Or they introduce stuff that comes into play later.
Its a tough watch
- Thread starter Roacho
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Or they introduce stuff that comes into play later.
I liked it from the start, but popular fan opinion is season 3 is when it starts to "get good".
I disagree though - last third of season 1 is when it starts to really pick up (episodes like Heart of Glory, Arsenal of Freedom and Conspiracy) and season 2 is excellent! Lots of good episodes.
I disagree though - last third of season 1 is when it starts to really pick up (episodes like Heart of Glory, Arsenal of Freedom and Conspiracy) and season 2 is excellent! Lots of good episodes.
I’ve seen a lot of people recommending Datalore from S1.
I agree that, unfortunately this is pretty much required viewing due to the number of threads that continue from it as the series moves along.
But man, this is an absolutely crap episode. It’s bottom-3 for S1. Really, really bad. Almost like a 13 year old wrote it.
I also don’t necessarily agree that the show gets “better” in the later seasons. It definitely changes, but I’m not sure it’s better. The weird, atmospheric sci-if tone from the earlier seasons gets replaced with too much soap-opera and run-of-the-mill stuff that could have been done in a non-sci-fi show.
I’ve had the BR disks for 5 years now. I still can’t get through a rewatch. It’s not that it’s a bad show. It’s just dreadfully boring about 60% of the time.
I agree that, unfortunately this is pretty much required viewing due to the number of threads that continue from it as the series moves along.
But man, this is an absolutely crap episode. It’s bottom-3 for S1. Really, really bad. Almost like a 13 year old wrote it.
I also don’t necessarily agree that the show gets “better” in the later seasons. It definitely changes, but I’m not sure it’s better. The weird, atmospheric sci-if tone from the earlier seasons gets replaced with too much soap-opera and run-of-the-mill stuff that could have been done in a non-sci-fi show.
I’ve had the BR disks for 5 years now. I still can’t get through a rewatch. It’s not that it’s a bad show. It’s just dreadfully boring about 60% of the time.
What's your problem with "The Battle" and "Time Squared"?
The first one is at least watchable and gives some background on Picard's starfleet career and the second one is a great and really interesting episode. Better and more fascinating than "Cause and Effect" imho.
Well said.
TNG's lengthy run has numerous transitions, some that segue more slowly than others. It makes for an interesting run.
Season 5 onward definitely has an excessive soap opera feel, with stories that could have been told anywhere.
IMHO, Datalore succeeds due to Spiner's skilled acting (necessary considering what the story tells) combined with first rate incidental music, direction, and lighting. But a lot of it is hokum, and the emotional elements designed for visceral response do get boring and the main content of the story isn't deep enough to get anything out of it. After several years, a rewatch does work bit the hokey elements still stand out...
Seconded, re: "The Battle". There are some plot contrivances but what's new with any form of storytelling?
Picard does get some backstory and it's done well, especially with season one's growing pains.C&E has its own innovations, but I definitely agree Time2 has that element of second guessing one's self that works a lot better (and doesn't get as boring on rewatch, even more than Datalore it's best as a one-time viewing, but C&E isn't hokey...)
The conventional wisdom today is that season 1 was bad, but what people today forget is that most 1980s American SFTV was much, much worse. It's all about context. For your typical 1980s SFTV viewer like me, the par for the course was cheesy, campy nonsense like Knight Rider or Manimal or V: The Series, and it was rare to get something actually worthwhile like the Twilight Zone reboot, Starman, or Max Headroom. So when TNG came along, yes, it was flawed, but it was easily one of the best American science fiction TV shows since the original Star Trek. It had a fantastic cast, top-notch production values (for TV of the day, which mostly relied on cheesy video effects that have aged far more terribly than anything in early TNG), and stories that actually aspired to intelligence and philosophical substance, whatever their shortcomings in execution. Certainly we recognized that TNG had its share of duds, but it had more merits than most of its contemporaries, and even its worst, dumbest elements weren't as bad or as dumb as the rest of '80s SFTV. We didn't see it as bad, because there wasn't really anything better onscreen at the time. Graded on a curve, it was at the top of the class.
The thing is, TNG's success paved the way for a new wave of smarter, better SF shows in the ensuing years, shows like Quantum Leap and Alien Nation and The X-Files and VR.5 and eventually Babylon 5, Stargate, and so forth, and of course TNG's own greatly improved later seasons and its spinoffs. So the overall quality of SFTV improved so greatly in the wake of TNG that we've forgotten how relatively good season 1 was in the context of its time.
Remember that TNG is a non-serialized TV show. So if you wanted to start at Season 3, and just come back to 1 and 2 later (maybe), you would still get more or less the full experience.
