Watching an old TNG episode (Datalore). Haven't seen many episodes yet but so far I really liked The Schizoid Man. Is the first season as bad as everyone says it is?
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Watching an old TNG episode (Datalore). Haven't seen many episodes yet but so far I really liked The Schizoid Man.
First season has some bad eps but it's mostly comfy viewing
this
i honestly find the bajoran stuff leading up to ds9 premiere more annoying than anything in s1 or s2
I like the "crossovers", makes it all feel as part of the same universe.
S1 has a certain stage play quality about it that contributes to its vibe.
It´s the 1960´s-ness.
The first season is a lot worse than Discovery, and only has nostalgia going for it. Even the "good" seasons really only have 2-3 good episodes out of 20+.
why do you lie anon?
>Even the "good" seasons really only have 2-3 good episodes out of 20+.
exact opposite is true, the actually good seasons only have 2-3 bad ones
what happened s2e22?
>what happened s2e22?
Its a clip show.
clip show, unironically
Clip show. Like 5 minutes of new footage, the rest is spent with Riker in a coma dreaming of things that happened in past episodes. Can't remember what the exact reason was, probably a writer's strike in Hollywood or something (that's what killed Moonlighting)
>clip show
God damn that seems harsh though.
It wasn't terribly uncommon for television back in those days. They really were making episodes by the seat of their pants in most shows, they didn't have the resources to plan and film everything out in advance for an entire season, the whole structure was different back then. Many soap operas were literally filmed the day before broadcasting, they'd get one take.
Yeah lots of shows had clip episodes back then, the Simpsons did it like 7 times.
99% of the time clip show episodes deserve lower than a 3/10.
>Can't remember what the exact reason was,
They were out of money. They'd spent the entire season's budget and had like $10,000 left and they were contractually obligated to make one more episode. So they made a clip show.
>God damn that seems harsh though.
Well its a clip show with only 2 seasons worth of material in a genre where clip shows weren't really accepted even back in 1990. It was also the season finale and the last episode with Dr. Pulaski's character.
The funny thing is even for a clip show it had some good lines
>This bug is persistent, I'll admit that. But I'm not worried, we Rikers are ornery too. Matter of fact my great grandfather once got bit by a rattlesnake. After THREE DAYS of intense pain.. the snake died!
tard shill troony homosexual shit for brains frickface
Hey
You
Yeah you
Frick you. Frick you twice, you c**t.
Frick you twice.
by today's standards the first season is great. It even has hilarious episodes like 'code of honor' (space homies) . 'justice' (Wesley gets sentenced to death for violating planets taboo), 'the neutral zone' (they pick up three colorful characters frozen from the 20th century). The first appearance of the ferengi , the first use of the holodeck , the first Q episodes, the episode where tasha dies. Even a gender roles episode when they land on a female run planet.
I've mentioned this before in other threads as I watched TNG first run. Season 1 seems like season 4 of TOS in quality. It's fun, a bit campy. Quality improved in subsequent seasons but it is only "bad" by comparison and only in retrospect.
First season of TNG is basically a lot like what the 70's Phase II of TOS would have been. Swap Picard for Kirk, Riker for Decker, Troi for Ilia, a Spock replacement Vulcan for Data, etc.
>a Spock replacement Vulcan for Data,
Xon
yeah
People mostly say the first season is bad because the later seasons are a lot better.
First season was bad, but had a few good episodes.
The first season feels like bad to mediocre TOS scripts with a cast that hadn't really figured out their characters yet.
First season is a different show with the same characters but it is still good.
About 50% of season 1 is shitty and/or forgettable and a lot of it plays more like a soap opera than the rest of the show does, but there's enough good there that you dont want to pass it up entirely. Season 2 that number drops to like 25%, and season 3 on is fricking gold.
>Is the first season as bad as everyone says it is?
No. It has a certain style that some find cheesy but creator Gene Roddenberry had certain ideas he wanted to explore. He really wanted to depict mankind "as we could be", in a distant future where we'd worked out our primitive instincts, tribalism, and greed, and operated as ascended individuals dedicated to the arts, science, exploration, "humanitarianism" etc. It gives the characters and setting a kind of stilted appearance that CAN come off clumsy, as it was intended for each cast member to function more as vessels to tell a story rather than complex characters in their own right. It wasn't "bad", and I believe it was an idea worth exploring, but it wasn't quite as engaging as they'd hoped. The concept of perfect futuremen was interesting, but not relatable. By the third season, the characters had become much more fleshed out, and "humanlike" with flaws and emotions, and that dramatically improved the flow of the series and hooked viewers.
