I’ve always liked the more optimistic, utopian view Star Trek presented for the future. Maybe not entirely realistic, but it’s science-fiction and the hope of a better tomorrow. I don’t necessarily want a realistic look of the future presented to me.

I will say I can maybe see the technobabble getting old to some, but it didn’t bother me. It gave Star Trek it’s own feel.

Also the Star Trek characters weren’t completely perfect. Like Pat mentioned they had conflicts, but they mostly were interpersonal conflicts. A lot of talk about doing things ethically. The crew would handle things in as rational a way as possible most of the time.

Their conflicts were always philosophical or ethical in nature. It was never personal. No one insulted anyone else. They got along perfectly on a personal level.

That's just not human nature. People get angry about stupid stuff all the time, and that won't change by the 24th century.

CBS has now what, 5 new ST series? Picard, Lower Decks, Discovery, etc etc....too damn much. TNG was the last ST show I loved and cared about. The rest is noise that's now lost in the multibillion TV shows universe.

I'm going to take issue with your use of the word INTERPERSONAL there. On TNG, characters could disagree over a course of action in a situation, but that meant that once the situation was resolved, the conflict was over.

What Roddenberry vetoed was conflict in the characters' relationships that could be text or subtext in any given episode or situation. While you point out individual instances where a character was driven by anger, jealousy, envy --all those were people gone bad. Starfleet personnel were humans who had evolved above the fray of vices. Imagine if Worf and Deanna had gotten together in Season 5, and Riker didn't like it, and it colored how the three characters interacted while they still had to work together. And then if at some point Deanna and Worf broke up. Those would be INTERPERSONAL conflicts.

I am not a Wesley hater, but I always wonder where is the rest of the crew on this kid being an "acting Ensign" . . . or solving problems in engineering? Barclay is a trained Starfleet engineer and a graduate of the Academy. Shouldn't he be complaining all day long about this punk kid getting in his way? Aren't there a bunch of Ensigns, who want to be Command Lieutenants, who should have that seat at navigation?

DS9 was a purposeful move to do something different by making much of the cast non-Starfleet and non-human, the characters could be in conflict with each other. VOY was set-up to be all conflict with Maquis and Starfleet butting heads, but apparently it wasn't in the producers DNA to be able to pull that off because they castrated Chakotay and had everybody fall in line behind Janeway pretty quick.

TNG ran from 1987-1994. Basically you want it to be produced like a show that would have premiered 20+ years later, where serialized narrative and story arcs are pretty much expected.

DS9 was different because it premiered in 1993, when experimenting with that kind of storytelling was becoming more acceptable, and because Ira Steven Behr was in charge and wanted it to be that way.

I was typing out my long ass answer when you posted this.

Yep.

I suppose I can see that a bit. I guess it doesn’t bother me. I don’t need to see the crew bicker amongst each other constantly. It was an episodic show and most of the conflicts were self contained to the episodes.

And I didn't need or WANT to see them bicker constantly.

But once in a while having a personal issue, something showing that the characters are real people and have flaws like real people would have been nice.


And I don't want to make it seem like I'm bashing TNG, because I'm not. I'm nit picking to a certain degree. It just could have been better - especially in the last 2 seasons.

They always came across as real people to me. They were just real people who lived in a future time--and acted that way. As I stated earlier in this thread, TNG (unlike all the subsequent shows) had the characters act like they were from a more evolved civilization. To them our time was like what the Dark Ages are to us. Most of us don't act like people from the Bronze Age or the Dark Ages. Why would they think and act like us?


^^ Many found scenes like this off-putting. I frankly found them refreshing. I don't need all sci fi shows have characters act like us and think the 20th/21st century was "all that".

Not to get too off course, but the technobabble does have a place. If you've seen the last episode of Discovery S3, the resolution to the plot is a little out of the blue, and I can't help but think that a little technobabble would have helped it go down a little easier.


This goes for anybody but I want to say that if you're interested in more TNG, then Lower Decks is the show for you. It is the most logical extension of TNG, both in aesthetic and story tone feel. It does skew towards the comedic side, but all the jokes are "in-canon", that is they feel organic to the Trek universe. And it's not all comedy, the final two episodes get deep into psychological trauma of a main character and there's fallout from a neglected TNG era enemy.

Regarding technobabble- one thing to keep in mind is that while it may have just sounded like a bunch of big words thrown around it actually had basis in actual science a lot of the time.

Michael Okuda is the guy who’s credited for a lot of those lines. He would come up with explanations that made sense within the confines of the rules of Star Trek, and that had some basis in real life science often.

I think a lot of it was down to delivery. I feel like in particular LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner were really good at delivering those type of lines.

I’m not sure the Okuda’s (Michael and his wife Denise) are involved in Star Trek much anymore.

The Bronze Age???

TNG was set 400 years in the future. 400 years into the past would take us to the time of Shakespeare.

Don't we act like people from that time? We fall in love and have heartbreak. We feel happy and sad and mad. People are noble and courageous, but people are also petty and mean. People lust and envy and get jealous.

Think about this. The Enterprise saved Earth and human civilization from complete annihilation (assimilation) by the Borg . . . TWICE! And they all act like it was all in a day's work.
When Captain Jellico is giving Riker shit during Seasson 6, where's the scene where Riker says, "Look fucktard, I'm the guy who was Captain of the Enterpreise when we defeated the Borg! What have you ever done? I don't need you to tell me how to make a shift schedule, you ass!"

Yeah, that's great but it's also a bunch of bullshit.

Who pays for those vacations on Risa? Where do they get the money to gamble? There are civilians serving drinks in Ten Forward, don't they get paid?

