity thing which makes it impossible to steer the TARDIS. The TARDIS gets swallowed by the Myrka, which is cool. The TARDIS materialises underwater, which is cool. The Doctor delivers a stern rebuke against killing, and then hands Dan a light sabre which he uses to murder all the Sea Devils with a single blow. Someone offers to blow themselves up for the Doctor, which is a self-homage to the end of The Master Shows The Doctor His PowerPoint Presentation or whatever it was called.

Then, because Chris has been reading the forums (never read the forums) and he’s found out that some people want the Doctor and Yasmin to become a couple, he has a scene in which the Time Lord cracks on to the novice policewoman, and then is all like “JK I’m on me own.” This of course takes place during a suitable break in the action because Character Development And Plot Advancement Are Two Very Separate Things Never To Be Confused. Any nuance that might have been developed from this situation is firmly erased, but then so is any complexity regarding the morality of having jolly adventures with pirates or the notion that the Sea Devils have a right to their planet. (“Slight wrinkle there,” says the Doctor and then never refers to the issue ever again.) The Sea Devils’ plan is to cover the planet in water, because two thirds of its surface being covered and the oceans being miles deep in places just isn’t enough room. Great, now we can just kill ’em all without compunction.

This is all shot in such a way as to never look remotely nautical or remotely Asian, edited in such a way that it’s barely possible to tell who is where or what is going on, and acted in the now-standard Blue Peter style. At the end, everyone is friends again, the son warmly embracing the woman who slaughtered his father for being near a statue. Even by the very low standards set by the last three seasons, this was thin, amateurish, will-this-do gibberish, with too much dialogue given to a Sea Devil whose lips don’t move, bizarrely empty ships for COVID reasons, and a supporting cast who do little more than provide a running commentary on whatever is happening in front of them (“He’s forcing them off to die in the water.”) like the world’s shittest magician.

Make it stop. Please, just make it stop.

But – hey! – Ace and Tegan are back.

Cool.

Star Trek The Motion Picture (). It wasn’t just Star Trek which went off the air in the early 1970s. Fantasy-based sitcoms like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie and The Munsters had run their course. Irwin Allen’s science-fiction adventure serials like The Land of Giants and Time Tunnel had finished. American television was dominated by domestic sitcoms, glossy crime capers and nostalgia. Movies were enjoying a new resurgence of gritty violence as censorship collapsed. Spaceships and aliens were at the top of nobody’s agenda.

Desilu was bought by Gulf + Western before Star Trek finished its original run. Thus, the rights to Roddenberry’s creation now lay with Paramount, who considered trying to bring it back as a movie in the 1970s and then as a TV show, tentatively titled “Star Trek Phase II”. One key question was whether or not William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForrest Kelley would return. The assumption during the planning of Phase II seems to have been that Shatner would do the first few episodes, Nimoy probably wouldn’t appear at all, and Kelley could be used if he was available. The others were making most of their livings at Star Trek conventions and could probably be relied upon to show up for almost anything. And then, Star Wars hit and everything changed.

A lot of the legacy of this confusing time shows up in the film which eventually emerged – Star Trek The Motion Picture directed by Robert Wise, which shunts Kirk off into the role of admiral, making him a stranger on the bridge of his own ship, and giving far more screen time to new cast members Stephen Collins and Persis Khambatta than to our familiar crew – which makes some sort of sense when you look at the film as a pilot for a new TV series, except that Decker and Ilia’s chief plot responsibility is to be killed off at the end. Kirk’s journey away from and back to the captain’s chair never pays off in any meaningful way, and McCoy gets almost nothing to do except grouse about Spock. Nimoy, who almost wasn’t in the film at all, gets something close to an arc, largely thanks to a scene at the very beginning which asks him to choose between Vulcan and Star Fleet, but really this is the story of Decker and V’Ger which is very odd for the film which brought Captain Kirk to the big screen. Worse, the conflict between Decker and Kirk isn’t resolved. It’s just busy-work to keep our attention during the first half of the film, using up the first hour which is how long it takes to get the Enterprise to the cloud. Pretty much as soon as Ilia is converted into a probe, Decker gets off Kirk’s back and becomes just another officer. He at least does better than Sulu, Chekov and Uhura, all of whom are never given any lines beyond the purely functional.

