(This entry was started in late January, so it's being posted as such, even though life intervened, and then it ballooned to an unreasonable size as I just kept rambling. If you make it through this entire post I will give you candy. *Note: all candy must be retrieved in person.)
For several reasons, relating to grad school expectations unmet, relationship expectations dishonored, and personal expectations unfounded, 2002 was overall the worst year of my life. I entered grad school for a PhD in English in fall 2001, and by Christmas I realized the life it was preparing me for, professionally and personally, wasn't who I wanted to be. In the new year I remember a journal entry describing it as if my knees had been cut out from under me, and as 2002 progressed, things just got worse. A handful of friends new and old supported me and gave me strength to get through each day, and each week, and each month, though for most of that year I struggled with depression and had a generally bad time. Little things, like the lack of natural light in my apartment, would get me down to the point where I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. Little things, like dear friends who, even though he was working on a doctorate while she was working in campus ministry and they were both raising 3 kids, gave me a key to their house so I could come visit whenever I pleased, would remind me of how blessed I was and encourage me to see the good in my life. There were those I had to cut out of my life for my own well-being; there were many more who invited me into their own lives as friends and fellow travelers in the strange and dehumanizing world of grad school.
It wasn't all pain and gloom, of course. Being a natural introvert, having an active imagination, and liking to keep myself busy, I invented lots of projects for myself. Some were pretty large: for example, I took a musician friend's cassette archives of almost 40 of his live performances from 1987-1997, organized them, cataloged them, and transferred them to CD. It was wonderful to live alone and be able to shut the door on the world outside for the weekends. In warmer months I took to wandering the woods near my apartment, and eventually wrote a short story about that. I discovered the joy of 24-hour grocery stores and shopping after midnight. The music I gravitated towards was somewhat eclectic, ranging from escapist pop to serious-minded singer-songwriters. My two big finds that year, artists whose music and lyrics are still very important to me, were Sixpence None the Richer and Nick Drake; my two big guilty pleasures, which still make me smile even though I'm sometimes hestiant to admit I like them, were Michelle Branch and Roxette. But perhaps most importantly in terms of projects, 2002 was the year that Paramount fortuitously decided to release all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD.
Another guilty pleasure of mine was to wander my local Best Buy for an hour or so once a week, playing the video game demos and checking out new DVD releases. When promotional material came out hawking the release of season 1 in March, with a new season to follow every other month (with both seasons 6 and 7 to be released in December), I was intrigued. Best Buy then added their own promotion: if you bought a season set in the first or second day of its release, you got it for 50% off. This was all at the cusp of television on DVD; no one knew whether or not such a thing would be successful or popular. Paramount was actually taking a rather big gamble on committing to releasing all seven seasons in a year. Best Buy, no doubt, was contracted to take a certain amount of stock, and were hedging their bets by offering this 50% off deal, just to get a jump on depleting the number of sets they'd have to eat if the entire experiment didn't work. In the late 1990s, "letterbox" VHS tapes for movies were briefly all the rage, but almost immediately tanked, and some in the industry speculated that television on DVD would follow the same pattern: people would buy 2, maybe 3, of their favorite shows, and ignore everything else. 10 years on we know what actually happened, but back then, there was no Netflix, no Red One, no online streaming, and no web-only video content (much less webisodes or web series). The Blockbuster model, of blue roofed stores you visited for weekend deals, led the industry. About the biggest innovation at the time was that you could return rentals you got at one Blockbuster to a different Blockbuster - be still, my beating heart!
