Ancient Geeks Monday
Talkin' ST: TNG, Part 1
An episode the size of the Alpha Quadrant! We go back to 1987, the year when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered. In this first part of the discussion, we discuss the state of Star Trek at this time. This was a heyday for Star Trek subculture, full of movies, novels, reference books, tabletop games, computer games, comics, you name it. Star Trek was flourishing, all based on the original series. Plus, the conventions were popular destinations for Trek fans. And a whole new series was on the way. Journey back with us to this bustling era of Trekdom.
Non-canon novels! Fantastic gaming material that fleshed out the Star Trek universe! Comics that labored mightily to tell a coherent story between movies! Blueprints of the Enterprise! Some really good fiction! An incredibly complicated board game! It’s all here.
In upcoming episodes, we’ll talk about the run-up to The Next Generation, our initial reactions to the show, our reviews of individual episodes from season one, and our thoughts about how the series managed to survive in spite of a tepid first season.
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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I think of Trek series as slow starters. Like it takes them one season to figure out the show, at least prior to the streaming era.
And I can’t talk Trek TV and not link to Marina Sirtis speaking about Troi’s accent at a convention. I’ve hunted down a few other videos of her convention appearances. She kind of does Trek production stand up routines.
Will listen when it hits Podcast Addict… but Season 1 as ‘tepid’? It was, quite simply, terrible, with ‘Code of Honor’ deserving its own category… Without the Trek name, it probably wouldn’t have made it to Season 2. But thank heavens it did! (there were, of course, a handful of ‘pretty good’ episodes)
@Kathy: Funnily, TOS had a really good season 1 (I expect we will talk about relative season 1s in what is now looking to me like part 4).
@Assad K: “Code of Honor” is almost certainly the worst Trek ep of all time. We will be discussing it in detail in part 3.
Season 1 of TOS is pretty amazing. Season 1 of DS9 is strong but not it’s best. ENT was fine, as was VGR. TNG really stands out in the poor quality of it’s first season. More recent Treks first seasons have been solid to great, I think.
Season 1 of TNG had some good eps. As per Kathy’s First Law: when you make two dozen or so eps per season, some cannot help but be good*.
Some decent eps suffered from bad implementation, like the one where The Traveler first shows up. Picard’s speech and instructions to the crew are corny to the point of embarrassment.
I think I’ve mentioned before my viewing of TOS was erratic and sporadic before the movies came out. The one show that formed my understanding of Trek is TNG. To me, Picard, Troi, Data, et. al. are Star Trek. Add the primitive effects and spartan (ie cheap) set design of TOS, and I find myself biased against the first Trek series.
*Not to be confused with Kathy’s First Law: when you make two dozen or so eps per season, some cannot help but be awful.
@Assad K: We talk, at length, about”Code of Honor” in part 3, as well as the general lack of good episodes in season 1.
Caught one episode that grabbed me for a while, The Inner Light which is top-drawer sci-fi if there ever was. For some time after I gave Star Trek a second shot, but determined that episode to have been something of a fluke.
@dazedandconfused: It is a rather non-Trek Trek ep.
@Steven L. Taylor:
There’s kind of a similar one, albeit way darker, on DS9. I don’t recall the name. The gist is O’Brien is convicted of a crime on some alien planet, and he gets memories implanted in him of several years imprisonment. The ep begins with O’Brien released, and the rest of the ep is how he deals with the trauma inflicted on him.
On related matters, I had a PC game called Star Fleet Academy. It was partly video, partly battle simulation on the Enterprise. Shattner and some other actors were in it, but as supporting characters. The objective of the game was to shepherd a group of cadets to graduation.
Listening now.. made it to the part where you’re chatting about the original Trek computer game and funnily enough here’s another podcast I listened to recently..
[Retronauts] 752: MAGfest: Star Trek & Sega R360
https://podcastaddict.com/retronauts/episode/218308749 via @PodcastAddict
Fun re-exploring of some of the stuff from your first episode!
My intro to Trek was actually the Blish adaptations (can’t really call them novelizations). First episode I actually saw was a video of Return to Tomorrow which I rewatched multiple times as it was all I had. The Alan Dean Foster novelizations of TAS were soooooo much better…
Also had many Fotonovels. Those were great!
I enjoyed a lot of the comics… I kinda preferred the Gold Key run to the brief Marvel run. DC comics was generally great though I preferred them after Mike W Barr moved on. It is interesting that he gave us the first Klingon in Starfleet before one appeared on screen..
I guess if we were talking about the books before TNG hit the screens.. from the Bantam run (Joe Haldeman writing Trek!) I don’t think I read any that particularly stood out. I hadn’t realized how many Pocket published before 1987.. certainly some of my favourite writers like JM Dillard were already active. Diane Duane had excellent writing but the Enterprise crew were just toooooo perfect and the Rihan.. er, Romulans were inept to the level of the Galactic Empire. John M Ford was just *chefs kiss* and its amazing how different The Final Reflection and How Much For Just The Planet are.
Good to know: One can sign up for a email list at Simon and Schuster and every month they have a selection of Trek e-books on sale for 2-3 $.
Looking forward to part 2!