Contributing to the disjointed feeling is the enormous amount of time in the second act devoted to uncovering Ilia’s memories from within the probe. While this makes perfect sense as a thing for the Enterprise crew to attempt, and it threatens to develop some of the characters (but not the ones we care about from the TV show) nothing ever comes of it, as once Kirk and co. make it on board V’Ger they solve the mystery entirely without recourse to anything the probe told them or they told it. The same could almost be said of Spock’s journey into V’Ger, although that at least is developing his arc, as begun in the opening minutes of the film, and it does provide some of the clues which Kirk needs, but really everything hinges on the discovery that V’Ger = Voyager – a nifty reveal, to be sure, but one which renders an awful lot of the preceding material moot.

All of this sounds like I’m giving it a bit of a kicking, but watching it again, after seeing 102 episodes of the television show, much of it does work. That score is completely iconic (the second of three genuinely great pieces of Star Trek music and we don’t have to wait long for number three), it does have a scope and a breadth which some other big-screen entries in the series sorely lack, and Shatner and Nimoy are as good as ever. It also isn’t half as long as you remember at 133 minutes including titles. That’s positively svelte compared to lumbering Nolan, Villeneuve or even Russo Bros epics. And the story is big enough to earn its place on the silver screen, even if (as I noted along the way) a lot of it is culled from bits-and-pieces of television episodes.

What doesn’t work? The pacing is off, the uniforms are drab, the supporting cast barely register and it feels stiff and cerebral in the way that The Cage did (and Where No Man Has Gone Before didn’t). Roddenberry, Wise, Livingston and co. were so at pains to avoid it being goofy, they forgot to make it fun. But in the context of Silent Runnings, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or even ET, and as an alternative to the brash and cheerful slaughter of Star Wars, this successfully carves out a place in the starry heavens for a more thoughtful kind of storytelling, even if a large part of its legacy turns out to be making it clear to the next creative team what not to do.

NB: I watched the theatrical version on Blu-ray. Maddeningly, when Robert Wise re-edited it in 2001 to improve the pacing and fix up some of the visual effects, the work was only ever done at DVD resolution. Even more maddeningly, the recently-announced 4K directors cut won’t be available on home media until September.

For another take on this movie, see here.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (). How do you solve a problem like The Motion Picture? Pretend it never happened. Gone are the sub-2001 beige corridors and philosophical conundrums. Gone are the shapeless uniforms and interminable spaceship porn effects sequences. In comes adventure, fun, and a swaggering joie-de-vivre that somehow meshes perfectly with a story which is about age, sacrifice, obsolescence and failure. The sheer number of classic concepts and images packed into this one movie is nothing short of astonishing – the Genesis device, the Kobyashi Maru, Kirk’s son, mind-controlling eels, that wonderful score – the list goes on and on.

Once again, most of the regular cast get very little to do. Even Bones is side-lined in favour of Kirk and Spock. Chekov comes off best, although grumpy fans noted that that Walter Koenig was not in the first season which included the episode Space Seed to which this story is a sequel. But who can be grumpy when we’re having this much fun – until that heartbreakingly perfect ending. “Franchise… out of danger?” It is now, lads. How amazing that producer Harve Bennett and writer/director Nicholas Meyer, neither of whom had seen a frame of Star Trek before starting work on this film, turned out to understand it far better than the man who created it, whose only role this time around was firing off absurd memos, all of which Bennett ignored.

For another take on this movie, see here.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (). How do you follow Wrath of Khan? Well, you kinda undo its most celebrated and emotional story beat. But given that, and given this film’s ruthless efficiency (Kirk takes Enterprise to Genesis, battles Klingons, takes Spock to Vulcan, roll credits), heavy death toll (Kirk’s career, Kirk’s son and the Enterprise as well as a bunch of badguys), this does what it sets out to do, and does it with a certain amount of charm and grace. The theft of the Enterprise from space-dock, as well as being the most crowd-pleasing moment of the film, is also the first time we see the Star Trek regulars working together as a team. In the TV series, they come-and-go at random. In the first two movies, they rarely get anything to do or say which isn’t strictly related to the ordinary operation of the ship. Here, they’re a gang, coming together to help a friend in need.

