A very wise Klingon once said to me, “When a Klingon says ‘Honor,’ substitute the word ‘Renown.’”
I hated what TNG did with the Borg. When they were first introduced, I thought they were a unique and interesting take on aliens in the ST universe. They couldn’t be reasoned with, they didn’t think like humans really, they weren’t interested in negotiations, etc. But then they had to give them factions and queens and rebellions and yawn make them just another alien species. Plus, where does Picard get off unilaterally making the decision not to deploy Hugh as a weapon? That’s a Federation Council or Admiral-level decision, not the decision of some freaking captain.
Also, didn’t like the kids on the ship. It’s the Federation flag ship, routinely being called into combat. It was stupid to have kids on the ship. And it made me have to watch that stupid shot in Generations where that little girl dropped her bunny just before saucer separation.
I have mixed feelings about the holodeck cabana party program. On the one hand, it was irritating. OTOH, it had hot guys in gold speedos, so that was a plus.
But overall, I think TNG is a really great show. Yes, it had stupid episodes (6 Ferengi take over the ship, Barclay becomes a spider, etc.), but it had a lot of really good ones.
And while I like TOS, TOS had a bunch of really stupid episodes and blatant sexism. Although, my favorite TOS moment, which is Spock having a jam session with a bunch of hippies, is the result of a stupid TOS episode.
You say that as though it’s a bad thing… 
Here’s something else that bugs me about TNG
The flashlights
They’re these small cubes you hold in your palm about the size of your hand. They look uncomfortable and inconvenient to hold
Making them look different and futuristic is more important than practicality
That’s because space fireflies, which provide the light, are mostly cubed shaped and are more comfortable in the cubes we see.
They’re not cubes.
They’re collapsed tesseracts.
[Rose] I’d really like to see you Spock it up a bit! [/R]
I agree. well said.
Your agonizer, please.
and TOS didn’t take on contemporary issues of the late 60s? How about the 1/2 black, 1/2 white folks in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”? Or the Space Hippies! All hail the Space Hippies!!
I eagerly awaited the two-hour premiere of TNG. When the show finally aired, I enjoyed meeting the characters, gawking at the new tech, etc, etc.
Then the commercials started. Five minutes of show, four minutes of commercials. By the end of it, I vowed to never watch another episode. I saw some snippets when visiting friends, purposely watched a few episodes of DS9 and Janeway (have you seen her in OItNB?), but I never ever tuned into the program for myself.
It could have been the best thing since sliced bread (and to hear others talk, they all certainly thought it was) or the vilest steaming pile, it didn’t matter to me at all.
My only other complaint is Wesley Crusher as “balloons for the kids.”
Encounter at Farpoint (pilot episode of TNG) has a running time of 91 minutes, the standard length of a MotW in the 1980s. So it didn’t have any more or less commercials than anything else on over-the-air TV at the time, unless your local station did something weird and cut in extra commercials or stretched it over more than two hours. But that seems doubtful.
What better way to ensure your boxers don’t ride up?
Yeah, the Enterprise from TNG always reminded me of what a reasonably priced business hotel and conference center might look like in the future.
And if the Enterprise is a diplomatic ship, where is the ambassador?
The problem with all Star Trek is that they try to make the ship, captain and crew jack-of-all-trades. The Enterprise’s mission can run from mundane supply runs of space vaccines, hosting a diplomatic conference, flag ship of a Federation battlegroup, answering distress calls, taking gas readings from comets, to hosting a murder mystery. Whatever the plot needs that week.
Is the Enterprise supposed to be the flagship of the Federation’s space navy? A platform for scientific research? An armed expeditionary ship for project force and effecting gunboat diplomacy along the frontier of Federation civilization? A sort of Federation coast guard cutter patrolling for trlithium smugglers and ships caught in special anomalies and whatnot?
As BrightNShiny said, you have either a warship full of children and non-combatants, or the equivalent of the Calypso mounted with Harpoon missiles and navel guns.
Plus they are SO pompous. “Look at our enlightened civilization!”. Yeah. That’s why you spend the better part of every season in a state of interstellar war.
