Rewatching Season 1 TNG

[2takesfrakes]

I hated everything to do with the people of Encounter at Farpoint, from their horrible fashion sense, to the way they conduct business in the market-area. But outside of that, I love the episode. Gene Roddenberry had, apparently, added the Q segments at the request of the studio. As a result, the story has multiple layers to it that continue to make it interesting and worth watching. Without Q the story doesn't "feel" like an introductory episode, it's too thin, so sometimes, Studio Interference isn't such a bad thing.

The cinematography was strangely inconsistent, though. Some shots would be photographed with rich colours and a moody feel to it, then someone else in the same shot would be photographed with more standard TV lighting. An example is when Picard orders Riker to manually dock the sections of the Enterprise back together. Stewart's given the luxurious lighting and Frakes is lit slightly differently, for their close-ups.

 

[Sans]

My understanding is the Q bits where added when Gene learned it was moved from a one hour premier episode to a two hour premier episode.

 

[2takesfrakes]

 

[RAMA]

The studio wanted a grand 2-hr premiere. Gene and Dorothy Fontana had a nice 1-hr pilot written and fought hard to keep it that way. Q was introduced to "pad" the story.

I hated everything to do with the people of Encounter at Farpoint, from their horrible fashion sense, to the way they conduct business in the market-area. But outside of that, I love the episode. Gene Roddenberry had, apparently, added the Q segments at the request of the studio. As a result, the story has multiple layers to it that continue to make it interesting and worth watching. Without Q the story doesn't "feel" like an introductory episode, it's too thin, so sometimes, Studio Interference isn't such a bad thing.

The cinematography was strangely inconsistent, though. Some shots would be photographed with rich colours and a moody feel to it, then someone else in the same shot would be photographed with more standard TV lighting. An example is when Picard orders Riker to manually dock the sections of the Enterprise back together. Stewart's given the luxurious lighting and Frakes is lit slightly differently, for their close-ups.

 

[2takesfrakes]

There you go - that's what's up! Thank you, sir.

 

[stardream]

I am always distracted by Michelle Philips in the Paris Story simply because I know too much about The Mommas and the Poppas. I kept expecting her to start singing.

 

[BillJ]

The studio wanted a grand 2-hr premiere. Gene and Dorothy Fontana had a nice 1-hr pilot written and fought hard to keep it that way.

People may have tuned away quickly from TNG if that shitty Bandai story was all we got for the premiere.

 

[suarezguy]

I really love "Datalore" and "Coming of Age," both felt really significant for their main characters Data and Wesley; "Where No One Has Gone Before", "The Big Goodbye" and "Conspiracy" were also really good and the cast had pretty strong chemistry from the beginning.

 

[BillJ]

There are a ton of solid, entertaining episodes in season one.

"The Naked Now"
"Where No One Has Gone Before"
"The Last Outpost"
"Lonely Among Us"
"The Battle"
"Hide and Q"
"The Big Goodbye"
"Datalore"
"11001001"
"Too Short a Season"
"Heart of Glory"
"The Arsenal of Freedom"
"Skin of Evil"
"We'll Always Have Paris"
"Conspiracy"
"The Neutral Zone"

The biggest flaw to the first season is how they're always trying to shoehorn Wesley Crusher into the episodes.

 

[Isolinear]

There are a ton of solid, entertaining episodes in season one.

"Hide and Q"

Got to disagree on that one. Hide and Q is a horrible episode. An ugly planet set with even uglier aliens and nothing really interesting happens. Wave after wave of stupid looking Pig aliens attack our heroes. It gets boring real quick. The only good thing in there was Wesley's 'death'.

 

[jaime]

I've always been in the minority on the 1st season of TNG; I thought the season was interesting-Stewart selling the show for what it was, and he didn't hold back on the drama. Yes, there were episodes which mimicked some TOS episodes, but I appreciated the tone of the season. Especially, during the time the Star Trek films were steering to comedy in IV and parody in V.

TNG could've easily followed in the path of the films but rather go their own way. All shows have some bumpy roads, but TNG, besides Troi's off again - on again mysterious foreign accent, and some position changes from the core characters, was consistent, and the stories were Utopian. I hear all about the writers' frustrations about Roddenberry's guidelines, but I think it made a pretty great show overall. Which is still popular today.

Just look at the spin-offs that didn't have those guidelines, and what we had was a mixed bag of shows which was not really Star Trek. Its' "un-Star Trek" personalities boxed those spin-offs to cult status, and always failed to reach the potential of TNG. I'm happy Patrick Stewart worked so hard on the 1st season of my beloved series because it paved the way for more Trek for better or worse and later became a phenomenon.

To be fair, Trois accent is pretty good work, and is always on in the show, even when she sounds American like her mother, because it's not until the films that her London gel roots appear at all.
Someone described it as sounding like a deaf persons voice (see sesame Street or other rare shoes with deaf actors) which is spot on, and really shows some thought...she's from a planet of telepaths. Speech is probably rare and privacy a very different concept.