In place of the extraordinary Ricardo Montalban as Khan, here we have Christopher Lloyd as Kruge. It’s a testament to the amazing quality of the second film, that this one manages to get Christopher Lloyd as the chief villain and it looks like a downgrade. Also a new face is Robin Curtis, providing a more straightforwardly grown up and less bratty (but also less appealingly vulnerable) Lt Saavik. The change in actor has prompted some fans to speculate that “Lt Saavik” is a code name passed on from Vulcan-to-Vulcan but this is not considered canon.

Standing between two classics, this won’t be many people’s favourite, but even if you do subscribe to the notion that the evens are gold and the odds are trash, this is handily the best of the odds and works especially well as a bridge between the swashbuckling Khan and the lightweight Voyage Home, speaking of which…

For another take on this movie, see here.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (). I dunno, maybe I was in the mood for some Star Trek and this really doesn’t feel like it. The beginning and the end (written by Harve Bennett, who got sole writing credit on III) are largely functional, just tying up loose ends from either the previous film or the middle of this one. The contemporary section, written by Meyer, feels like any other eighties fish-out-of-water American comedy and the relentlessly generic Leonard Rosenman score and flat direction from Nimoy only add to this feeling. Again, after a film which focuses on the regulars, we get a new face eating up more than her fair share of screentime – Catherine Hicks as Gillian Taylor – but her relationship with Kirk does work, and this film is the only one to actually use the regulars as an ensemble, even if that does mean that McCoy ends up playing straight man to Scotty and Chekov becomes little more than a McGuffin in need of rescuing.

Some of the humour works – Kirk and Spock talking over each other about Italian food, the famous punk on the bus – but some of it left me cold this time around – Spock’s inability to master swearing, Scotty talking to the computer mouse, Chekov bleating about “noocular wessels”. And yet it’s hard to deny the charm of this film and its cheerful refusal to take itself too seriously. God, what a long way we’ve come since V’Ger.

For what feels like the third part of a tight trilogy, not all the continuity is top-notch. The bridge of the Klingon ship looks almost nothing like the ersatz throne room seen in the previous film. I’ll have wait until The Final Frontier to confirm whether or not we ever again see the gleaming white JJ Abrams-style Enterprise A bridge which ends the film. I also believe that this is the beginning of “there’s no money in the future.” Kirk pawns the antique glasses McCoy gave him in order to get cash, commenting “they’re still using money,” and yet as recently as the first act of the previous film, Bones was in a dive bar, haggling over the price of passage on a ship.

For another take on this movie, see here.

TAS S02E01 The Pirates of Orion () opens with a disease sweeping the ship that is now under control and is said to be no worse than pneumonia. God, when was this written? Only after Spock collapses does McCoy determine that the pathogen is fatal to Vulcans. Did nobody think of self-isolation? This is a McCoy-centric episode but he does little but exposit. The pirates feel fresh but their motivation is woolly – if the Orion captain was determined to destroy both ships, why bother beaming down with the drug? And the pacing is sluggish. “You’ve already made up your mind.” “Yes but the episode is two minutes short so we’d better sit around the conference table discussing it for a bit longer.” No major changes for season two, including no extra music so they keep using the same three cues over and over again which is driving me slightly crazy.

TAS S02E02 Bem () is the name of the exotic alien observer on-board the ship for a first contact mission. He talks like Yoda and his body parts can float around independently in a way which looks more like magic and less like science-fiction. The saurian aliens are good fun too, but I wish Kirk wouldn’t keep calling them “aborigines”. The pacing here is sluggish in the extreme. Stately shots of the Enterprise crawling across the frame. Long conversations which repeat information we already know – including Kirk’s middle name which is repeated three times.

TAS S02E03 The Practical Joker (). No sooner are the titles off the screen than the Romulans are firing on the Enterprise, but they duck through an energy field and suddenly everything is fine and the crew are celebrating with a slap-up meal, complete with trick glasses and wonky forks. The dialogue is full of clichés this week, both Trek clichés and pre-existing ones (“discretion is the better part of valour”, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this”, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”, “Method to this madness.”). On the whole a series of unimaginative practical jokes do not make for an engaging episode. This episode does give us our first look at the Rec Room, later to  become the holodeck on TNG, but this is lazy, tiresome stuff. The plot is resolved because Romulans fear disgrace more than death. Sure, let’s go with that.