It’s my understanding that Jonathon Frakes suffered from severe back pain, hence the stiff attitude.
The Picard maneuver, however, was because of ill-fitting wardrobes.
Which was exactly the point, which I guess you missed. From the very beginning Star Trek was “Horatio Hornblower in space.” A Galaxy-class starship was supposed to do everything, and her crew were expected to JoaTs. The universe is a big place, and you can’t just run down to SpaceshipZone for new parts, or over to the local JC to get someone to do some gas-mapping, or back to the Head Office to get a negotiator. They have to be able to do everything, or there is no purpose for them to be there at all.
What do you want them to do? It isn’t like they go out starting wars. Somebody attacks, you defend.
It it weren’t for Starfleet, earth would have been destroyed/enslaved/absorbed a dozen times over. Any one of the Klingons, the Romulans, the Borg, or even those dumb-assed whale lovers would have wiped us out. Or the doomsday machine, or the space ameba would have destroyed us.
You can’t just hide in you home growing grapes or making cajun food and pretending the universe isn’t out to eat us. It is, whether you believe it or not. Someone has to defend the earth.
And it’s our fault for letting the universe know we’re here.
No attacks for thousands of years and then we invent warp drive and it’s us against them.
Personally, I don’t see the point of hating on a nearly 30 year old show for not being what the current shows are like.
I mean, the show doesn’t quite hold up as well as we might like in a lot of ways. Looking back, it’s very dated in many aspects- the overhwelmingly single-episodic nature, the relentless utopianism that ran through the entire series, the emphasis on win-win resolutions and negotiations, and the like.
I firmly believe that a lot of the later “gritty” science fiction shows were a backlash against the perceived lack of moral ambiguity, the cleanliness, and the general utopianism of ST:TNG. Even later Trek series did this- they were deliberately more gritty than ST:TNG had been.
In a sense, it was a sort of sci-fi cultural phenomenon where maybe the pendulum had swung a little bit too far in one direction, only to swing back to the opposite peak with “Battlestar Galactica” Now, sitting on the far side of those pendulum swings, ST:TNG can seem absurd and ridiculous in a lot of ways, but I think it was a product of the times- when it began, the Cold War was still in full effect, with the Russians starting to crack, but without being visible to the outside world. So this was a sort of response to this, I think.
I will admit that I really do like the more modern multi-episode story arc format more than the self-contained single-episode ST:TNG format, but I’m not going to hate on the show for that.
All this was explained in The Making of Star Trek, which was written as TOS was being filmed, lo those many years ago.
The Enterprise performs the same functions as naval vessels of the 18th and 19th centuries on Earth: diplomacy, scientific exploration, regulation of trade and commerce, combating piracy, errands of mercy, national defense in time of war, and so on.
It operates in distant sectors of the Galaxy, usually far from any support. The captain has to have broad discretionary powers, since he can rarely kick things up the chain of command. If he could, he would be nothing more than another cog in a machine, and the series would be nowhere near as interesting.
In this context, who is the ambassador on board? Usually it’s the captain, and every decision he has to make can have far-reaching consequences. This is something TNG tried to emphasize: Making decisions is the captain’s job, not putting himself at risk in away missions. Any problem important enough to reach him must be dealt with decisively.
While dramatic, of course, this can all be rather static. Which is why TNG ended up having Picard go on far too many away missions: on an action–adventure series, you gotta have action and adventure.
Putting children on board was monumentally stupid, considering the dangers such ships can face in the course of their duties. It’s also unlikely that a starship would take the form of a luxury hotel, since this is suprememly wasteful in terms of both energy and materiel.
If you haven’t read The Making of Star Trek, I highly recommend you buy a copy. For that matter, you should track down an early edition of David Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek, where he analyzes the whole drama vs. action conundrum. (The later editions were bowdlerized.)
No kidding. I actually thought of making a similar point. V’ger would still copy the entire earth into it’s pattern matrix whether we had warp drive or not. We just couldn’t stop it.