#TNGWatch #SeasonTwo #WrapUp

With one notable exception, this season is a lot better than the first season. There are still some pretty dumb and terrible episodes (friggin’ clip show and that horrible "Up the Long Ladder"), but there are also some amazing episodes, which Season One had like none of. The crew is pretty much who they are supposed to be at this point, and we get Guinan, Ten Forward, and the Borg.

Romulans, Klingons, and Ferengi all show up again, but a lot of new races get introduced as well (though we won’t see most of them ever again).

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, though. That notable exception I mentioned earlier is of course Dr. Katherine Pulaski. And her presence marred pretty much the entire season. She was written as bigoted from the very beginning, but in such an unsympathetic way that you couldn’t help but dislike her from the word go (if you want to see how a sympathetic bigot might be written, you need only look at Chief O’Brien and his hatred of Cardassians, which I think starts to develop while he’s still on TNG). I’m legitimately surprised that Roddenberry allowed such a character to exist. He was notorious for not allowing these kinds of things to exist in his utopian future because he firmly believed we would have grown out of that shit by the 24th century (that said, Roddenberry’s progressivism was colored by the fact that he was a straight white man who grew up in the 30s and 40s, so it only went so far, especially where women were concerned).

This season started terribly, and it ended terribly, but it had some pretty awesome things in the middle (and also "Up the Long Ladder"; good Lord that was fucking awful).

Onward to Season Three!

#TNGWatch #SeasonOne #WrapUp

This was an incredibly uneven season. It had its moments of brilliance, and a few shades here and there of what it becomes in the future, but it was mostly filled with meh episodes, and a fair amount of truly terrible episodes. I am fairly impressed that they very rarely relied on what had come before, however. The Klingons and Romulans, aliens that were known from the OG series and films, only show up in one episode each, and Vulcans only show up once or twice (I only remember that Admiral from the body horror episode). Everything else is quite new and fairly different. OG Trek was getting into scrapes all the damn time, while TNG tries really, really hard not to.

The cast mostly gels into what I remember by the end of the season, though Worf and La Forge are still in command red, and Riker’s face is still naked, but there’s a lot less grumpy Picard, and Data kind of steals the show every time he shows up. Tasha Yar gets the boot, and The Boy really disappears from the last few episodes, showing up almost as an extra only a few times since the episode in which he took the Starfleet exam and didn’t make it.

Now, onward to Season Two!