It makes sense that serving on the military on a starship provides you with everything you need, but being in Starfleet doesn't have to be a lifetime commitment. If you leave Starfleet and have a family, where do you live?

How does the Picard family own that vineyard? How does Sisko's dad own that restaurant? How do people pay for Picard wine and Sisko gumbo?

Where do humans get the money to buy drinks and gamble at Quark's? Or pay to get their clothes tailored by Garek?
Did Sisko buy the land on Bajor to build a house? Wasn't Jake getting paid to be a war correspondent? Can a civilian just live on DS9 for free?

So Picard, who spent his whole life in Starfleet and never gave a shit about money, retires and lives on a massive estate. Does everybody on Earth get to live on a massive estate with servants? And if money doesn't exist and all your needs are taken care of, who works as a fucking servant? And how does Picard plan to pay for Rios' ship?

This is (or rather was) Gene Roddenberry's fictional world. As the show went on Michael Piller, Ronald D. Moore bent the rules some, but for the most part they abided. And frankly it spoke to me and millions of others. I find the world I live in absolutely disgusting and depressing. When I was younger TNG (and to a slightly lesser extent, TOS) was a much welcomed escape. I wasn't the only one who felt that way too. As time went on, TPTB wanted Trek to be more "realistic" its popularity went down. Now correlation is not causation, but it's as good a guess as any.

If I want to watch a science fiction show where people of the future are as petty, greedy, and warlike as we are now I'll watch Babylon 5, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica or the multitude of other SF shows that have that. Just give a me a couple shows that give me a little hope for humanity--even if it's not "realistic".

For me, I really don't care about the details of the economics of Trek. I didn't give it much thought. Roddenberry had his idea of his creation and subsequent show runners have theirs. The Jean-Luc Picard of TNG is vaaaaastly different from the Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: Picard. As much as I respect Deep Space Nine as a series, it totally wrecked Trek as a intellectual and commercial property. TNG was saying that "humanity will evolve" and DS9 said, "nope!". There were plenty of sci fi shows that have the "nope" philosophy. That's why I cleave to TOS and TNG like dear friends.

I don't fret about whether The Force is real in Star Wars or how realistic Superman's powers are. They're fictional properties that feed my soul. That's enough for me.

Well, if contemporary fans of sci-fi/fantasy were all eager to watch optimistic and inspiring TV shows, The Orville would have been a hit.

Chicken or egg? I don't know. But the people who make TV shows for adults are making shows with darker themes and more complex characters and that's what audiences are responding positively to. The first McDonalds stopped selling BBQ because people were mostly buying the hamburgers.

The show has too much of a comedy vibe. I like The Orville and it defintely has some Star Trek themes but there's not one episode which doesn't give the feeling of a comedy series, which isn't that funny either. It's not Star Trek, it's not Galaxy Quest, it's something in between. It looks like a spoof, but isn't. It is a hommage, but doesn't take itself serious enough. There's no time where this would've been successful.

I don't know why there isn't a show runner who would take a chance a make an optimistic sci fi show that was NOT a goofy comedy. Even as a limited series event. They've made shows about all sorts of odd premises that have surprised people. In these deeply troubled times, a show that offered a hopeful outlook of the future with honorable characters doing honorable things might be explosively popular. Modern television has taken bigger risks...

The third season of Discovery was trying to be more opmitistic and for the first part of the season it worked.

You know that really points to how poorly the showrunners kept track of character growth. Riker absolutely would have been fine at handling the Cardassians instead of Jellico. And he was right to tell Jellico that changing everybody's sleep schedules on the brink of a war breaking out was a monumentally stupid idea. Riker should have got the CMO to override that decision as being harmful to the health of the crew.

While I prefer DS9, TNG reached very high highs (especially from mid Season 3 to late Season 6). Loved excellent episodes like Cause and Effect, Inner Light, Best of Both Worlds, Chain of Command, The Drumhead, The Defector, etc. Also, lots of fun episodes like Next Phase, the Moriarty episodes, Clues, etc. Plenty of other good episodes I could name too. Also, there's great chemistry between the actors.

That said, the first season is awful - perhaps the worst in the entire franchise - and the second season is only a little better, with only a handful of good episodes.

For me, while I can definitely see why so many people abhor the first season of TNG, but I always found it fascinating. There really was a sense of wonder in that first season. You really felt like you were out in the unknown. I think some of it was helped by the absolutely beautiful music they used for each episode. I'll go so far to say that I prefer the first season over a massive swath of Voyager and the majority of Enterprise. In the first season episode, "Where No One Has Gone Before" where the enterprise is propelled into the furthest reaches of the universe, it really seemed wondrous. In the Voyager pilot, "Caretaker", the crew is sent 70,000 light years from home. The Delta Quadrant really doesn't seem that different from the Alpha Quadrant. Instead of conflicts with the Cardassians, they get in conflicts with the Kazon.

Voyager never did anything like this:

I actually like a handful of the first season episodes a lot (110010101, The Naked Now, The Big Goodbye, etc).

But it DID take the show 2 full seasons to really find it's voice and style.

If this is where 70,000 light years takes you, where does an extra 2,600,000 light years take you?

Wesley is a punk.

I think season one is weaker in comparison, but I don’t think it’s too bad all around. You’re right that there’s a different feel to it, which I feel carries over to season two as well.

There’s a definite feel like this is a new crew on their first missions. I admit some of the episodes aren’t great, but there is a sort of charm to those early episodes at the same time.

The biggest thing that throws me off is Jonathan Frakes without his beard. He looks so different without it.