Code of Honor is a perfectly fine episode.
>Code of Honor is a perfectly fine episode.
Based and “I don’t think traditional cultures are something to be ashamed of” pilled
It's funny that Datalore started the "shut up Wesley" meme even thought it was one of the few stories were Wesley was completely correct and justified in his actions.
If I ever meet Wil Wheaton I don't think I would be able to resist the temptation to say
>Are you prepared for the kind of death you've earned, little man?
Which is OBJECTIVELY the better quite from that episode, but I dont think he would appreciate it.
Firstly, who is this “everyone” you speak of? Second, the first season is awesome and most of us real Trek fans were glued to it from the start. Revisionist history made it bad just like it made Deep Space Nine ( Ira Behr’s middle finger to Roddenberry) seem good.
Deep Space Nine is fantastic between the first season and the last season and a half or so. Ira went off the deep end towards the end, but everything up to the point Dukat loses it was brilliant. It's definitely a very different tone to TNG and I love both on their own merits. TNG explores the part of humanity we want to see, DS9 explores the part we want to hide. DS9 also has markedly good performances and sublimely good cast chemistry.
It's my theory that people that dont like DS9 dont actually understand the premise, despite the show outright directly saying what the premise of the series was - the feds far away from their vaunted utopia, far enough away that if they got in trouble they couldnt realistically call for help and expect it to arrive in time, but also not just able to frick off elsewhere once the issue of the week was resolved
...but still being able to bring the light of that utopia out with them
One setting, in cold if not outright hostile territory, with lasting consequences from episode to episode. Its a decent twist on the formula.
The root beer scene might be my favorite scene in the entire series. It's intensely memeable and easy to use as a parallel to anything one dislikes about the modern state of the world, but at the same time there's heavy implications that you just can't easily discard.
Dung Space Nine is the worst. It doesn't't trek, and that's a mortal sin. Anybody who enjoys a Interstellar Truck Stop show is a moron.
I like it.
> Anybody who enjoys a Interstellar Truck Stop show is a moron
I retroactively like it even MORE after that phrasing. Good job, anon!
finest truck stop in all of cardassylvania and the spoonheads are literal lot lizards
It was still good. They only dropped the ball on the Ferengi as they intended them to be Borg tier but they were too comical. The episode where they all frick because of the radiation was great. Tasha Yar was definitely the weakest part of that season thank God the actress left.
I went through TNG blind and seasons 1 and 2 are SOLID.
The reason why people call hhem bad is because beyond season 2 the world-building and character development really ramps up.
However, season 1 and 2 are probably my favorites because the universe feels a lot more mysterious and unexplored, with weird omnipotent cosmic forces every episode. At some point beyond season 3 the universe starts feeling really small.
It's the same with any fantasy book series. The first books are always the best after you've finished it all, even though all the epic stuff happens in the later books
yeah s1 and s2 still have subspace delay. sure, subspace is way faster than light, but they still aren't having quadrant spanning conversations in real time which I think starts in s3
>It's the same with any fantasy book series. The first books are always the best after you've finished it all, even though all the epic stuff happens in the later books
True enough and this is really a guiding factor I kind of fixate on in a lot of domains, such as fantasy video games. Everything is most amazing when you don't know "what's out there", when you haven't explored the whole world, figured out the magic system, don't know what kinds of items and spells and abilities you can get or monsters you might encounter, when it's just a fresh horizon and endless dreams. As you progress and learn more about the world, flesh out the map, there's satisfaction involved with the sense of accomplishment, but the magic fades more and more.
In real life, I used to go camping a lot as a kid so I love the outdoors, and all the places we camped at were magical to me, just neverending forests full of adventure.. I made the mistake looking up some of these campgrounds as an adult, checking google satellite views, etc.. many of those "endless forests" of my youth were small parks surrounded on every side by highways and an endless patchwork of farms and cornfields. Everything is so much smaller as an adult. Even watching videos of drones flying above the trees feels "wrong" somehow, nothing should be demarcated out that mathematically, it's better to just be "lost" in the moment. I wish there were a drug I could take that would just make the world seem more limitless and magical.
