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.