I of course had my own problems, and questions about the viability of TV on DVD never occurred to me at the time. All I knew was that one of the shows I grew up on in junior high and high school was coming out on DVD, and I could get all of it, and at 50% off. I liked to joke, then and now, that watching Next Gen was what got me through grad school, but there's actually a nickel's worth of truth there. It became a ritual, a cherished tradition: an episode a day, often with dinner or just before bed, starting in March with season 1 and continuing every time a new season was released. Of course life intervened and it didn't happen every single evening, but it was something I could look forward to with regularity, and there wasn't an abundance of things I could look forward to in those days. There were even a dozen or so episodes I'd never seen before for one reason or another, and because of the shortened release schedule at the end of the year, I was watching episodes into the spring of 2003 which, having decided long before to leave after getting a master's degree, was my last semester. So Next Gen really saw me through the rest of my grad school career, and those seven silver boxes have been sitting on shelves in first my apartment, and now my house, ever since.
I think it's important to commemorate both the good and bad things in our lives, and a decade on, I've decided to remember what 2002 was like by watching all of Next Gen once again throughout 2012. In January I rewatched seasons 1 & 2, and will be rewatching a season every other month for the rest of the year, tacking on the four Next Gen films after season 7 in November. So how did rewatching the first two seasons go? Wow, I'd forgotten how truly awful most of season 1 is. And yet, the first season was, by the standards of the day, successful. This is, in my opinion, due to three factors. The first was simply that American TV in 1987 was mostly waiting on "the next big thing," especially in terms of a dramatic series. Several successful shows ended multi-year runs in '87: The A-Team, Remington Steele, Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break, Scarecrow & Mrs. King, Fame, and likely the most important from 25 years on, Hill Street Blues. Blues was one of the first shows to introduce a serial form of storytelling into American prime time, the other major show being St. Elsewhere, which in 1987 was beginning its last season. Serial storytelling is, briefly, the kind of narrative in TV we're used to today in scripted dramas: ongoing intricate storylines spanning seasons and even entire series, with viewers expected to know what characters reference even if the plot point occured years earlier. A show like Lost or the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica - or even The Sopranos - simply wasn't possible in 1987; television was just starting to learn that the serial format, which worked to great effect on soap operas in the afternoon, could be applied to "serious" prime time drama. The biggest things on evening TV in '87 were half-hour sitcoms: The Cosby Show, Cheers, Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Golden Girls, Newhart, Who's the Boss, Designing Women, Night Court and, sadly, ALF. The rest of prime time was hour-long dramas which were either non-serialized (Murder She Wrote, Matlock, Magnum PI, Miami Vice, Cagney & Lacey, MacGyver) or were playing with serialization, but mostly as "prime time soaps" (Moonlighting, Dynasty, Dallas, Knots Landing), the one exception being Steven Bochco's L.A. Law, which had just started the previous year. Also, there was only one serious science fiction show on prime time: a new version of The Twilight Zone which had started in 1985.
So even though much of the above was "good TV," the medium had a gap which something like Next Gen, a serious, serialized sci-fi show with broad based appeal and a strong brand name, could fill. The second reason the show was successful was purely its business model: Gene Roddenberry and Paramount decided to release the show in first-run syndication, which means that the show was produced and filmed without a specific network on board to broadcast it. Instead, broadcast rights were sold to regional or local TV stations, who usually (though not always) were affiliated with a network. Because the regional or local station now owned rights to broadcast, they chose the day and time the show aired. For the 1960s and 1970s, the biggest success of first-run syndication programming was game shows, which stations would air in mornings or afternoons as a niche kind of filler for when they ordinarily wouldn't have network programming. Often during these years, British miniseries were sometimes shown in the US this way. Many cancelled network programs found a second life in syndication, sometimes producing new episodes which were then distributed via the first-run syndication model. The original Star Trek itself (aka the Original Series), though it produced no new episodes after cancellation in 1969, had 79 episodes which were syndicated frequently in the 1970s, giving the show cult status and enough of a fan following to resurrect the show, briefly as a "Star Trek - Phase II" TV show which never got out of pre-production, but ended up paving the way for the feature film franchise.