>At some point beyond season 3 the universe starts feeling really small.
Yes! And somehow Voyager (with some exceptions) managed to maintain this “small universe” feel even though they were on the far side of the galaxy
Yeah, on the rewatch I thought it was actually the second season that was really bad. Roddenberry's cornball influence is quite clear in the first season, but then he died and I think there was kind of a power vacuum in the second season and it was getting pulled in multiple directions. Then Rick Berman murdered all his rivals and consolidated power
Diana Muldaur is great as Pulaski though, as much as Crusher was a cornerstone sex object for my adolescence, she's a pretty bland character in comparison. We kept the wrong doctor.
I just started tng after never seen any star trek before and it's really good. But which culture that we all admire were these guys supposed to resemble, exactly?
Apparently American indians, because of the "counting coup" thing, except American indians still exist in the 24th century and are squatting on rightful Cardassian soil so idk lol
This will always be fricking hysterical to me, that in the far future the Injuns all fricked off to space and settled on a distant planet. It's also the episode where Wesley mercifully leaves the show for good.
The jump in overall quality and consistency is definitely noticeable when you start season 3, but there are some great eps in season 2.
Is it worth watching the remasters? I don't actually like seeing the black construction paper on the walls or the marks on the floors, I just wanna enjoy the make believe magic
can take it or leave it
it does look better on larger displays, and the issues aren't too bad unless you're the type of person to obsess about such things, s1 and s2 are the biggest offenders as well
>Is the first season as bad as everyone says it is?
Its the weakest season; but its not that bad. If you like the characters you'll generally enjoy it.
“Everyone” doesn’t say the first and second season are bad, that’s a reddit “opinion.”
Troi isn't attractive. I just don't see it.
You haven't seen her at her sweatiest greek best.
This feels like the right thread to ask.
I was recently in the hospital for four days with bronchitis and I had nothing to watch but actual basic cable (the real thing). I ended up watching a TNG marathon of random episodes. I've never seen TNG before. I liked the episodes, particularly the episodes about Data. Should I just start with season 1? Is there a particularly good Data-centric season?
Data has good episodes throughout, maybe especially in the early seasons. Measure of a Man in season 2 is one of the best.
>Should I just start with season 1?
Yes. Season 1 and 2 episodes can be clumsy but it's really important to understand the whole lore (heh) of Trek and how it evolves. It's a fun watch even if it comes across a bit cheezy sometimes. From season 3 on it gets very good.
>Is there a particularly good Data-centric season?
They're all more or less sprinkled throughout the series as a whole. He has a very long and slow burn development. "Measure of a Man" is the most talked-about episode regarding him, it's good but perhaps a bit oversold. "The Most Toys" is probably the pinnacle of Data episodes, BUT I would not jump directly to that, it's rather climactic. Really, just enjoy the ride as a whole.
By the end of the series the characters who get the most episodes are Data, Worf, and Picard though they're pretty spread out. Riker gets a fair number of episodes early on, but kind of recedes into a more background role starting around season 4-5. The rest of the characters get episodes here and there, but nowhere near as many as the others.
Ultimately there are no seasons that are super focused on specific characters, the writers tried to space the character specific episodes out so that the audience would be surprised about who would be the "main" character of the episode.
Dubs, trips, and off-by-one confirms, just start with season 1 because it's all at least pretty good. Roger that.
just enjoy the ride as
suggests
Data is in almost every episode, and he always contributes. Even S7 episode Masks, where his actor Brent Spiner started getting a bit too big for his breeches, is watchable.
>The one where Data makes a very special friend
>The one where Data poisons a town
>The one where Data reduces a pumping station to a pile of debris
>The one where Data has to kill them, kill them all
There's just so many good ones
The one where data gets a development achievment and unlocks the on-disc dream DLC is a favorite of mine.
>The one where Data makes a very special friend
This can describe about 12 different episodes.
I enjoyed it after watching the rest of the show and then coming back
>Here's that Gene's vision I was telling you about
>It's the, everyone gets intoxicated from a star episode
Other than Wil, whose the worst trektor?
