How was season 1 received at the time?

[Christopher]

Oh, I think "Farpoint" was a decent enough pilot. I just don't care for the idea of the Q, which is more out-and-out magical than I like to see in my SF, and which was just a warmed-over TOS trope that Roddenberry tacked onto the pilot to pad it out. It was John DeLancie that made it work.

 

[2takesfrakes]

John de Lancie was raised right here, in Philly! He's my Home Boy ... but, uh ... yeah, he's brilliant, as an actor - I can't deny the proof of it. His wife also starred as the girl in Reeva's "chorus," later on in TNG. She gets killed with the other interpreters, leaving Reeva - who's deaf - to rediscover himself, whilst saving the mission, at the same time. A lot of good, Human drama, there. Their son, of course is Q, Jr. so ... the de Lancie family's given us a lot of STAR TREK entertainment and I love them for it! If you don't like Q's being tacked on to FARPOINT, well ... hey ...

To each his own, you know? "Live & Let Live," that's my motto!

 

[MakeshiftPython]

Funny, I think the Q subplot feels entirely tacked on -- which it was, since it was only added to pad what was conceived as a 90-minute pilot out to 2 hours. Q shows up periodically and makes some pompous speeches and threats, and claims he's judging the crew on their performance at Farpoint, but he doesn't really have any effect on the story as a whole. He pops up in the climax to heckle Picard, but it's all empty bluster and doesn't really have any impact on events. It's really rather obvious that he was an afterthought.

Farpoint would've been flat terrible without deLancie.

The way the whole Farpoint storyline is, I agree. Sure, Q was at that time a warmed over TOS trope, but the concept of humanity being judged for the way they handle their first mission is far more interesting than the mission itself.

 

[Amaris]

I loved the first season. Then again, I was 7 at the time, so take that with a grain of salt. Still, even now, I have a lot of love for the first two seasons (I love Diana Muldaur, so sue me!), and the first one, in particular, has a lot of adventure and excitement going for it. I think TNG worked well right out of the gate, and that like a fine wine, it only got better with age.

 

[Christopher]

Sure, Q was at that time a warmed over TOS trope, but the concept of humanity being judged for the way they handle their first mission is far more interesting than the mission itself.

Which is exactly why the "judging" feels tacked on to the story. Why this mission in particular? Okay, it does demonstrate that humanity is more compassionate than it was in the bad old days, but other than that it feels like an arbitrary choice for the big test.

 

[BillJ]

Oh, I think "Farpoint" was a decent enough pilot. I just don't care for the idea of the Q, which is more out-and-out magical than I like to see in my SF, and which was just a warmed-over TOS trope that Roddenberry tacked onto the pilot to pad it out. It was John DeLancie that made it work.

I would love to see the original pilot script for "Farpoint" minus the Q elements. But I just don't see a story that's all that interesting minus the inclusion of Q. I also don't see anything that hooks the audience and keeps them engaged for ninety-minutes.

All in my opinion, of course.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Sure, Q was at that time a warmed over TOS trope, but the concept of humanity being judged for the way they handle their first mission is far more interesting than the mission itself.

Which is exactly why the "judging" feels tacked on to the story. Why this mission in particular? Okay, it does demonstrate that humanity is more compassionate than it was in the bad old days, but other than that it feels like an arbitrary choice for the big test.

As to why Q chose the Farpoint mission to appear, Therin of Andor posted an answer that I was unaware of:

William T. "Puppy-dog eyes" Riker? Uh-uh. Right from the get-go I didn't like him. I watched him get saucer-eyed about the cool way the ship's computer would give him directions or tell him where people were, and immediately wondered, "Hey, you just transferred off another starship - why didn't you notice all this cool stuff there?"

Because the Enterprise-D was supposed to be state-of-the-art. The ship's computer and the holodeck advancements were unique to that ship, at the time. There was a premise-change after "Encounter at Farpoint". As scripted, the Enterprise was not going to be returning to known space after departing Farpoint. That's why Q stopped them.

It was a supposed to be a mission of perhaps ten years duration. For some reason, Starfleet did not proceed with that mission.

 

[Christopher]

Well, the original reason that Q interceded at the time was because Starfleet had only just begun impinging on the Q's territory. It wasn't until later episodes that the Q got inflated into these godlike, cosmos-spanning beings. In "Farpoint" they even used a ship of sorts, the forcefield bubble that pursued the Enterprise. They were meant to be more like the Organians or Melkot or Metrons, a race with great powers but occupying a particular territory.

So Therin's interpretation is a valid retcon given what was later established about the Q, in order to explain why an all-knowing and all-powerful race would've waited that long to put us on trial. But it wasn't the original intention, as I read it.

And either way, it's still kind of arbitrary, and the Farpoint plot and the Q-judgment plot don't really mesh all that well. Once you're aware that the Q material was added to a pre-existing story, you can pretty easily tell where it interrupts what was going to happen anyway.

 

[Lance]

IIRC, at least one early draft I've read a synopsis of skipped the Q plot completely, and was all about the mysterious Farpoint station. It introduced us to TNG directly through the character of Will Ryker (his name in this version being spelt this way), who is waiting there for the Enterprise to pick him up and is assessing Deneb's application for Federation membership when he begins to suspect strange goings-on... in this version when the 1701-D does eventually turn up it was a vessel of an undeterminate age, having apparently been in service quite a while already instead of it being a brand new ship, and Ryker was merely it's latest executive officer rather than being the first one... in fact as a whole I thought the story holds up surprisingly well without the Q plot, feeling more isolated and intriguing.

 

[Amaris]

Perhaps, and it would be neat to explore that avenue, but I love what we ended up getting. I mean, TNG without "Q"? Nevah!

 

[The Old Mixer]

Viewed in light of the Q plot being tacked on, Picard's declaration that they'll keep doing what they would have done if Q had never existed becomes unintentionally funny.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Viewed in light of the Q plot being tacked on, Picard's declaration that they'll keep doing what they would have done if Q had never existed becomes unintentionally funny.

I mean, .