beige???!? The future is beige? Really? Office cubicle beige?
Let’s go macro on this issue for a second: if there’s one thing Trek fans love as much as watching Trek, it’s bitching about Trek. Not a knock against the OP; it seems like everyone (including me) has very specific ideas of what Star Trek is about and what makes for good Star Trek. Ragging on the stuff that falls short is all part of the fun.
With that in mind, I too used to watch TNG in college, and loved it —when I wasn’t ragging on it. Even then, we complained about Troi. (Having a ship’s counselor was a great idea, unfortunately underused in the scripts and embodied by an incompetent actress.) We laughed at Riker’s weird body language that always made him look like he was about to batter the door down with his forehead. And so on. But you can’t deny that, starting around the third season and continuing until nearly the end, reached greatness in ways the original never did and never could. (I’m thinking of “The Inner Light.” Imagine that lovely script in the clumsy meathooks of William Shatner.)
HOWEVER.
In some respects, the show has aged poorly. It’s not the effects; it was TV, they did the best they could and that stuff was perfectly good enough. (The “forehead bump alien” designs were a conscious choice —the aliens are intended to be human analogs, and they wanted the actors’ faces to be easily readable to the audience.) It comes down to a few things for me.
-
Timing. TNG came out just before Joss Whedon proved with Buffy that audiences would follow a serialized drama. If one thing characterized the Berman era of Trek, it’s a fear of making the audience work too hard to follow along. They seemed to think that the fans would watch regardless and so tried to make it appealing to people who were never going to be great fans of it whatever they did. So you have reset-heavy stories, static character dynamics, superfluous “log entries” that mostly tell people what they already know, and so on.
-
Technobabble. It’s a good thing for the show’s writers to understand how the technology works so they can keep their stories within the same boundaries of possibility. But they went too far and started thinking that people actually gave a shit about the EPS conduits and whatnot, and too much of the action ends up hingeing on whether Geordi can whatever-ize the thingamajigger.
-
The Office in Space. I agree with the OP on one major point, and it’s the one that works against the show most today: it makes space travel seem routine, bureaucratic and boring. Too often, TNG feels like a workplace drama set in a dull industry, in which the characters never go home and rarely develop any deep bonds of affection.
You guess wrong. TOS hardly made a lot of money in its original run. The first movie had just come out, and was hardly a blockbuster (or even all that good.) What there was was a fan base. I saw Roddenberry on his lecture tour, well before the first movie, where he filled up a large auditorium with fans. Obviously Paramount greenlighted the show after figuring out they could make money, but IIRC TNG was the first original show to go into syndication instead of with a network, so it is not like there was massive demand that caused them to force Roddenberry to do it.
Anyhow, you like Wesley more than Data? That’s just bizarre.
Be thankful it wasn’t avocado green.
I prefer shows with only limited threads myself. You can pick up TNG almost anywhere and, still enjoy it. I’m watching the whole thing now, and there have been only a few place where I saw connections I hadn’t before because I missed some of the episodes. I realize that this kind of show is no longer popular, but it drives me at least to skip trying to catch them on the TV and instead waiting for the DVD or streaming to come out so I can follow along better.
They did a good job showing the development of their technology from TOS time. But I agree that they pull stuff out of their ass to meet the needs of the plot. I don’t mind the technology being almost like magic - they are as far ahead of us as we are from Newton, and the rate of increase has just exploded. I do mind it not being consistent.
And I really mind their ability to connect any two things together and to rewire their instruments like they were crystal radios. Try doing that with a smartphone - and their stuff will be even more integrated.
Joss Whedon did not prove with Buffy that serialized drama would work. They had been around for decades.
TOS was mostly ‘stand alone’ episodes. So that’s the pattern they tried for TNG. Then they moved to a more multi-story arc format. (and the show got better)
They did not have static character dynamics. They did change over time. (slowly, in latter seasons)
A couple of visuals that just bug me, the main one being the Picard Maneuver. Not the battle tactic, the stupid looking shirt tugging that he does every time he gets up or sits down. They should have fixed the uniforms and told him to cut that shit out.
And Riker’s tilted head imitation John Wayne walk. Looks like he is trying to steer his body around corners with his head.
Data’s quick side-to-side head jerking. Yes we know you are an android Pinocchio, it is not necessary to pretend that someone is controlling your head via string.
I hate the smug superior attitude of those at Starfleet Academy, while they themselves are inconsistent.
For example, (our much-maligned) Wesley doesn’t get selected, because he didn’t meet some super sekret screening requirement. One of which was the staged confrontation with the officer in the hallway that treats every interaction as conflict. Wes correctly assessed (and passed) that test, but my question is, how did THAT guy get in Starfleet? Didn’t his shitty attitude, cultural or not, disqualify him?
They treat SF Academy like it is some frat house, or monastery, rather than a service academy. Skill has nothing to do with getting in, it’s how you play the politics. It’s more skull and bones than Annapolis.
In other words, if Reg Barclay can get in, why not Wes?
I have the feeling Reg was legacy.
Okay… “Never” is too strong. But for every time Worf actually got to slug somebody, there are twenty episodes where he doesn’t. Picard tells him to stop, most of the time, and the few times Picard is okay with it, the opponent is too strong and Worf is the one who gets clobbered.
Yes, there were exceptions. There were good episodes, with good ideas.
But the ratio of those good eps to bad eps is…pretty damn low.
(I always felt bad for LeVar Burton, because they took away his eyes. The eyes are one of an actor’s most valuable tools. It’s like acting…in a sack!)
While it has its problems, I don’t see much reason to hate on TNG when Voyager and the first two seasons (especially the second) of Enterprise exist.
I’ve watched the TOs eps many times and I never get tired of them.
You may be right.
What’s *really *awkward is when he *gets back up *the same way in one of those clips. If I didn’t see him proceed to walk out the door the right way I’d think they just turned the clip backwards.
Why would you have “get that far”? It’s an episodic series. I don’t think I’ve ever watched the series in order. There are occasional callbacks, but, other than the really big episodes, they are unimportant.
Having originally seen most of the series in out of order reruns, I didn’t initially realize there were as many long-running developments that do benefit from chronological episode viewing. They actually showed Tasha Yar’s half-Romulan daughter a few times before her main story arc. Worf’s relationship with the Klingons (including Galron’s succession, discommodation, etc) also plays out through various episodes spread out through most of the series. Also, especially when watched with DS9 in the original airing order, the Federation/Cardassian peace treaty has direct, immediate repercussions in later episodes of both shows.
Yeah, you can watch most episodes without needing to know what happened before and after, but it does have arcs throughout the series. Worf and the Klingon stuff is my favorite, and it continues through DS9. The Cardassian and Maquis stuff also bleeds into TNG in the later seasons.
A core part of (at least early) Voyager, too
(Other than that the Maquis were always lame, somehow. “Oh no, it’s mildly antagonistic Space Canucks!”)
That kind of bothered me, too. They weakly tried to explain that with the “warrior’s spirit boils in their blood” thing.
After watching the series many times, though, I saw Worf as an interesting character study on Klingons. Worf grew up with mostly humans, but his adoptive parents wanted him to have a connection to his culture, so they did their research and found the best elements for him to learn about. This is why Worf is so obsessed with honor, while most other Klingons seem to talk honor but care more about glory.
I saw it as kind of like Back to the Future, when Marty’s mom is telling him all about how pure and innocent she was as a teenager, but then he went back and saw firsthand that wasn’t the truth. Klingons want to appear honorable, but when it comes down to it, they are not so much. Notice how much Worf doesn’t seem to fit in when around other Klingons.