Your Thursday Regret: The One Where The Masses Rise Up Against Me

My family had some fairly serious money troubles when I was a really young kid. My parents, god bless them, were spending basically every cent they had (and then some) educating my sister and I, and that didn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room for anything else. As I got older things started to loosen up a little but they didn't really get completely cleared up until... oh, I'd guess sometime when I was in college or thereabouts.

Around Christmas, when I was very young at least, my mother wouldn't say anything, she'd just look worried all the time. As I got older my mother had a familiar Christmas litany. I swear she would say the EXACT SAME WORDS every year: "it's going to be a lean Christmas." She would say that in an attempt to cushion the blow for when that year's present haul wasn't as impressive as the previous year.

I didn't notice at the time but I now realize that every time she said that when my father was in earshot he would just smile, basically to himself. Somehow my mother never realized that every year, without fail, my father would go out on Christmas Eve in an orgiastic frenzy of present buying and every year, without fail, no one would be disappointed.

One Christmas present, though, that my father did NOT buy came when I must have been 8. Amongst a sea of other presents were two videotapes: one had the first three Star Wars movies on it, and the other had the first three Star Trek movies. Apparently the A/V department at my father's school had gotten their hands on a tape-to-tape recorder, and my dad went and rented all those movies and put them onto single tapes for me. I'm assuming they were recorded in SLP or "picture quality, what's that?" mode, though admittedly the crispness of said images is not that big a deal when a) you are 8, and b) your TV is as big as an RV but only has a 19" screen, thus rendering the quality of the tape pretty much a non-issue.

So I had these tapes. My memory of them is remarkably vivid: the label on the Star Wars tape was written in my dad's giant all-capitals block-letter handwriting, and the label on the Star Trek tape must have been written by whoever it was at Girard who made it; the handwriting was considerably smaller and more elegant than my father's. I had these tapes and, in probably the first instance of the obsessive nature with which I would inhale entertainment for the rest of my life, watched them over and over and over and over AND OVER again. My parents didn't mind - it is worth noting that when I was that age they weren't much older than I am now, and they were both long-time gigantic nerds to boot - and my sister was 6 and, I dunno, I guess she was around or something.

I was already a big Star Wars fan, even at 8. Empire was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I had books and action figures and all that stuff. My course as a lifelong Star Wars nerd was locked in around my fourth birthday. (Thanks a fucking lot, Mom and Dad.)

I don't remember specifically liking Star Trek BEFORE I got that tape, but I sure as hell did afterward. I went the same way as I did with Star Wars, vacuuming up as much material as I possibly could; if you think adult collectors of things like this are sad you should see it at that age; when you're 8 or 9 paraphernalia is like crack, and with the associated addict behaviors to boot.

In the process of my multimedia hoovering I learned basically everything there was to know about Star Trek at the time. It is worth noting here that this was before the days of the net and Wikipedia and whatnot where over the course of a couple hours you can, Matrix-like, download every vital piece of information about an entertainment franchise directly into your brain and have the equivalent knowledge of having seen every episode/movie/whatever without ever watching a frame of film/reading a page/whatever. I learned everything about Star Trek the hard way.

So in 1987 when I saw a commercial for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," oh, man, it was like the derrick drill hitting that oil field for the first time.

Nerd.

EXPLOSION.

I was instantly hooked on TNG, even though I distinctly recall telling my mother at one point during the first season that though I loved it and it was my favorite thing on television it still wasn't as good as old Star Trek. Still, I watched it with an obsession that would be pretty frightening were I to witness it now in a 9-year-old. When I would get grounded and sentenced to "no TV" my parents would have to make an exception for TNG because I would go completely BERSERK if I didn't get to watch it. It was the first time I was ever completely hooked on a television show. I'm pretty sure that TNG is still the only show where I watched EVERY SINGLE EPISODE at their first-run airtime. In the years since I've gotten pretty compulsive about watching Lost or Galactica but I still DVR them from time to time. Back then, though, I'm almost positive I watched 7 years of TNG eps the very second they aired.

The first seeds of doubt started with little things. Tiny things. Why does a Frenchman have a British accent? I didn't hit that one until I was about 14. What's the point of having shields if there's like 900,000 ways around them? Wow the holodeck and transporters seem to malfunction a lot. Wow there seem to be an AWFUL lot of these anonymous crew members who die with regularity. What the hell does Worf DO, anyway? "Security Chief?" What the fuck is that? The ship has enough firepower to blow up a planet and there's a GUY whose job it is to keep the ship SAFE? From what, the Great Green Arkleseizure?