You'd just miss out on Dr. Pulaski, who I found way more interesting than the serviceable but forgettable Dr. Crusher.
You'd just miss out on Dr. Pulaski, who I found way more interesting than the serviceable but forgettable Dr. Crusher.
on rewatching, I go back to season 1 or 2 first, as said a bit more "magical" or interesting that latter seasons.
That's a good advice. It would be smart to watch every epieode at least once to form your own opinion. And perhaps eventually watch them again to remind yourself what some episode was all about. Right now for me it's been many years since I watched some episodes, no matter what season. I think a rewatch is coming up sooner or later.
Some of TNG's people worked on those shows too.
But, yeah, that is an excellent point.Knight RIder started out good but ended up using cliches and too much fantastical/fantasy elements that killed suspension of disbelief. Hasselhoff loved the show from the start and it shows in his performance, which didn't hurt either.
The original V miniseries was great. The 1984 Final Battle was... a step down. The 1985 weekly show started with potential despite the budget cuts but lost its way in scripting so badly that half the cast would leave. Even the unmade season finale would have had Julie leaving. The mid-season retooling didn't get much farther than some nifty new credits that restore the fear factor but that's about it...
Even TNG season one, barring a couple episodes, was still better than those - which were axed only a year or two prior...
TNG definitely had the cast. Shame that Roddenberry had to battle his own demons in that a captain can't be bald (yet must not have a hairy chest as per 1960s Kirk era...)
TNG did have more new effects rather than recycled/borrowed ones, that's for sure. Especially Knight Rider, where reuse of cel animation or, worse, sound effects from video games like "Centipede", were quick to pull the viewer out of the show's universe. But it was still icing on the cake.
Whatever the shortcomings and rewrites, TNG1 still did have a cerebral aura that the other shows did not have.
Within the context of the time, that is 100% true.
TNG's style did indeed revolutionize storytelling.
I recently rewatched QL. It's a lot more schmaltzy and "teh feelz", with a thin premise, one they throw out the window with the evil leaper sequels in season 5.
X-Files was more or less shock jock 90s horror. The day Scully got abducted by aliens and probed behind a veil to keep the graphic nature to a minimum was the last episode I bothered with.
VR5 and Alien Nation were good. FOX had a habit of greenlighting excellent and original shows, only to not get whiz-bang ratings after three episodes, demand often-goofy changes in a belief that ratings will skyrocket due to that and not due to visibility or letting the premise unfold more organically than what their commercials were doing (and those sometimes sold the wrong message), and then axe it anyway. Along with those, Sliders was the other big example, and with Orville being a recent one - though it's changes were more subtle and Hulu took it over. Given FOX was bought by Disney, it wasn't canceled as such... now who will spend the $50/mo for the Live TV option where new episodes will air long before they're ported to their cheaper channel...
Sliders was unfairly pegged as "quantum leap ripoff" by some, except the only similarity was the blue and red CGI effects depending if you're the hero or the villain. Or because they couldn't get back to Earth Prime ("home") - in which case, any number of shows and movies that use red/blue or rely on being lost and unable to get back to an intended destination ("home"), and stories were doing that long before Star Wars and Doctor Who respectively as well...
The premises and executions were completely different. Sliders also did what-if scenarios and not just reenacting history for the feelz. If anything, Sliders is closer to being loosely inspired by "Voyagers!", which had to have been ripped off even more by Quantum Leap... QL's premise is creative but it's also comparatively limited (within Sam's own lifetime rather than any time in history unless an individual script demands it with some lame throwaway (almost as bad as how they connived the evil leaper to transfer with him and not Zoey...) not to mention Sliders lampshades and bypasses all their claims, saying a previous historical event took a different route and in that dimension they just landed in thanks to the technological invention gizmo sending them there is the result. Nobody's soul was jumping into others' bodies with theirs going back to the big blue screen waiting room...)And, yes, I really do adore QL. The blu-ray quality is surprisingly great, considering some later episodes were clearly edited on videotape to cut costs and you'll see the interlacing effect right enough...
Well It would be fair to say TNG S1-2 isn't of the same quality as TNG at it's peak during S3-5.