Wil is a gay but ultimately irrelevant. Patrick Stewart is responsible for Picard so he's markedly worse.
Worst in terms of acting or as human beings? Patrick Stewart is far and away the best lead Star Trek has ever had in terms of acting skill. He carried TNG to the point where it surpassed the original and can never be beaten, unless some future series hires a really good actor, like really good, like Travolta or Cruise level skill. The other thing besides Patrick Stewart's acting skill which elevated TNG was its incorporation of the writers' own time tracks. It was just old space opera. The newer series diverge and get creative, but there was truth in TNG. Another great lead actor in the Star Trek series was Avery Brooks. The rest of the leads just aren't very good, and that's why none of the other Star Trek shows have made an impact.
I'd agree with the other anon that it is Stewart, for however good an actor he is he is instrumental in the Picard series and even before that you get him wanting to make the character into an action star. As for performances of main character then I think there a lot of cases of bad/weak performers that at their best are mediocre. To list some then Marina Sirtis and Terry Farrell are bad though bluntly put at least served the function of being pretty, Gates McFadden, Robert Beltran though in his case it is more he stops trying, Anthony Montgomery though Travis is such a non-character he may have had nothing to work with.
Not really the worst in either acting ability or as a person but, Crosby is embarrassing. Not a great actress yet neither the worst but, what makes her stand out over others of similar performances is her quitting and then basically begging to come back after her career was going nowhere.
>quitting and then basically begging to come back after her career was going nowhere.
a Trek tradition
a Trek tradition
Troi
She never ever did anything remotely relevant, plotwise or actingwise
The character was a canon nepo baby and it sure as hell felt like the actress was one as well
Ironically someone who can read the emotional state of aliens from hundreds of kilometers away would be EXCEPTIONALLY useful in a setting that had actually alien aliens rather than humans with stuff on their faces. The closest we got was farpoint with the big jellyfish, but even then she was just like ""its happy that we've freed it." Yeah no shit, deanna. Have a revealtion about the crystalline entity being sentient the few times they encountered it before it exploded why dont you, ir maybe just BE A LIE DETECTOR A FEW TIMES, there were plenty of moments when the crew was being decieved or didnt have enough information about something where an empath would actually have been really useful, it feels like they kust had no idea what to actually do with her most of the time
>we arent being attacked by the romulans in super-slow motion, they're all terrified and we're trying to help them. But someone else is out there too whose motives are...fear for their children?
>captain I can still SENSE that Geordi and Ro, as strongly as if theyre...right in front of me. Something isnt right here sir, I dont think they died
I feel like early seasons had her doing more and it tapered off. I think it's too messy from a writer's perspective to have a character so capable so it gets traded out for what feels like incompetence or her abilities just being pointless.
Yes, he's often given that role. He'll typically be part of the away team or on the bridge but without a whole lot else to do. It makes him feel moronic if you think about it too much while watching it play out.
We're not all screenwriters ensign, can you simplify all that?
Napping at the academy, commander?
Yes, "napping"
I never considered seasons 1 and/or 2 bad, but it's definitely not what you remember TNG for. The characters are a lot stiffer and more outwardly archetypal, plus you've got wonder boy Wesley Crusher acting as the focus for a great number of episodes. I can see his role as the protagonist of a young boy's fantasy adventure, but it never quite matched the tone of the show. Plus the show's production was super cheap early on, and wasn't very good at hiding it.
Star Trek was always woke.
Obvious b8 but I’ll bite.
It was woke but it balanced out the woke moralizing with being a swashbuckling space western. It had something for the spiteful mutants AND something for the red blooded American males. In fact, by not going out of its way to alienate that demographic, it was actually able to impart some woke propaganda to viewers.
NuTrek’s gone all-in on woke and there’s not enough Horario Hornblower in Space to satisfy anyone who isn’t already a true believer.
Can somebody explain to me why the captain and officers wear red in TNG? I don't watch much Trek but thought red was for the nobodies who die, Pike in Strange New Worlds wears gold for captain.
For some reson, Command (ie:line officers) went from gold to red, while operations went from red to gold.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Command_division
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Operations_division
But don't we also see random ensigns and extras in red?
