TNG Reviews

Star Trek: The Next Generation was my first-ever favorite TV show. In fact, once upon a time, it was virtually the only show that I really cared about. I considered myself a Star Trek fan before TNG, and I would later come to love its successor, DS9, as well, but—regardless of whether it is “the best” Trek series or not (however one might judge such things), there’s no denying that TNG is my favorite incarnation of Trek. Partly because I was thirteen years old when TNG debuted, and just finishing up my sophomore year of college when it came to an end, it imprinted itself on me in a way that no other Trek series, and few other things of any kind, did. It’s the Trek that I grew up with, and (just as important) it’s also a show that “grew up” in tandem with me. I’ve watched most of its episodes many times, and no other show has ever felt as thoroughly “mine” as TNG.

Also—without mincing words—TNG is often terrible. Don’t get me wrong; I love this show, and I will leap to its defense any time I encounter the sort of jaded, eye-rolling criticism that is sometimes leveled at it. But I love it with, I hope, a critical mind and eyes that are wide open. TNG’s entire first season was an almost unmitigated disaster, so bad that it’s astonishing the show survived to eventually mature into something that was capable of greatness. And even after it did so, it was still prone to producing lackluster or outright bad episodes with distressing frequency throughout the entirety of its seven-year run. Many factors contributed to this, not the least of which have to do with when the show was made, and the fact that TV was just different in the 80s and early 90s from what it’s like in the 21st century—but I won’t go into that here. The point is, I eventually moved beyond TNG and discovered other, better shows…and yet, TNG has never really lost its hold on me, either. The critical lens through which I view the show has sharpened, I trust, both through encountering better fiction and by virtue of life experience in general, but at the same time, I have never stopped caring about TNG, or felt inclined to distance myself from it, or to disown my unabashed nerdy love for the show. If I bring anything distinctive to the project of writing episode reviews for TNG, perhaps it’s a product of this mixture of traits.

I don’t recall exactly when it was that I started writing these reviews. As a guess, I would say it was probably sometime in the 2009-2012 era. Initially, it was just a pet project that I had no particular plans to share with anyone beyond my (at the time) wife. The reviews that date from back than have gone through several rounds of revision and polishing since I first slapped them together. Another spate of reviews was written in 2015-2016; soon after, I began sharing them with select friends. At that point, I had still only made it through about two and a half seasons. (Yes, this means that I had reviewed substantially more terrible episodes than good ones.) Then, in the summer of 2020, I set up this website—and, after posting all of my then-existing reviews, I once again began writing new ones. It may take me a while, but I hope to eventually get through the entire series.

Obviously, then, these are retrospective reviews, written years after the show was made and with the benefit of having watched each episode many times over a period of decades. I have also discussed and dissected them with friends over the years, and I have read and digested the thoughts of other reviewers (both professional and not) from time to time as well. These episodes (even the ones that I loathe) are all old friends to me. That said, each review was written shortly after a fresh re-watch of the episode in question. In general, my process is to write an initial draft based solely on my own thoughts and reactions immediately after that fresh viewing. Then, as I edit and revise, I sometimes look at others’ reviews to get a sense of how my assessments compare, or to see what things I might have missed—and in some cases, doing this has impacted my thinking about an episode in ways that end up being reflected in the finished review. In such instances, of course, I give credit where due to the best of my ability. I consult multiple review sites on an inconsistent basis, but I’d like to call out Jammer’s Reviews as one of my favorites and something of a go-to. Even more particularly, a frequent commenter on Jammer’s site who goes by William B offers consistently insightful takes on almost everything that he chimes in about, and reading his comments has deepened my thinking about a number of TNG episodes. Also, The Star Trek The Next Generation Companion by Larry Nemecek is an invaluable resource for all things TNG.

As a final comment regarding the style of my reviews: Readers will notice that I do very little “recapping” of the events or details of each episode, unless it’s to frame them in a particular way or illustrate some point about story logic or narrative structure. I frequently reference characters or other elements from the episode that I am reviewing without pausing to introduce them, explain what they’re about, or otherwise provide context first. Instead, I operate on the assumption that an interested reader will know the episode pretty well already, and/or can just watch it again if in need of a memory refresher. I’m writing to evaluate the episode, not to tell you what happened in it.

I rate each episode on a scale from one to five stars, with as little hedging or rule-bending as possible. There are no half-stars; episodes that I particularly hate do not get “0 on a scale of 1-5”; etc. That said, any given star rating inevitably encompasses a range of episodes, and I do comment in the reviews when I feel like an episode only “barely” makes the cut for a three-star rating, say, or is perhaps somewhat better than many other one-star disasters while still, nevertheless, being awful. But I’ve made a real effort to apply my rating system consistently, and not to “grade on a curve”—so, for instance, I don’t go easy on first season episodes just because the writers had no idea what they were doing yet. (If you are a fan of this show and you start reading my reviews from the beginning, be prepared for what may seem like a near-relentless onslaught of negativity. I promise you: I, too, am a huge fan of this show, and you will eventually get to reviews of episodes that I like!) Below, for reference, is a “key” outlining what I intend to communicate with each star rating; these definitions serve as my guide when deciding how many stars a given episode merits.