 

[STEPhon IT]

How awesome those Uniforms could've been if they had the TOS colors of Avocado green: Command, Blue: Science, and red: Engineering?

 

[2takesfrakes]

I love the various, mix & match uniforms Bob Fletcher designed for TMP and would've loved to have seen his work repeated in TNG. I was fine with the muted colours, but Green, Blue & Red would've been alright to help delineate the two shows. I would've even accepted black pants with coloured tops, but the TNG uniforms that were worn used too much black, throughout, though. And it just kept getting worse, as the franchise went on ... I hate that! Blackman was handed plenty of chances to make the uniforms really cool and wasted them all. But you know what? ... if it wasn't cheap-looking, it wouldn't be STAR TREK television, I guess.

 

[DeepSouthTrekFan]

For me, it's "The Neutral Zone," for its humor, interesting characters contrasting the series regulars, the Romulan menace, and a cohesive episode on many levels.

 

[2takesfrakes]

I had to put on "Too Short A Season," recently and I have to say, I really like Admiral Mark Jameson, the way he's written and played. I want to deride the make-up, so bad, but Michael Westmore made the most of a very challenging assignment, without the benefit of a big staff - or much time, hardly, at all. Marsha Hunt plays Mrs. Anne Jameson. She was born in 1917 and - bless her! - the old girl hasn't snuffed it, yet. She's still with us ... and seems quite an interesting person, even if Anne was kind of thinly written. She was kinda cute, way, way back in the day, too ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsha_Hunt_(actress)

 

[Tracy Trek]

I liked the one that Michelle Philips was in. The story about the time anomaly is interesting. I guess my favorite one is Where No One Has Gone Before. It is very loosely based on one of my favorite original series novels.

 

[2takesfrakes]

I'm not really up on STAR TREK trivia, but I do know that Michelle Phillips actually had not 1, but 2 STAR TREK captains! Jean-Luc Picard, of course ... and she also starred as the wife of William Shatner's character in "Secrets of a Married Man," where he hooks up with a prostitute in some Made-for-TV movie, back in the day.

 

[BillJ]

I liked the one that Michelle Philips was in.

"We'll Always Have Paris"

 

[mswood]

1st season was by a large a massive let down for myself, but I was so desperate for new weekly trek that I gave the show more time to find it's voice then any other tv show to ever air.

But it did have a few episodes I really liked or loved, and a few elements on the production end that I really enjoyed.

From the get go, the music was fairly solid and thankfully having original scores each week meant that we didn't have to reuse themes, something I strongly dislike. For example TOS romance theme, using the same theme each time makes it appear that each woman is loved or desired to an equal degree something that is absolutely not what my experience has taught me, same with danger, etc, even some of the weakest episodes had a solid score.

The cinematography of the first two seasons was really strong. Most of the other elements of the production from set dressing, costumes, makeup, and visual effects were fairly weak in my opinion. I really was extremely happy when Thesis stopped doing costume designs for TNG, while his work in the 60's was great and reflective of elements of it's time. I didn't really see any growth, it felt like the show could have occurred as the 4th season of TOS. FX work, was really weak, and I love model work, but they had a limited staff and were always out of time, getting rotating crews for the 2nd season, and expanding even that later in the series run did wonders for the work the fx crews managed. Though I do admit there are two shots that really did work great done in the 1st season and both done in the same episode, When the Bough Breaks. The shot of the Enterprise being flung away from the planet seeing it spin, and then the power source for the computer which was a tiny model, but done so that it appeared as a massive structure. the one aspect of the fx that I thought was pretty solid from the get go, was how they farmed out the matte paintings. Set design and set dressers did great work with The Big Goodbye but i wasn't impressed by the work for the 24th century.

Episodes that I thought the majority of departments were doing great work were Where No One Has Gone Before, The Big Goodbye, Heart of Glory, 11001001 and Conspiracy. I also thought Datalore was a 3 out of 5 star episode.

Everything else I would rate 2.5 to .5 starts. though most episodes did have at least a scene, or a character beat, or a concept that I enjoyed, just the overall final product wasn't appealing to me. Now I ended up loving TNG, but its first year is for myself the worst first season of any Trek outside of the Animated Series (which even as a kid I never really liked).

Oh one other thing I want to give a shout out to for the first season and that was the fairly new director Rob Bowman, who ended up being one of my favorite trek directors and my favorite director on the x-files. I love his work even in terrible episodes.

 

[tomalak301]

Oh one other thing I want to give a shout out to for the first season and that was the fairly new director Rob Bowman, who ended up being one of my favorite trek directors and my favorite director on the x-files. I love his work even in terrible episodes.

I thought Bowman came on in Season 2.