If I had to pick the absolute essential episodes from the first two seasons I woud likely pick the following, that isn't to say they are the best episodes of those opening seasons but some contain elements which are picked up later in the shows run
S1
Encounter ar Farpoint
Where No One Has Gone Before
The Battle
Datalore
Coming of Age
Skin of Evil
Conspiracy
Less essential episodes
Hide & Q
The Neutral Zone
The Last Outpost
The Big Goodbye
S2
Elementry Dear Data
The Measure of a Man
Q Who
The Emissary
Less ensential episodes
A Matter of Honour
If I had to pick the absolute essential episodes from the first two seasons I woud likely pick the following, that isn't to say they are the best episodes of those opening seasons but some contain elements which are picked up later in the shows run
S1
Encounter ar Farpoint
Where No One Has Gone Before
The Battle
Datalore
Coming of Age
Skin of Evil
Conspiracy
Less essential episodes
Hide & Q
The Neutral Zone
The Last Outpost
The Big Goodbye
S2
Elementry Dear Data
The Measure of a Man
Q Who
The Emissary
Less ensential episodes
A Matter of Honour
Some of TNG's people worked on those shows too.
And learned from the experience. Plus on TNG they had a bigger budget and producers who cared more about doing intelligent science fiction, and were in syndication and thus under less pressure from a network to dumb things down. It probably shouldn't be underestimated how important first-run syndication was to the increase in the quality of SFTV from TNG onward. To be sure, there were plenty of dumb shows in syndication too, but it gave the smart shows more freedom to thrive.
Indeed. The original miniseries was one of the best SFTV productions of the decade, but what followed went downhill, again thanks to network execs' very low expectations for the intelligence of the genre audience.
I think the cast departures were more a production decision to cut the budget, rather than the actors' own decision.
When I revisited TNG's syndication sister show War of the Worlds: The Series (just the first season, since I'm not a masochist), I was startled by how cheap the production values were compared to TNG -- not just the really crude video effects (aside from the recreation of the Martian War Machines in the pilot), but the amateurish camera and sound work that made it seem like it was shot in someone's basement. A lot of TNG's effects look very dated and had to be recomposited for HD, but for its day, TNG's effects were extraordinary, almost feature-quality stuff compared to nearly anything else on TV.
Yeah, it's really more fantasy than science fiction, and a version of the common approach back then to make an anthology-like show with continuing leads, by putting the lead in a different identity and situation every week (e.g. The Fugitive, The Incredible Hulk, Mission: Impossible, etc.). It emphasized drama and character more than science and tech, but that was one of its strengths.
FOX was no worse in its treatment of SFTV shows than any other network. The only reason it seems worse is that FOX bought so many more SFTV shows than any other broadcast network until UPN and The WB came along, which naturally made it happen more often numerically, though the percentage was about the same. Also, I think it was because FOX bought more shows that were memorable and earned significant fanbases, while the shows on other networks that were treated equally badly didn't manage to snag a loyal audience that would be upset by their ending (e.g. Space Rangers, Hard Time on Planet Earth, or Something is Out There, just off the top of my head).
Another thing people forget today is that when I was growing up, it was exceedingly rare for a science fiction or fantasy series to make it more than a season or two. Getting cancelled quickly was the norm for SFTV, not the exception. The problem wasn't any one network, the problem was that SF/fantasy was a much less popular genre than it is today. It had a niche audience, so it was hard for a genre show to bring in high enough ratings, especially given that genre shows tended to be more expensive due to their visual effects, a problem that wasn't solved until the technology for inexpensive CGI effects came to television starting with Babylon 5. So the odds were always stacked against genre. It was to FOX's credit that it kept trying regardless.
And there were some shows that FOX was very supportive of. They loved Alien Nation, and the only reason they cancelled it was because they needed to expand their schedule to more nights and could make four half-hour sitcoms for the cost of AN alone. But they kept trying to look for ways that they could afford to revive the show, and four years later they did revive it with a series of TV movies. Later on, under a different regime, both Dollhouse and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles were given second seasons despite low ratings, when just about any other network regime would've cancelled them. They didn't manage to get beyond two seasons, but they never would've gotten more than one if the network hadn't been exceptionally supportive.
Yeah, that came along during a time when FOX's execs were very bad with SF. People tend to talk about networks as monolithic units, but their execs come and go and have different policies and approaches, just as different occupants of the White House can have radically different policies and views from one another. "FOX" is not a person, it's just a place where various people have worked over the decades, and some of them have been better at handling SFTV than others. The era of Sliders was a low point in FOX's history with SFTV, an era that mercifully ended long, long ago. See also M.A.N.T.I.S. around the same time. Both shows were badly dumbed down at the behest of execs who had no idea how science fiction worked or what it was all about. I consider the season 3 finale of Sliders and the series finale of M.A.N.T.I.S. (which never even aired on FOX) to be probably the two most agonizingly bad hours of television I've ever seen in my life. (Which is another example of how the same writer can do better or worse on different shows, because the M.A.N.T.I.S. finale was written by David Kemper, later the acclaimed showrunner of Farscape. I think he made the M.A.N.T.I.S. finale bad on purpose as some kind of protest against the network's treatment of the show, but it was still torture to watch.)