Gene Roddenberry was heavily involved with Star Trek - Phase II and with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But budget costs spiralled out of control on the movie, and partly because Roddenberry was such a bottleneck for all decisions, Paramount found him easy to blame when the film was poorly received critically, and although the film made money, it was far less than the studio's expectations. Paramount greelit a sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but ended up giving director Nicholas Meyer the lion's share of decision-making. When the film was not only made within budget (and with a much smaller budget than Star Trek I had), and was wildly successful both financially and critically, Paramount continued to release movies in the franchise and continued to slowly sideline Roddenberry. By the time the fourth movie came out in 1986, the creator of Star Trek had almost nothing to do with the film series. But the successes of the films made the public and Paramount want more of the Trek universe, and Roddenberry was able to sell them an idea of a show built around another Enterprise crew, set a century after Kirk's generation, with all new actors (who would cost considerably less).
The catch was, Roddenberry wanted to be the first and last decision-maker on the show. He would run casting, he would decide who was on production team, he would enlist the writers and directors. Together, Roddenberry and Paramount hit upon the first-run syndication model because it got them both things they wanted: it assured no network interference, which Roddenberry had had quite enough of already from NBC in the 1960s, and the syndication deal they decided on meant that stations had to agree to a 2-year contract, and essentially guarantee two full seasons (around 50 episodes) of Next Gen before a word of a script had been written or a casting call had gone out. This made sure Paramount would recoup its investment if the series was a flop, and Star Trek as a brand name had the cache to convince stations to make the 2-year commitment. And because Paramount would be making its money back even if the series tanked, they were quite willing to let Roddenberry be in complete control. After all, lightning had struck for him once with the Original Series in a syndication model - why not twice? If the series was successful in syndication and picked up for additional seasons, that would be cream financially for Paramount, and vindication for Roddenberry that he still knew what was best for Star Trek. Even better for the studio, a new show with new actors meant that not only was the original Trek cast available for more feature films, Roddenberry would be busy on the TV series and could be withdrawn entirely from the films. (Which proved to be true, though a mixed blessing for the studio and franchise: Star Trek V was directed and mostly written by William Shatner and was the poorest received of any original cast film; on the flip side, Roddenberry was adamantly against everything about the storyline of Star Trek VI, which then and now is widely seen as the second-best original cast film.)
This brings up the third and last reason the ghastly first season of Next Gen was successful: the vision of Gene Roddenberry himself. (Yeah, I know, you'd forgotten we were technically still within the three reasons list.) There seems little doubt, historically in both the Original Series and in the Next Generation, that Roddenberry's vision of the future, in general and in specifics, played a large role in the success of Star Trek. Roddenberry, rare among science fiction writers and dreamers, looked at the future of humanity and saw hope and unity. He saw an Earth united under one fair, benevolent goverment and part of a United Federation of Planets. There were not only hundreds of alien races in the universe besides our own, but they were mostly rational, intelligent beings with whom we could have meaningful alliances and advance science, learning, and the general well-being of all species. Poverty was eliminated through the Federation, as was much disease, and there was general enlightenment beyond the traditional barriers of race, gender, class, and creed. With the passing of these things, there was also the passing away of currency, greed, avarice, and most all forms of conflict on a societal level. Starfleet, the exploratory arm of the government, sent ships in search of more intelligent life in other galaxies, and was also an efficient military force for defense purposes against those who preferred to be at war, such as the Klingons and the Romulans.
When you really think about it, it's amazing such a rather utopian vision of the future ever caught on, in the 1960s, '70s, or '80s, or even today. (And yet, the "reboot" of the Star Trek film franchise by J.J. Abrams in 2009 showed the continuing appeal - and financial goldmine - of this kind of hope in this kind of future.) Of course, Roddenberry was never someone you could call "consistent" - one of the favorite jokes Trekkies have with one another, which Roddenberry confirmed privately while making Next Gen, was that the Trek canon was basically whatever Roddenberry felt it was at any given moment. He was a persuasive visionary, but not in any way a businessman or, frankly, much of a showrunner. In assembling a production team for Next Gen he brought back some old partners like Bob Justman and D.C. Fontana, but also took on new talent as well, including Mike Okuda and the heir apparent, Rick Berman, whom Roddenberry groomed to continue the legacy of Star Trek in the way Roddenberry wanted.