TAS S02E04 Albatross () More plague. This time, McCoy has wiped out a whole planet with a dangerous vaccine. It’s a little known fact that this episode was the early work of Joe Rogan. As if this wasn’t all problematic enough, the virus causes a change in skin colour. But, in the end, the truth is exactly what we thought it would be. McCoy is a goodie after all. Again, the plotting is woolly. McCoy, who cured the plague, didn’t tell anyone how to cure it because medical knowledge is not to be shared. On the other hand, this McCoy almost sounds like the character from the live action show (although Kirk is still just a cipher and Spock only an exposition machine).

TAS S02E05 How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth (). In a hugely imaginative turn, the Enterprise tackles a mysterious alien probe which presents as a giant glowing cloud thing. Even more mysterious is the presence of a Mr Walking Bear at Sulu’s station. And, wouldn’t ya know it, the one day Walking Bear is on the bridge, a ship appears which takes a form he can recognise. In a familiar move, the probe zaps key crew members and takes them on board. Kirk, Bones and co figure out in minutes what defeated the intelligence of different civilisations over countless generations. It all builds to another pair of familiar tropes – the gilded cage and the pacifist Federation – but thoughtfully presented and the characters glimmer through here and there. Unaccountably, this decent but fairly routine episode won itself an Emmy.

TAS S02E06 The Counter-Clock Incident () The televised adventures of Kirk, Spock, Bones and co conclude with this reverse re-run of The Deadly Years which features the key crew members regressing to childhood. Robert April was one of the names considered for the character who became Christopher Pike. This episode ret-cons that to make someone of that name the first captain of the Enterprise. I really object to the ludicrous speeds given here, including a mysterious object said to be travelling at warp 36, and once more the transporter functions as a biological reset switch, but I do appreciate the wild alternate universe time-travel fantasy as the kind of story which maybe only this incarnation of Star Trek could have attempted.

Final thoughts

• Obviously done on a shoestring, the limited animation, often flat line-readings, and endlessly recycled music cues do a lot to obscure some occasionally quite decent scripting, but the short run times sap character details as well as providing less time for stories to build in complexity.
• Very little in these episodes is referred to again, so they end up sitting a somewhat outside the framework of the series as a whole. Roddenberry would claim they were and were not canon as the mood struck him.
• Average episode score for The Animated Series is 2.95, slightly better than Season Three of TOS, but behind TOS as a whole. Stand-out episodes include The Slaver Weapon, The Infinite Vulcan, The Magicks of Megas-Tu but nothing here is a nailed-on classic. Worst episodes include the idiotic The Practical Joker and the deeply unfunny Mudd’s Passion.

TAS S01E12 The Time Trap () brings us to the Bermuda Triangle in space, whereupon the ship’s sensors immediately go berserk (so how is that this region of the galaxy has never been properly investigated before now?). Seeing a lot of new ship designs is fun for trainspotters but doesn’t make for riveting drama. Similarly, there are lots of alien races but they’re all just sitting around a conference room and talking for much of the running time. The subterfuge with the Klingons just falls flat in this medium and there’s an awful lot of padding – including the crew pausing to watch a floor show before they attempt to make their escape. For once, they can’t get the actor when they bring back a familiar face, so Doohan plays Kor instead of John Colicos. Nichelle Nichols’s versatility is also stretched to breaking point.

TAS S01E13 The Ambergris Element () is set on a water planet – again, not easy to do in live action, but easy in limited animation – and lo! before long, the landing party’s submersible is flung across the screen by a many-tentacled monster. And then a mysterious force makes Kirk and Spock go all fishy – which screams “reset button”. Fish-Kirk and Fish-Spock happily chatting away to McCoy from inside their aquarium, with only an optical ripple suggesting their watery fate, suggests that nobody is really thinking this one through. It remains ridiculous rather than shocking, and again, Shatner’s flat line readings a lot of the drama out, but the alien environment is worth an extra star. The planet is called Argo, like Jason’s ship, but I don’t know why.

