Am I crazy or am I just crazy? And if so, how crazy am I?
My boyfriend in college was a huge ST fan, and with him I watched a great deal of TNG and DS9. I vastly preferred DS9, but when I saw that Netflix had them both on insta-watch, I decided, why not?
So I started watching. I’ve only watched a couple of episodes (I just started Friday!).
Bad:
I can’t believe how much the writers jizz in their pants about Westley. I knew that was the case, I just had no idea how bad it really was.
I also have been counting the times Deanna Troi was useful. So far: one. In three episodes.
The sexual tension between Riker and Troi and Picard and Crusher is awful and nearly unbearable. Troi acts like a lovestruck girl, chasing Riker in the middle of work, and Picard excuses Westley’s actions because his mother is making Picard feel all funny.
The security thing! I got spoiled by Babylon 5, what with security everywhere and when you have a stationwide threat, a security team goes out and you actually see them! Here it’s like, Tasha Yar, going out and dealing with all of the threats herself.
Good:
I never saw Data from the beginning. I only know how far he grew. I think it will be very fun and entertaining watching his journey.
Riker used to feel a little smug to me, but watching him in these early episodes, I see he wasn’t like that. He was uncertain and hesitant, and he, like the others, will grow into his role.
I love Jean-Luc as captain, of course.
And Worf is just a big ol’ grouchy grouchball in these early episodes! It’s funny to see him and Data almost agreeing on some things because they both don’t get humans.
So what do you guys think? Worthy endeavor?
Completely worthy. I only watched the first season or so once, because it was pretty awful. It’s fun to see the series mature from silly to good; you can almost pick out the cutoff point when Roddenberry was gently steered away from writing the episodes and better writers took over.
Yeah, there was far more sexual tension between Troi and Worf than there ever was between Troi and Riker.
One of my college roommates loved that show so I watched a lot of the first two or three seasons. It drove me crazy because they would use some of the stupidest lazy plot devices imaginable.
One that sticks in my mind is … I should spoiler this, I guess
[spoiler]Data has an evil brother who is one design revision back from him but they are identical looking. Evil Data disguises himself as Data and plans to cause havoc. Wesley discovers that he can tell them apart because Data, the most sophisticated android in the galaxy can’t speak in English contractions (can’t don’t won’t). Evil Data says can’t instead of cannot and the ruse is revealed.
Can you imagine anything more fucking idiotic? 1. The most sophisticated android ever has this one insanely stupid flaw. 2. He’s supposed to be the new revision but in this case the old version is better. 3. They’re not even supposed to be speaking English anyway because everyone speaks their own language and the Universal Translator fixes everything. [/spoiler]
There’s a reason the the trope about when a show really starts getting good is named after Riker growing the beard. The first season or two are shaky and kind of painful, but once he’s got the beard things get good.
God yes, the first season was like a rehash of TOS plot lines and character development. Terrible. I really never liked the original (except for the movies), to me it always played out super campy, like a bad Sy-Fy Sunday afternoon special.
But from season 2 on, TNG grew to become an incredible series. Absolutely shaped my young mind in ways more good than bad, and it became my ruler against which I compare pretty much all Sci-Fi.
Eventually I started watching DS9, and that series became my favorite, but TNG is a super close second.
I’m actually going to do the same as the OP. I just finished going through Enterprise (good series overall, IMHO, except for the time travel bits and some of the episodes in the final season), and I’m tackling TNG next.
I don’t think they have DS9 for streaming on netflix, do they? I’ll order the DVD’s once I’m done with TNG.
As an aside: The entire TNG series is coming to blu-ray with remastered video, special effects and audio.
Love TOS hate TNG. It never worked for me. I tuned in originally and didn’t like it much. Apparently by the time it was good I only watched the occasional episode, which ALWAYS came down to some sort of holodeck experience: in other words nothing about space and space travel. They could have written the same plot into “Fantasy Island.”
Kinthalis, They have DS9 for streaming also. I added it at the same time as I added TNG. No idea on how long the rights are going to last; right at the exact moment I got totally sucked into B5, Netflix’s license to stream it ran out. Poo. I ended up buying that series.
Leaffan, I’ve watched TOS as well, when it was on hulu. I liked it a lot, and was floored by how gorgeous Kirk was in those days. Those amber eyes! Flat belly and everything. Fun, if a bit silly at times.
hajario, I actually remember the episode you speak of.
I’m another person who only watched most of the first season only once, despite liking the show. Lots of winceworthy stuff in the first season.
I’ve seen the fan-argument made that Soong deliberately made Data with that flaw/feature in order to make humans less nervous about Data’s general superiority.
I tried to do this with DS9 a little while ago, which I always remembered as the “good” Star Trek series, and I just couldn’t make it through. It was rocky from the beginning, but once the Klingons showed up, I just couldn’t take it any more. Seriously, is there any military force in the whole of sci-fidom more incompetent than the Klingon Empire? The big fight scene when the Klingons attack DS9 features them beaming aboard the station, attacking the crew with knives, for fucks sake, and still getting their asses handed to them by unarmed humans.
That was about where I gave up on the show. I watched another three or four episodes, but my heart wasn’t in it any more.
OK. I was spoilering for you but since you’re reading them I’ll stop.
What about the one which started out as a pretty cool call out to a TOS ep. Everyone gets a disease which makes them go crazy and Data has to save the day since he can’t get viruses (human viruses anyway, I guess he could get a firmware virus.) Riker has a vague memory of reading the history of a previous similar thing in the records of the old Enterprise.
So it’s Data to the rescue and he can read really, really fast so he goes through the entire database sequentially. They keep cutting to him looking intently at the viewscreen while all of these pictures and text quickly flash past. WTF? Databases in the 1960’s had rudimentary search functions. Christ, even books made out of paper have indexes.
How would Soong have known about some weird obscure fact that only appears in one language on one planet? Even if he did, they don’t really speak English.
Also, if I’m nervous about the super-strong, super-smart, basically indestructible Replacement Human, his inability to say “don’t” is not going to be particularly reassuring.