Yes. those belong to that division. Command is pretty much what in IRL navies are line oficers, ie. the regular dudes not in a specialized field like medical or engeneering.
I has some of the worst episodes of the series, but if you like the show it's not much to watch them anyway.
Why did Riker turn into some butthole hardass around S3? In the first two seasons he's almost a completely different character.
He's "maturing" I guess? Prior to the Enterprise he had fewer responsibilities, didn't he? Was he a first officer on his last ship? I can't recall now.
The thing to realise about Riker is he was conceptualised as an emergency backup Kirk if audiences did not like Picard: if Picard was not working they could either shift focus away from the captain and upon Commander Riker or more probable just replace Picard as captain with Riker. As it was audiences ultimately liked Picard, which gets to the issue that from outset the show never properly considered what to do with Riker beyond his emergency function. Riker ends up becoming a casual pop cultural conception of what Kirk was like without the actual characteristics and focus Kirk enjoyed, and Riker if often regulated to being the 'Watson' that is to say being there to ask questions on behalf of the audience. All things considered he is not a major detriment for the show and adds things however, there is that aspect (in what is touched upon in the show) that maybe Riker should leave the Enterprise to be his own captain.
>Riker if often regulated to being the 'Watson' that is to say being there to ask questions on behalf of the audience
In english, ensign?
In Sherlock Holmes the character of Watson would often ask questions so Holmes could explain how he was making his deductions, with those questions being done for the benefit of the reader. To give an example of Riker...
>Picard: Could this be a Dyson Sphere?
>Riker: A Dyson Sphere?
>Picard: [explanation of what a Dyson Sphere is]
The show knows that much of the audience is not going to know what a Dyson Sphere is, so rather than have Picard or Data do the unpromoted and in-universe unneeded 'as we all know a Dyson Sphere is...' they get Riker to ask the question for the benefit of the audience.
as much as i dislike SUBVOORSION of tropes for their own sake, I loved how it was handled with Disaster:
>[paraphrasing] It was a quantum filament
>Troi: Is that like a cosmic string?
>O'Brien: ... [beat] ... No.
>[scene continues with no explanation.]
It seems like if you were to get transported to the setting of Star Trek you could very easily be simultaneously both the most knowledgeable and dumbest person in a room of people.
I feel like you average person who hasn't even seen Star Trek would get a better handling of how do deal with the likes of the Ferengi, Cardassians, Dominion etc. than your typical Starfleet personnel.
Those races are buttholes, and being an butthole has been largely bred out of humanity by the time of Star Trek. We'd definitely have an advantage over those diplomatic wimps.
Shocking that Troi is so high up in command. I suppose that is what you get though for a navy that pretends it is not a navy.
So you're saying he's some sort of foil for the viewer?
>"No that's an entirely different cosmic phenomenon. Anyway..."
Dumbass counselor btfo
>So you're saying he's some sort of foil for the viewer?
I do no not think foil is the correct word; although he, whilst not an audience surrogate or POV, is there for the audience ability to easily understand what is going on. Fiction often needs to provide the audience with information they do not have, be that due to the subject being real-world obscure/complex or bullshit in-universe technobabble. As said, one way to provide that is with 'As you know...' however, that is unnatural and can be distractingly blatant in what it is doing. Riker asking questions allows the show to put things in layman terms for the audience that seems natural.
>Riker asking questions allows the show to put things in layman terms for the audience that seems natural.
I can't accept that. Shields up, go to red alert!
I don't think you'd have to follow any orders she issues outside of counseling-related stuff.
>So you're saying he's some sort of foil for the viewer?
He's either a foil for the viewer or a strawman for the type of person a more scientifically literate viewer would view as a chad normie.
>Picard: Could this be a Dyson Sphere?
>Viewer: I know what that is. But my brother who is watching with me might not.
>Riker: What's a Dyson Sphere?
>Viewer: Phew. Now I don't have to explain to my brother and miss the show.
>Viewer's brother: Awesome, now I can understand why my brother is so excited about this thing.
Started watching Star Trek for the first time in January, been watching in broadcast order so kind of flip flopping between TNG and DS9 and I thought season one was fine.
I also don't get the hate DS9 gets, I'm liking the cast slightly more than TNG (fricking love Quark and Odo)