TAS S01E14 The Slaver Weapon () was written by Larry Niven no less and brings us a snazzy redesign for the Enterprise shuttle craft. This Kirk-less episode revolves around a stasis box, in which time stands still, and features some uncharacteristically poor judgement from Spock who remonstrates himself for pursuing his curiosity. TOS sexism is given a tiny wrinkle here. The alien Kzinti will underestimate human females which might give Uhura the upper hand – but nothing really comes of this. That said, this features a novel location, exotic aliens (appearance and culture) strong focus on just three characters, has high stakes and is decently paced with some really strong science-fiction concepts. It all escalates nicely into a destabilising super weapon, hand to hand combat and an intelligent war computer. Probably the highlight of the series, and one that it wasn’t possible for Shatner to ruin. It’s also, I believe, the only episode of TAS which features a character’s death

TAS S01E15 The Eye of the Beholder () begins with familiar stuff – the crew investigating a missing research team – and continues to even more familiar stuff – they are in an artificial paradise which turns out to be an alien zoo. As noted, the characters have been ironed flat in these episodes and Spock is usually reduced to a single joke in which he recites a paragraph of gibberish from a Thesaurus, another character says “Do you mean XYZ?” and he replies “I believe that is what I said.” It’s a ten-year-old’s version of the character. So, if this feels like Star Trek in a way that the sillier animated episodes don’t, that’s largely because most of it is patchworked together from elements of live action episodes.

TAS S01E16 The Jihad (). The title alone is enough to elicit from me a cry of “Yikes” but this turns into a secret quest to find a magical tchotchke with random assortment of fantasy characters. The polar opposite of the previous episode, this feels like a generic Saturday morning cartoon rather than Star Trek but at least it doesn’t feel like a rerun. In fact, it’s so unlike Star Trek that the foxy chick is cracking on to Kirk who politely rebuffs her advances.

TAS S01E06 The Survivor (). The survivor in this case survived a meteor “swarm” and turns out to be a 23rd century Lord Lucan. I think that’s Shatner doing his voice, and Nichelle Nichols as his fiancée. Far from this being a post-monetary society, Lucan is a wealthy philanthropist – and in fiction they are always either masked vigilantes or psychopathic super-villains. Wanna guess which one we have here? So, this turns out to be that good old Trek stand-by: something nasty has snuck on board the ship. Lucan impersonates Kirk and takes control of the ship. While this doesn’t suffer by trying to space battles in animation, it doesn’t take advantage of the medium the way that Furthest Star did, so this all feels a bit rote – and the early plotting requires the crew to be dumber than usual. Some character work from “Carter” does something to redeem it. The relationship between the Vendorian and the grief-stricken Lt Anne feels very Star Trek in a way that many of these episodes have struggled to achieve. We also meet the leonine Lt M’Ress in this episode.

TAS S01E07 The Infinite Vulcan (). Walter Koenig’s script is very fast paced – we go from Sulu dropping the alien plant that just stabbed him to “he’s got a minute to live Jim!” in seconds. For the first time in ages, we get to see a really extravagant alien city and some aliens (and giant humanoids) that the 60s show would’ve struggled to realise, and this feels like a really strong version of what animated Star Trek could and should be (although about the final exchange between Kirk and Sulu is all sorts of wrong). But the great strength of the live action episodes – the chemistry between the leads – never really comes through here. Nimoy and Kelley are fine, but it’s evident throughout that William Shatner really couldn’t give a shit about this job. His line readings sound as if they’ve been tossed off in between golf games (and my understanding is that’s basically what happened).

TAS S01E08 The Magicks of Megas-tu (). After a wobbly start, during which the show’s scientific advisors seem to have gone for a liquid lunch, this generates considerable energy and pace. And even though those world-class character dynamics are never present, this admirably fulfills the brief of using the animation medium to tell thought-provoking science-fiction stories, even if it is using familiar tropes –the bridge is visited by a playful being with god-like powers who puts humanity on trial.

TAS S01E09 Once Upon a Planet () is another sequel to a TOS episode and early dialogue rams that fact home, even though the painted backgrounds only vaguely resemble to location chosen for Shore Leave. The solution to the problem turns out to be the same as last time, followed by having a chat with the previously murderous computer, so this is all a bit of a bore – zero gravity on the bridge is quite good fun though.