Part of the truth of things was that, in 1987, Gene Roddenberry was 66 years old and starting to have health problems. As the first season got underway, there were issues from the very beginning in the writer's room, and Roddenberry increasingly focused his attentions there, leaving more of the daily production to Justman and Berman. There's been much speculation as to the nature of the problems in the writer's room during season 1, and though various facts are known (including that Roddenberry ended up doing the final rewrites, some of them extensive, on the first 14 epsiodes regardless of who else wrote them) there's also been a fair amount of protection Roddenberry's associates onscreen and off have given him. What can be inferred without much difficulty is that Roddenberry wanted the scripts to work a certain way, to generate conflict more from the situations on new planets the crew found themselves in, instead of among the crew themselves. There would be no more antagonism a la Spock and McCoy (well, actually, there would be, but that's in season 2). There would be new, dangerous enemies which would reappear frequently, and the biggest successes of these would come from Roddenberry, who created the idea for the Borg, and created Q entirely on his own. Unfortunately, Roddenberry also created the Ferengi, who were simply creepy in an uncomfortable instead of a threatening way.
Though many of the characters and casting decisions were exactly right (such as a more contemplative, diplomatic captain, paired with a first officer leading Away Missions who seemed to take on the more honorable aspects of Kirk's character), he had to be strongly persuaded by his colleagues to make Worf a main character, and for much of season 1 Worf has almost nothing to do but growl and make recommendations that the captain should act aggressively. Roddenberry's own ideas of who Klingons could and couldn't be were rather shockingly limited; in the first and second seasons, ideas made for advancing Worf's character came from other writers. Perhaps his biggest character misstep, though, was Wesley Crusher, who was given Roddenberry's middle name and who became a surrogate for Roddenberry himself in terms of his own desires: to be a young man in this brave new future who was brilliant and had the rest of his life in front of him. Wesley had little to do in season 1 as well, mostly limited to being in awe of everything, spout arrogant technobabble and, more than a few times, save the entire ship because of his genius. Wil Wheaton played Wesley and rather unfairly got the brunt of almost immediate and long-lasting fan hatred. Really, Roddenberry is to blame for being too close to the Wesley character and for using it as an outlet for wish-fulfillment.
Poor story decisions were made at the outset, too. While the Q sections of the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" work fairly well, little else does, and the second episode, "The Naked Now," is basically a rehash of an Original Series episode called "The Naked Time," with the crew encountering a new strain of an emotion-releasing, deadly fever that the previous crew encountered. Barely after meeting these characters, not only do we unfairly see their deepest emotions revealed all at once, but in a ripoff of a story done 20 years earlier. The next epsiode, "Code of Honor," depicts the bad guys as African tribesmen, and then "The Last Outpost" introduces the Ferengi, who have big electric whips and talk about how shameful it is for humans to clothe their females; neither episode works at all. (One of Roddenberry's more dirty-old-man moments involved a full page of the writer's bible to the first season devoted to Ferengi mating habits.) But people were watching, and maybe through a soft spot for the world of Trek, were saying the new episodes had the flavor of the old series, if not the quality. A basic restatement of why it's important to explore the galaxy came in "Where No One Has Gone Before," and we get a first-grade recitation of why the Prime Directive is important (before Picard breaks it) in "Justice." In these early episodes, Picard is pedantic and rambling, Riker cold and driven, and Troi is Captain Obvious with her Betazoid spidey sense. Wesley is annoyingly right all the time. Wesley will remain annoyingly right all the time for most of the next two years.
