Whilst working from home, I've been listening to the Ron Jones project: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeQ8lYZtvUXOYaypvrZqQ4QDYMh2LiQL7 It's flipping great, some of the scores for terrible episodes like Up the Long Ladder are actually pretty decent. Season 1 and 2 have this kind of TOS vibe, but by Season 3, the man was really knocking it out of the park with some excellent scores. And again, junk episodes like Evolution have a really decent theme. Its not always easy background listening though, try focusing on work whilst Intervention is playing! Such a tragedy that Berman wanted wallpaper music from Season 5 onward.
Ron Jones is noteworthy in that he has the second most generic name in human history, just behind John Smith.
Quite a few years back I ripped all my TNG DVDs to my iPod Classic to listen to at night and I also made a playlist of all my favourite episodes. I bought the Ron Jones Project CDs fairly recently and it was quite a revelation to realise that pretty much my entire list of favourites were episodes Ron had scored. He definitely elevated even bad episodes for me. I decided to listen to Human Factor from Booby Trap while writing this post.
Should this opinion be in the controversial Star Trek opinions? I think it's a great episode Surely I'm not the only one? This post is not an attempt to derail this thread, I just had to say this because I really like that episode.
Well, there are worse episodes. The music and the VFX are cool. But, basically, Wesley creates intelligent life an everyone is incredibly blasé about this. I mean, it's like he's made a Data and you'd think this was a pretty impressive achievement. It's always been a little bit crazy that Wesley's school experiment lets two nanobots with allegedly only the simplest of capabilities "interact". They "escape" and - whoosh - they evolve to a "civilization" in no time.
Well.... it's scifi so we need to give some slack. Wesley seemed to have very special nanites, he's a genious wonderchild after all. And if all else fails: Q, the trial might have something to do with it, Q wanted to see how humans would react to microscopic intelligent life? Nanites weren't just annoying bugs to step on but intelligent self aware creatues. Great episode.
Wesley always had a little different view on what constitutes a simple school experiment. A functional miniaturized tractor beam? An antimatter Experiment capable of warp powering a whole starship? somewhere in there is a hilarious family sitcom about Wesley‘s crazy hijinks in school and the routine nervous breakdowns of his teacher Mr Wilson. Wesley the Menace!
Ron Jones' genius cannot be understated. His compositions gave real life and excitement to episodes but without overstating them (for the most part, there were a few exceptions where episodes' scenes were overshadowed by music that became "too loud" (in tone, not decibel volume)). He elevated a lot of episodes that were either crap or had potential but season 1's muddy path bogged them down with so many stupid moments that they were dismissed as crap. TLDR. "Evolution" had a few conveniences for sure and my favorite is how each nanite fritter was scuttling around with gigabytes of RAM (but how big is its ROM and how well does it get used? ) At least it showed Wesley being fallible instead of Wonderboy: Saviour of the Galaxy (insert very loud bombastic muzak here).
I actually kind of like UTLL...not a bad message in terms of having disparate cultures getting along, though I find the moral and tech questions in it a bit overly reactionary. RAMA
have to agree with you there. Ron Jones' music for TNG was and is absolutely fantastic. it was such a shame that he was let go from the show.