TAS S01E10 Mudd’s Passion (). I disliked Mudd’s Women and hated I, Mudd, and so I wasn’t looking forward to this one – yet another sequel to a TOS episode and in this case a third instalment. If anything this was worse than I expected. This time the slimy bastard is offering a strictly heterosexual love potion, which he’s knocking out at 300 credits a pop.

Some of the best episodes of TOS have probed and pushed at the limits of Spock’s logical stoicism. But this story does it with no subtlety, feeling or attention to detail. In earlier episodes such as All Our Yesterdays Spock was sufficiently self-aware to notice his own odd behaviour. This is a 10-year-old’s version of “being in love”, which is disappointing even in the context of a show aimed at children.

Nurse Chapel is given more to do here but she is once again defined almost entirely as “having the hots for Spock”. And McCoy refers to a fellow officer as “that pretty little Lt Uhura.” Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

TAS S01E11 The Terratin Incident (). Some sources give this as the 12th episode, not the 11th. I don’t know what’s going on there. This gives us another venerable science fiction idea but not one that Star Trek has attempted before – the crew is shrinking. It’s a wonderful use of the animation medium – it could never have been achieved in live action. Even making the crew suddenly smaller would have wrecked the budget, let alone slowly decreasing their size. All of the usual scientific inaccuracies with size-shrinkage are present here, but it seems churlish to complain about that when this is such fun to look at. Once again, the transporter is used as an all-purpose biological reset switch.

Stray thoughts

• The original series began as a meditation on the nature of being human, and quickly became a strikingly thoughtful science fiction adventure show with particularly strongly-characterised leading characters and a remarkably coherent vision of the future.
• Although produced under heavy budgetary constraints, these affect the final product differently, and it takes a fair few episodes before The Animated Series discovers the possibilities afforded it and begins to make real use of them.
• Red shirts have a much longer life-expectancy. In fact, death is a very rare occurrence in this incarnation of Star Trek.
• The Animated Series flirts briefly with the more thoughtful elements of the live action show, but when it tries to tell a personal human story and neglects the interplay between the regulars (which is always) the results are often dull. The episode with the most depth of characterisation – Yesteryear – suffered precisely because Kirk wasn’t there for Spock to bounce off. It never really recaptures the magic of the live action show, not least because William Shatner in particular is barely giving anything in his line readings.
• That said, the best episodes are better (and certainly shorter) than a great deal of those in Season Three.
• The key cast of this series is (in order of importance) Kirk, Spock, Chapel, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu. Poor Sulu.

Nightmare Alley

Guillermo del Toro follows up his Best Picture-winning storybook fable about forbidden fish love with this noir remake based on a hard-boiled novel, but once again he renders it in a glossy, pixel-y style which is sometimes at odds with the content of the first act. It’s true that the exotic and colourful carnival world looks wonderful through his lens, but given that a key element of the story is the contrast between the wondrous sights presented to the public and the mundane reality behind the scenes, I can’t help but wish for a similar contrast in the style of shooting – here everything looks like a perfectly contrived videogame cut-scene.

Gliding through proceedings with his customary charm is an effortless Bradley Cooper, who manages to drive a clear line from the shy outsider fascinated by the carny schtick, to the nervy neophyte conman, to the hardboiled and cynical huckster, to the frightened man on the run he becomes by the movie’s close. But the tone and the structure goes awry when we leave the carnival and abandon the wonderful cast of characters we have established, who make a single brief token appearance after the time jump.

What follows is rather more predictable, rather more rote, rather more a product of the genre conventions, and again somewhat swamped by the lush visual style which overwhelms almost everything, rendering even the excellent Cate Blanchett a standard-issue femme fatale, and giving Richard Jenkins almost no room at all to show what he can do. A few shocks along the way don’t fully make up for a storyline which meanders to a conclusion which I was unlucky enough to see coming in the opening ten minutes.