But after ten or so episodes, things do pick up. It's hard to say exactly why: there was a revolving door on the writer's room, as scribes frustrated with Roddenberry's reworking of their stories left and others came and then they left too. Eventually it seemed like a few writers began to grok the world Roddenberry wanted to create, and also that these characters were not cardboard cutouts for Roddenberry's ideals, though sometimes he wrote them as such. In the slightly better episodes, Q returns in "Hide and Q" to tempt Riker with phenominal cosmic powers, and "Haven" takes what could have been a disastrous story idea, of the arranged marriage Deanna Troi's father set up for her long ago, into a roller coaster ride with a brilliant guest star and character: Lwaxana Troi, played by Majel Barrett, Roddenberry's wife. "The Big Goodbye" introduced the holodeck, which now we all know is for porn, but in 1987 was a real innovation for storytelling and played into the virtual reality craze of the time. The episode, where Picard, Data, and Dr. Crusher don 1940s attire and muck about in the noir world of Dixon Hill, private eye, was given a Peabody Award, the first syndicated show to receive that honor. It's actually difficult to imagine Next Gen without the holodeck, and if there's one cultural referent which Next Gen alone can entirely be credited with, it's that empty black room with the yellow gridlines which can become anything.
Episodes remained hit and miss for the rest of the season. Cast members seriously wondered if Paramount would pull the plug, and some started looking for other jobs. (Denise Crosby, who played Tasha Yar, found another gig and asked to be let go from her contract, which Roddenberry permitted. Her character died near the end of the season in "Skin of Evil.") The holodeck was again used and its ability to mimic nature analyzed in more detail, speculating on its abuses, in "11001001," a rather enjoyable episode despite some heavy-handed plot twists. Data's evil twin brother appeared in "Datalore," an entirely cringeworthy event. What could have been a mature exploration into gender roles becomes a series of predictable whiny rants in "Angel One." Still, there's some stories which are moderately well-done and definitely feel like classic Trek: an old negotiator uses an experimental drug to make him younger for one last mission in "Too Short a Season;" Picard's long lost love reappears, married to a sweet but nutjob scientist who may accidentally blow the universe apart in "We'll Always Have Paris;" and even Wesley gets to be less of a jerk when he and other Enterprise children are kidnapped by a society who have become sterile in "When the Bough Breaks." Worf gets to be the focus of the episode "Heart of Glory," as rebel Klingons are rescued by the Enterprise and try to convince Worf to join them against the Klingon Empire. Though it skirts the real relationship of the Federation and the Empire, as a set piece for learning more about Klingons and Worf's character, it's actually rather well done.
The season ends with two quite odd episodes, "Conspiracy" and "The Neutral Zone," the former the most hard sci-fi episode I know of in Next Gen, with flesh-consuming aliens living inside a highly-placed Starfleet aide and trying to take over the organization, the latter involving the Enterprise finding three humans cryogenically frozen for thousands of years and trying to help them adjust to the 24th Century, while also dealing with the Romulans, who suddenly appear in the Neutral Zone and accuse the Federation of destroying their outposts there. The former is a scary, creepy episode and one I've never liked; the latter is quite flat and boring, even with the Romulans. When the cast and crew reminisce about season 1, they tend to describe it as being exciting in the beginning, but then just as a slog to get through, lots of growing pains, and they're just thankful things kept moving and got better in season 2.
And season 2 really is better than season 1. In fact, the series' first two truly excellent episodes show up, the eighth and ninth of the season. The first, "A Matter of Honor," involves Riker participating in an officer exchange program with the Klingons; he has to overcome both the Klingons' distrust and a very real Ferengi threat to the Enterprise at the same time. It almost perfectly blends the action-adventure and intelligent character drama which Next Gen became famous for and which I remember growing up. The show's willingness to take on important social debate appeared in the next episode, "The Measure of a Man," where a Starfleet engineer wants to take Data apart to make many more copies to serve on other starships. Picard takes him to trial and fights for Data's right to choose his own fate as an individual, not as the mechanical property of Starfleet. The one-two punch of being an almost perfect illustration of what Star Trek is all about and Patrick Stewart's acting prowess makes the episode one of the best Trek episodes ever. Watching it this month, probably for the fifth or sixth time, I still got a shiver when Picard turns to point at Data and says "Your Honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life - well, there it sits! Waiting."