I wouldn't go that far. There are plenty of episodes from other shows that I'd rather watch than bad star trek episodes.
The Stargate series for example are pretty good in general, but they also have their bad episodes.
+1
Even "Justice", despite its foibles, gets around some crass 80s-isms and has some intellectual depth that's too easy to overlook thanks to what amounts to roughly the first half of the story. And lets the audience ponder a few things on its own as well.
Very possible. The network didn't want a direct Nazi story because it would be "bland". Hmm, I've seen movies that sell it right enough, but the "nazi lizards" approach clearly had strengths as well as an aura of originality despite the influences.
Kenneth Johnson left V: TFB project early on as I recall, over disagreements. He wrote a follow-up novel, but it never got filmed...
A shame. The characters, and casting, elevated the series a LOT. Elias and Ham did get shafted in the series, so I assumed and never really looked up the behind the scenes stuff. Either which way, they had cut down the budget so much to begin with - few new effects and the sound reverb was removed without a line of dialogue or any other established in-universe cue. The premiere had a lot going for it and just one Visitor saying how they got around it... oh well.
Either way, factoring in the audience - and trying to appease the fans, genre-goers, casuals, and anyone in the middle is never easy.LOL
Now I'm worried about rewatching WotW. I remember enjoying it, warts and all... season 1, anyway... season 2 - yuck...
Aye. QL does it well, and the characters of Sam and Al, and as acted by Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell are terrific. In the right mood I'd binge on the show.
Just read that the streaming version chops and mattes the screen at 16:9. Ugh...
Great points!
You got me there... sci-fi historically not being popular is definitely something that is generally a truism. And FOX did advertise an episode of Sliders as if it were 90210... other episodes' promos had all the best sci-fi bits removed and were sold as a regular drama - trying to imagine a non-sci-fi person tuning in and wondering what the heck is going on...
Good points!
I forgot about Dollhouse - season 1 was a bit better... though a show where the protagonist is just a puppet or "doll" for stored personalities makes cheering on the puppet or the personality a bit more complex.
Excellent point that is a great reminder.
Sliders' season 3 finale was horrible (never saw MANTIS), to the point even TNG's clunkers are more watchable. Even the caber toss with Beverly's laughably romance with a green gassy ghost...
I remembered liking season 1, but when I rewatched it, it was mostly terrible. The main thing I liked about it originally was the great rapport among the cast, but while that chemistry was still there, I realized that their talent wasn't as great as I'd thought, or at least they weren't being directed as well as they could've been, since the performances were quite broad.
Again, that's hardly exclusive to FOX. Downplaying the sci-fi in hopes of attracting a wider audience is commonplace network procedure. Look at Person of Interest. It was one of the very few science fiction shows that CBS has done in the past few decades, and CBS was constantly pushing its producers to tone down the SF elements and be more of a crime procedural, which is why the larger story arc is so very, very slow to develop.
The whole back half of Sliders season 3 was atrocious. The writers thought that science fiction meant ripping off old horror movie plots, and that character conflict meant nonstop gratuitous bickering. People complain about the Sci-Fi Channel seasons because of the cast changes and all, but the writing on season 4 was immensely improved from season 3. I don't think I've ever seen another show get so disastrously bad and then recover so well, though a few have come close.
I did a overview of M.A.N.T.I.S. on my blog nearly a decade ago:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/the-multiple-faces-of-m-a-n-t-i-s-1994/
The pilot movie is worth checking out -- it's written by Sam Raimi and Batman '89's Sam Hamm, it has Carl Lumbly and Gina Torres in it, and it's pretty daring for its time in featuring a nearly all-black cast and tackling racial politics and unrest. But I would not recommend the subsequent series, a wholesale reboot (keeping only the core premise and Lumbly's character but restarting the continuity) that was much more unambitious and much, much worse than the pilot. You can read more about it at the link.
I like both episodes, but I wish Bob Justman's original plan for the scenario in "Time Squared" (that the space vortex thing was created by Q, along with the alternate Picard and shuttle) had been followed through. Bob had wanted Q to reveal this on the shuttle in "Q Who?" as a test of humanity, but Gene nixed establishing the connection. I feel like those details help make "Time Squared" work better since otherwise there are a number of elements that don't make as much sense as a standalone episode.
I likewise wish that the original concepts for "Justice" had been used to some degree over the final, much sillier version we got.
I seem to recall Sliders was hit by some serious executive meddling, to the ultimate detriment of the show. There was a lot of good potential in the series but it wasn't always used to the best degree.
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