But these questions occupied the back of my mind, a dark, humid corner where another voice sat saying "if Luke kissed Leia in Empire and they were revealed as siblings in Jedi then these movies aren't planned out very well, but that means..." which we now recognize as the first steps on the road to madness.

I ignored that part of my brain - the part asking distressing questions about Star Trek, at least - for a lot of years. We still had Trek movies with delightful regularity (if not delightful or regular quality) and TNG was, by all accounts, on television in full-blown syndication something like 45 times a week. Somewhere in there, though, there was this, I dunno, gap between when TNG was on everywhere three times a day to when it started its abortive, ill-considered run on Spike, when there was very little Star Trek to be had.

(Side note: what genius decided that it was a great idea to make STAR TREK the flagship show of what is, essentially, the Frat Boy Channel? That is one person, folks, who does not fucking well understand "branding.")

When TNG came to Spike there was this giant promotional push (like you do) and I sat down to watch - seriously, intently WATCH - Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time in several years.

After a few weeks I came to a conclusion:

It's not that good.

I'm sorry, folks, it really isn't.

Part of the reason it's not that good is because of the one part of it that is truly amazing: Patrick Stewart. Even if he wasn't such a great actor - and not to take anything away from the rest of that cast, but he's so far past any of them it's not funny - if nothing else Picard was the only character on the show who was REMOTELY interesting. Every other crew member of the USS Enterprise-D (that's right, goddammit, it's the Enterprise-motherfucking-DEE) is a bland cipher at best or a one-note joke at worst. Dutiful Riker. Naïve Data. Worf the Warrior. And the rest, here on Gilligan's Isle. Seriously, Troi, WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE ON THAT SHIP FOR? She doesn't do ANYTHING.

The actors - all of whom are quite talented, except for maybe Dr. Crusher, whose character was construed so narrowly as to be practically two-dimensional and thus provide no insight into the actress - are all trying very hard, but you can see in the first couple years the show straining against Roddenberry's vision of a perfect 24th century human utopia (which, while philosophically interesting, makes for acutely bad drama) and then, after he left, TNG became stuck in the rut that strain created. By then boring anti-drama had become part of the show's DNA and every time they tried to break out of it things came across as strange and off-putting. The Klingon civil war arc is so out of character for TNG it seems like it's from some other show entirely (possibly the later, exponentially better DS9), the late-seasons "romance" (a term used here in surely its loosest sense) between Troi and Worf is as clunky as Russian poetry, and even Q got tiresome after far too many appearances down the years.

This is not to say there aren't moments where the show, through some fortuitous alchemy of script and acting and direction, didn't pop and sometimes even take flight. The episode where Q flings the ship into the Delta Quadrant and we meet the Borg for the first time is remarkably good television, and the Borg's return in The Best of Both Worlds is as satisfying as any season finale/premiere two-parter I can think of. This is true DESPITE the fact that every Borg appearance on the show after are such horrific cock-ups that retroactively poison every instance previous, and that it would take First Contact to truly "make" the Borg. The one with Jean Simmons as Admiral Satie, the witchhunt-y episode (The Drumhead? Maybe?) is, to my mind, the best hour of pure acting (and probably writing) in the entire series. And "Cause and Effect" is a fantastic, just a truly fantastically-executed hour of science fiction, though it occupies a black space in my heart because, in what is surely the greatest irony in the history of the universe, it is the single episode of TNG I have seen more than any other; for a period of - I am not making this up - almost 10 years it seemed like just about every time I turned on TNG "Cause and Effect" was on. And John De Lancie, overused though he was, is still always a joy to watch with Stewart.

But those, and a few others, are really only a couple high points in what is an overall run of surprisingly depressed quality. One almost gets the sense that after 20-some-odd years between Star Trek and The Next Generation the time spent on TNG was the creators learning how to make Star Trek, at least on television. The fact that Deep Space Nine is SO good - and even ten years after it went off the air when I catch it I am STARTLED by how good almost every single episode of DS9 is, and how remarkable the whole series became - is some pretty strong evidence in that direction. Of course, the dreck that was Voyager and the first two seasons of Enterprise undermines that argument somewhat, but shut the hell up.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying TNG is bad. It isn't. Especially if you compare it to some of it's contemporaries; it is more than probable that part of the reason we have such fond memories of Next Gen is because, for science fiction fans at least, the available alternatives were so unpleasant. It isn't bad. At times, even, it's pretty good, but on the whole it's just not nearly as good as we remember it.

And, of course, if I could just bring myself to not watch it when it's on, I wouldn't have to think about this so often.

JLK