Season 2 also had many solid, enjoyable episodes, from Data and Geordi's first run on the holodeck as Holmes and Watson in "Elementary, Dear Data" to a deaf guest star appearing as a deaf mediator who must find a new way to communicate when his "chorus" is accidentally killed in "Loud as a Whisper." There's the first of several "time loop" episodes with "Time Squared," where a Picard from 18 hours in the future appears adrift in a shuttlecraft. There's an updated version of Romeo and Juliet with "The Outrageous Okona," Riker's dad stops by and causes problems in "The Icarus Factor," Worf's first love stops by and causes problems in "The Emissary," and Lwaxana Troi stops by and causes lots of problems in "Manhunt" as she looks for a new husband and decides the captain would be an excellent choice. The TNG writers were learning that the show was often at its best when exploring the personal lives of the main characters, not something sci-fi was known for in the 1980s, and something the Original Series itself had dipped into only infrequently.
Perhaps most important in terms of episodes, Q shows up in "Q Who?" and sends the Enterprise spinning into the Delta Quadrant, where they first encounter the most popular adversary ever in the Star Trek universe: the Borg. And there's one of my own personal favorite episodes of the series, "The Royale," which sees Riker, Data, and Worf trying to solve the mystery of why a casino populated with alien beings in human forms appears on an otherwise uninhabitated planet... and why the three of them can't leave the casino. It's just so classic Trek, with an amusing script and a rather clever explanation. Season 2 marked the beginning of a recurring role for Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan, ship's bartender (and a new permanent set in Ten-Forward, the Enterprise bar/social space). The role was pursued by Goldberg herself, having been a fan of the Original Series and of Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, specifically. At first the producers didn't take her seriously, but when she was persistent, Roddenberry happily cast her and created the role of Guinan for her. Goldberg would guest star in several episodes over the rest of the series, ocassionally playing a major role (including another of my all-time favorite episodes, Time's Arrow, where the crew go back to 1893 and meet Mark Twain).
But as the casting of Goldberg was satisfying to fans, another big casting decision was a minor disaster. At the end of season 1, Gates McFadden, who played Dr. Crusher, was let go and Roddenberry decided to bring on Diana Muldaur as the new ship's medic, Dr. Pulaski. Muldaur had appeared twice in the Original Series as two different supporting characters, so she had the Trek pedigree, and definitely had the acting chops as well. Unfortunately, Roddenberry decided to try to build up some of the old McCoy-Spock antagonism, this time with Dr. Pulaski and Data. It didn't work, not only in the scripts (except in rare instances) and never on screen, as Data had been a fan favorite from the beginning of the show, and Dr. Pulaski was seen as too prickly, too stubborn, and as played by Muldaur, enjoyed mocking Data a little too much. As the season continued, some of her antagonism was switched to Picard from Data, but this didn't work very well either, and thankfully the character was removed at the end of season 2. McFadden was approached to return for season 3, and wasn't planning to, but Patrick Stewart called her and convinced her to give the show another try. McFadden stayed for the rest of the run.
There were, of course, a large handful of dud scripts too. An arrogant, selfish scientist near to death transfers his brain into Data in "The Schizoid Man." Aliens who are rather dumb trick the Enterprise crew into helping them by playing dumb in "Samaritan Snare," which is the worst episode of the season. What had the potential to be a decent story, of a scientific community developing eugenically enhanced children getting struck by an aging disease, instead becomes a vehicle for Dr. Pulaski being stubborn for an hour in "Unnatural Selection." Wesley has his first crush, on a young shape-shifting diplomat in "The Dauphin," with predictably cringeworthy results. Cut short by a writer's strike, season 2 only wound up with 22 episodes, but over half of them are what I'd call good, with a few standouts as I've mentioned. The world of Next Gen was taking shape, the writers' room still had a bit of a revolving door but had settled some, and though Roddenberry's decisions were hit-or-miss, overall the fanbase and even most of the critics had judged Next Gen as not only a worthy successor to the Original Series, but an enjoyable show in its own right.
