If you could pick one episode of TNG to be the first feature length film of the TNG cast, what would it be? Or would you stick with Generations? I think Yesterday's Enterprise actually would be my choice for no other reason than the fact that I just loved that episode.
What do you call it when some TNG eps would have made better movies, and some TNG movies would have made crappy eps?
^^ I think he means which of the 178 TNG episodes would have made a great feature-length movie. For example, for me, I would stretch "Masks" into a full-length movie!
To me it's like, duh, Yesterdays Enterprise-- except with the original crew going back to save history. Not just Spock, but the whole crew sacrificing themselves to save the Earth, the Fed and galactic peace. The Ent-A going back into that anomaly phasers and photons blazing and convincing the Klingons that humans were better as allies than adversaries!
"Best of Both Worlds," would have made an awesome movie, in my opinion. Obviously it would have taken a small chunk out of the TV series not to have it air and later episodes would have been affected, but that wasn't the point of the topic.
"Parallels"...though given the conventions of making a TNG movie it probably couldn't be Worf doing the timeline-jumping....which would be a shame since I thought he was the perfect character to throw into that sort of situation.
Outside of the obvious ones like The Best of Both Worlds and Yesterday's Enterprise (though, not sure how I feel about a movie which didn't really happen), there are really surprisingly few TNG episodes that stand out as good candidates. That's a good indication to me that Star Trek, in general, and probably TNG in particular are better suited for TV. Schisms, The Chase, and I Borg are episodes where the plots could've been expanded into interesting "high concept" films. Of course, they would need some more action to be successful on the big screen.
"Darmok"! It's my favorite TNG ep., and it very nicely captures what Star Trek is All About (TM)---reaching out to other lifeforms in order to better understand ourselves. And Paul Winfield was an amazing actor!
^It is a great episode, but I'm not sure it could be expanded to two hours without becoming tedious for the majority of the viewing public. I wouldn't mind being proven wrong, though.
I agree with this - a missed opportunity - they should have saved this script to be a movie, should they ever make one, and had it be the Enterprise-A that came through the rift ... that would have been EPIC ... I really felt some of the details about Captain Garrett seemed like Captain Kirk ... worried about the crew, stubborn about accepting medical treatment ... though I wouldn't have had Kirk die the way Garrett did...
As someone said already, Yesterday's Enterprise (with the 1701-A) would be my first choice for a script they adapted into the first movie. Another interesting idea was one that I think I read somewhere was the original concept for "Too Short A Season" in an early draft (or was that just a rumour?) - that instead of Admiral Mark Jameson, we would have had Admiral Kirk, very old at this point, travelling with the Enterprise-D to negotiate the release of hostages on a planet he once visited. The plot would have needed to be expanded, but I think the idea of Kirk taking command of the mission like Jameson did, with the tensions with Picard, would have been an interesting take... and if Kirk was having to deal with consequences from some actions he took as captain of the original Enterprise ... it could have led to some nice introspective moments with Picard. The whole idea of the Admiral taking an alien drug to make himself young enough to go on missions again would have been an interesting theme as well, considering how Kirk seemed to regret aging in some of the original movies (e.g. The Wrath of Khan). Jameson certainly seemed as though he was written with the intention of being a Kirk-like character. Either way, if they had made Yesterday's Enterprise or Too Short a Season into a movie with original series characters, they still could have called the movie "Generations" :-) (... and just to throw it in, if they were making a novel into a movie, I think Peter David's Vendetta would have been a way better Borg movie than First Contact, too!)
Agreed! I remember being blown away by that book as a kid. I also really loved Q-Squared by PAD, which would have worked as a replacement for Generations.
When I started this thread my pick was also Yesterday's Enterprise, but I think it should have been the 1701-B just the way it was in Generations with Kirk and crew going into the future while defending the Klingons against the Romulans especially given that the last movie before Generations had to do with Kirk, the Klingons, peace, and to a smaller extent the Romulans. There would be so many continuity aspects that would be great to play off of like Worf's ancestor defending Kirk and McCoy, the Khitomer Massacre by the Romulans, the feud between the Mogh and the house of the Duras, etc. It would have been perfect!
I agree with a lot of the ones already named from what I skimmed, so I won't pick those since we have just one. I wouldn't have minded seeing Unification as a movie, though with ramped up action. As for the novels, Crossover would've made for a better Generations idea than what we got from the actual Generations movie.
"All Good Things..." Even the writers admitted it was a better movie than 'Generations'. Of course, then, I have no idea how the series would have ended... but, y'know... whatevs.