King Richard

Assuming you don’t know the first thing about Venus and Serena Williams and the role their father played in their rise to competitive tennis superstardom, this film will fill you in. It will even tell you the second thing, although it does pretty much stop there. Taking nearly two-and-a-half hours to laboriously plod through the key points of their life story from 11 to 14 (Venus) this fails to achieve much except recreating episodes which are fairly well-documented already. That Richard Williams abruptly stopped his offspring from playing competitive matches until Venus suddenly debuted as a 14-year-old pro must have been hugely frustrating for those around him and I can see how it looks like dramatic conflict in a story outline, or even in a script. But on screen, it never generates any real tension or interest, or character development, with all the major players ending the film in exactly the same place they started it, only $12m richer. With the conclusion of the story never in doubt, the only reason to see this is for Will Smith’s excellent performance, completely inhabiting Richard Williams and giving him depth and soul which the limited screenplay and flat direction doesn’t deserve.

CODA

This was the last of the Best Picture nominees which I watched and one for which I had high hopes after it pinched the PGA award from The Power of the Dog. Nightmare Alley was dazzling but empty, King Richard was pedestrian and dull. CODA was never less than entertaining and left me suitably heart-warmed but for a film which is emerging as a front-runner in the Oscar race, it’s pretty unambitious, unconfrontational stuff, which in another year might have been little more than an after-school special.

A lot of what it attempts to do, it succeeds in. The eccentric family unit of deaf Frank, Jackie and older brother Leo, complimented by hearing daughter Ruby, is very well-drawn both on the page and on the screen. It’s always a delight to see Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur is a wonderful figure and has picked up a Best Supporting Actor nomination, but it’s Daniel Durant as Leo who impressed me the most with his easy charm, contrasted with flashes of barely post-teen anger.

The film also seems to have dodged some of the accusations of inauthenticity which dogged the French original (at which subtitles had to be provided for deaf audiences who couldn’t make out the poorly-executed sign language), although Deborah – who has worked as an interpreter – wondered at Ruby’s consistent editorialising, in contrast to the usual ethics of CODAs who generally interpret everything regardless of their own feelings, and also at the deaf people refusing to “turn on” their voices even when trying to be understood by hearing people. One can only imaging that the deaf actors and consultants on the film were aware of these issues, but it is strange.

What’s less easy to forgive is how much of a chocolate box of a film this is, with magically easy solutions to potentially intractable problems, ideal boyfriends, mildly eccentric and inspirational teachers, a minor work conflict which doesn’t required too much exposition to unpack, and some tasteful conflict all set to soaring ballads. Can the Academy really look at this and The Power of the Dog and call this the best film of the year? Will CODA be another Green Book, getting virtue points for its representation and providing a warm hug of reassurance when depicting a marginalised community? It’s not impossible.

Of course, representation only works if lots of people see your story, and – let’s be clear – a warm family drama on Apple TV+ is going to get lots more hearing Americans watching than this year’s other sign-language film the highly inaccessible Drive My Car, but then the prize should be lots of viewers, not the highest award that filmmaking has to offer.

Which leaves us with some predictions to make. I still think the sheer originality of The Power of the Dog can and must triumph over the very watchable but shmaltzy CODA, but I appreciate that Campion’s film is a hard one to love. Less in doubt, surely, is Campion for Best Director (you may remember that when Green Book won Best Picture, Alfonso Cuarón won Best Director for Roma). My personal favourite of this crop is probably the wonderfully original Licorice Pizza although I have a lot of time for the beguiling Drive My Car as well – but I enjoyed watching all of this year’s nominees except for This Way Up. My chief complaint is that room should have been made for Tick Tick Boom, Flee or (by reputation) The Worst Person in the World.

Best Actor looks like a straight fight between Will Smith and Andrew Garfield – both excellent and I think Garfield might have the edge, although Will Smith has waited longer for his. Best Actress I think is Jessica Chastain’s to lose, although I haven’t managed to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye yet. Best Supporting Actor might well go to Troy Kotsur, especially if CODA does not win Best Picture. Best Supporting Actress is going to go to Ariana DeBose and nobody else needs to bother writing a speech.

The screenplay awards are harder to call, but I think I’d bet on Kenneth Branagh winning for Belfast, and that film winning nothing else, and Adapted Screenplay could well make it three for three for The Power of the Dog, unless the Academy turns on Campion, following her stupid crack about the Williams sisters at the Critics Choice Awards.

My previous poor record at this game has taught me to hedge my bets a bit. See you back here soon to pick over the results.