It's interesting to think about how, as Roddenberry's health would decline in season 3 to the extent that Rick Berman took over all showrunning duties, how that season marked the beginning of Next Gen's best years, which I'd say are seasons 3, 4, and 5, with the overall quality of episodes in seasons 6 and 7 still being measurably better than seasons 1 and 2. To me, it doesn't diminish the idea that lightning did indeed strike twice for Gene Roddenberry, but I do think that for Next Gen to really move forward, it had to be entrusted to other writers and showrunners. Roddenberry set it all in motion, and kept it going through a rough first two years, and on the basis on his vision, his inheritors continued creating memorable, enjoyable science fiction worthy of being Star Trek. We could of course debate how far that could stretch, as with each new Trek series (Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise) there was a law of diminishing returns. Still, the franchise only lay fallow for four years, 2005-2009, between the last episode of Enterprise and the Abrams reboot of the Original Series in film form. I look forward to seeing the "continuing missions" of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and who knows who else in the years to come as the franchise reinvents itself once again. For this year, though, I'm quite content to revisit my old friends in the 24th Century, commemorating how I enjoyed exploring the final frontier with them as a kid, and how a decade ago they helped me out once again, by getting me through grad school and by contributing to the viability of TV on DVD, both of which I'm very grateful for.
For several reasons, relating to grad school expectations unmet, relationship expectations dishonored, and personal expectations unfounded, 2002 was overall the worst year of my life. I entered grad school for a PhD in English in fall 2001, and by Christmas I realized the life it was preparing me for, professionally and personally, wasn't who I wanted to be. In the new year I remember a journal entry describing it as if my knees had been cut out from under me, and as 2002 progressed, things just got worse. A handful of friends new and old supported me and gave me strength to get through each day, and each week, and each month, though for most of that year I struggled with depression and had a generally bad time. Little things, like the lack of natural light in my apartment, would get me down to the point where I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. Little things, like dear friends who, even though he was working on a doctorate while she was working in campus ministry and they were both raising 3 kids, gave me a key to their house so I could come visit whenever I pleased, would remind me of how blessed I was and encourage me to see the good in my life. There were those I had to cut out of my life for my own well-being; there were many more who invited me into their own lives as friends and fellow travelers in the strange and dehumanizing world of grad school.
It wasn't all pain and gloom, of course. Being a natural introvert, having an active imagination, and liking to keep myself busy, I invented lots of projects for myself. Some were pretty large: for example, I took a musician friend's cassette archives of almost 40 of his live performances from 1987-1997, organized them, cataloged them, and transferred them to CD. It was wonderful to live alone and be able to shut the door on the world outside for the weekends. In warmer months I took to wandering the woods near my apartment, and eventually wrote a short story about that. I discovered the joy of 24-hour grocery stores and shopping after midnight. The music I gravitated towards was somewhat eclectic, ranging from escapist pop to serious-minded singer-songwriters. My two big finds that year, artists whose music and lyrics are still very important to me, were Sixpence None the Richer and Nick Drake; my two big guilty pleasures, which still make me smile even though I'm sometimes hestiant to admit I like them, were Michelle Branch and Roxette. But perhaps most importantly in terms of projects, 2002 was the year that Paramount fortuitously decided to release all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD.
