Dare I risk venturing into one of those boring Viewings posts no one likes?
We just finished season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s gonna be a full rewatch, although I saw at least half of them on the Horror Channel (RIP) about eight years ago. Anyhow, a troubled season one—it only gets better after this. To be fair, it does build towards a pretty strong final few episodes.
So do I like TNG as much as TOS? Probably not. How much of that is sentiment for the show I watched lots as a kid? Hard to say… but definitely a factor.
A short documentary on the final season one disc gave me a chuckle. Gene Roddenberry recalled Patrick Stewart first being suggested as the new Enterprise Captain, and he had his doubts. He wasn’t sure he could cast a bald man in the role!!
I see exactly what you mean, Gene.
There might be more new comics stuff coming. Bear with me. If you didn’t give any love to the last strip, please go and do so! It turned out pretty good, I thought.
Hope everyone in the UK has enjoyed the hot weather, anyhow. A bit of sarcasm there. We have a temporary respite, but another heat-wave is threatened. With all the emotive colour-coded alerts and bright red maps these days, believe me, I absolutely do take it as a threat of some kind, from our Reptilian Overlords no doubt……
Seems to me that he’d have been much better off, if everyone was bald.
I was never that invested in Star Trek, though I watched the original series and many of the Next Generation episodes. Not sure I could face watching any of it again, I’m afraid.
I watched the first four or five instalments of Star Trek: Discovery when it first launched, then just walked away from anything associated with the Bad Robot and Secret Hideout production companies (including the third movie set in their ‘Kelvin timeline’): no episode of the original series — even the infamous ‘Spock’s Brain’ — was ever as dumb as the garbage Abrams and Kurtzman foisted upon the franchise.
I recall chuckling when I read that memo in Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, Herb Solow and Robert Justman’s account of their dealings with NBC, Desilu and (often most difficult of all) Gene Roddenberry. The so-called ‘Great Bird’ was reportedly less involved with The Next Generation from its second season onward, although his lawyer Leonard Maizlish was accused of interfering with the production process (quite possibly without his client’s day-to-day knowledge); Maizlish’s allegedly rewrote the episode ‘Too Short a Season’, prompting Trek veteran Dorothy Fontana to quit and producer Maurice Hurley to take over control of the writing team from Roddenbery.
A quick check confirms that memo was written just 25 days before NBC announced Star Trek was getting a third season, although Roddenberry effectively quit after arguments over its timeslot (the initial plan was to take over from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on Mondays at 7:30pm, but NBC eventually opted for Fridays at 10pm, essentially ensuring the majority of its potential audience would either be home in bed or out having the kind of fun advertisers can’t target). He retained an executive producer credit, but Fred Freiberger was now at the helm as the Enterprise went into its final spiral.