So TNG is being thrown under the bus? Again?
Yep. Arguably the most successful Trek, getting ragged on. Again.
Check this out:
I think the characters were mostly so bland that middle of the road episodes of TNG ended up being mostly forgettable.
Like someone else said, I'm sick of characters having to be angst ridden.
That, I think is the one big strength of season one TNG. It seemed they spent more episodes "out there" exploring. Where as later seasons got caught up in milk runs and politics a little too often. You barely got the sense they spent any time on the frontier.
Yep, exactly how I felt. S1 is under-appreciated.
That, I think is the one big strength of season one TNG. It seemed they spent more episodes "out there" exploring. Where as later seasons got caught up in milk runs and politics a little too often. You barely got the sense they spent any time on the frontier.
I would actually like to see more exoplanet colonies, either Human or other Federation species, that the new ship and crew are exploring and supporting. I think that would be interesting to see.
I came to TNG late, and didn't really appreciate it, but the more I watched, the more the Klingon political scene seemed to take over. It was fine at first, but it grew old after a while. Seeing more diverse situations and not the same old fighting between Klingons and [blank] species would be nice.
As a kid, I often couldn't wait for Klingons to appear, but looking back on TNG, what happened to Klingon culture was boring, and those seem much weaker episodes. Ronald D Moore wrote most of that stuff, and while I like his work on other things, it was under him that they became so banal. The politics of Sins of the Father and Redemption, etc, are not particularity compelling in hindsight.
As I get older, I would also like to see more in the way of exoplanets, discovery, etc.
What do people think of Star Trekian humanism - that it can't handle the "real world" or something?
That's the impression some people might get from watching the background for 24th century humans. A lot of it seemed very tamed in order to show how far humans advanced.
Very little beer, soda, tequila, but lots of tea. Very little contemporary sounding music, but lots of classical music.
TNG would only go as far as do analogy episodes about things like the freedom of same sex relationships, but not show it.
Sisko didn't want to participate with a recreation of a 60's casino, and it irked some people, because it was never considered something like that could happen in Trek.
Beverly dumped a Trill she was deeply in love with after the new host turned out to be a female, although her explanation seemed a little shaky.
That particular era kind of insulated and sugar coated certain things about humans living in the 24th century.
One thing Trek 09 got right was what a 23rd century club/bar might look like.
It had the flashing lights, loud club music. People drinking hard core alcohol.
It looked
real,
alive and interesting.
A TNG bar would have had just jazz music, be calm and quiet, etc.
So, you can get the impression that Trek sort of avoided elements of the real world in favor of super ideal world.
They didn't avoid it though. It was a conscious choice. Even the intellectual tastes people had were a unabashed argument in favor of education.
We know alcohol and tobacco are harmful carcinogens, and are responsible for numerous cancers, from facial cancer to cancer of the colon - recently people are beginning to recognize that alcohol (long considered "safer") may even be the worse. TNG wanted to show a society where people did the rational thing, and banished these industries - where people no longer felt the need and recognized they had a medical problem. A radical position even today.
I don't know what show people here were watching, but TNG remains radical, in my eyes, and I can't see what you are all seeing - we are looking for different things I think, and therefore seeing what we want to.
The 24th century did seem a little
too cultured and civilized at times. If nothing else, the new movies did bring a much-needed dose of rock-and-roll to what was starting to feel a little bit too much like chamber music.
It's worth remembering that, utimately, STAR TREK is not about life in a peaceful utopia. It's about danger and dilemmas on the Final Frontier, beyond the boundaries of the Federation.
As Q put it in his very best speech, space is wondrous, but it's not for the timid. You have to expect a bloody nose once in a while.
I'm sure Captain Kirk would agree.
You can risk your life and get a bloody nose without being a hard drinking cigar smoker, however. Wasn't TNG trying to show people could have this attitude, without ascribing to traditional mores of macho risk takers? Judging by the amount of vegan, environmentalist, mountain climbing, entrepreneur, poly-maths today, maybe he was ahead of the times.
And, for those who think TOS was not radically utopian or progressive like TNG, recall Kirk saying "we no longer consider crime a choice, but a disease - we no longer punish the ill". Radically utopian now, as it was in the late 60s - I still to this day watch the popular media argue in favor of destroying prisoners and criminals; the masses in my country favor reinstating the death penalty, and I occasionally hear the uneducated in my workplace arguing "we should cut off their [insert relevant body part]"