Another guilty pleasure of mine was to wander my local Best Buy for an hour or so once a week, playing the video game demos and checking out new DVD releases. When promotional material came out hawking the release of season 1 in March, with a new season to follow every other month (with both seasons 6 and 7 to be released in December), I was intrigued. Best Buy then added their own promotion: if you bought a season set in the first or second day of its release, you got it for 50% off. This was all at the cusp of television on DVD; no one knew whether or not such a thing would be successful or popular. Paramount was actually taking a rather big gamble on committing to releasing all seven seasons in a year. Best Buy, no doubt, was contracted to take a certain amount of stock, and were hedging their bets by offering this 50% off deal, just to get a jump on depleting the number of sets they'd have to eat if the entire experiment didn't work. In the late 1990s, "letterbox" VHS tapes for movies were briefly all the rage, but almost immediately tanked, and some in the industry speculated that television on DVD would follow the same pattern: people would buy 2, maybe 3, of their favorite shows, and ignore everything else. 10 years on we know what actually happened, but back then, there was no Netflix, no Red One, no online streaming, and no web-only video content (much less webisodes or web series). The Blockbuster model, of blue roofed stores you visited for weekend deals, led the industry. About the biggest innovation at the time was that you could return rentals you got at one Blockbuster to a different Blockbuster - be still, my beating heart!
I of course had my own problems, and questions about the viability of TV on DVD never occurred to me at the time. All I knew was that one of the shows I grew up on in junior high and high school was coming out on DVD, and I could get all of it, and at 50% off. I liked to joke, then and now, that watching Next Gen was what got me through grad school, but there's actually a nickel's worth of truth there. It became a ritual, a cherished tradition: an episode a day, often with dinner or just before bed, starting in March with season 1 and continuing every time a new season was released. Of course life intervened and it didn't happen every single evening, but it was something I could look forward to with regularity, and there wasn't an abundance of things I could look forward to in those days. There were even a dozen or so episodes I'd never seen before for one reason or another, and because of the shortened release schedule at the end of the year, I was watching episodes into the spring of 2003 which, having decided long before to leave after getting a master's degree, was my last semester. So Next Gen really saw me through the rest of my grad school career, and those seven silver boxes have been sitting on shelves in first my apartment, and now my house, ever since.
I think it's important to commemorate both the good and bad things in our lives, and a decade on, I've decided to remember what 2002 was like by watching all of Next Gen once again throughout 2012. In January I rewatched seasons 1 & 2, and will be rewatching a season every other month for the rest of the year, tacking on the four Next Gen films after season 7 in November. So how did rewatching the first two seasons go? Wow, I'd forgotten how truly awful most of season 1 is. And yet, the first season was, by the standards of the day, successful. This is, in my opinion, due to three factors. The first was simply that American TV in 1987 was mostly waiting on "the next big thing," especially in terms of a dramatic series. Several successful shows ended multi-year runs in '87: The A-Team, Remington Steele, Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break, Scarecrow & Mrs. King, Fame, and likely the most important from 25 years on, Hill Street Blues. Blues was one of the first shows to introduce a serial form of storytelling into American prime time, the other major show being St. Elsewhere, which in 1987 was beginning its last season. Serial storytelling is, briefly, the kind of narrative in TV we're used to today in scripted dramas: ongoing intricate storylines spanning seasons and even entire series, with viewers expected to know what characters reference even if the plot point occured years earlier. A show like Lost or the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica - or even The Sopranos - simply wasn't possible in 1987; television was just starting to learn that the serial format, which worked to great effect on soap operas in the afternoon, could be applied to "serious" prime time drama. The biggest things on evening TV in '87 were half-hour sitcoms: The Cosby Show, Cheers, Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Golden Girls, Newhart, Who's the Boss, Designing Women, Night Court and, sadly, ALF. The rest of prime time was hour-long dramas which were either non-serialized (Murder She Wrote, Matlock, Magnum PI, Miami Vice, Cagney & Lacey, MacGyver) or were playing with serialization, but mostly as "prime time soaps" (Moonlighting, Dynasty, Dallas, Knots Landing), the one exception being Steven Bochco's L.A. Law, which had just started the previous year. Also, there was only one serious science fiction show on prime time: a new version of The Twilight Zone which had started in 1985.
So even though much of the above was "good TV," the medium had a gap which something like Next Gen, a serious, serialized sci-fi show with broad based appeal and a strong brand name, could fill. The second reason the show was successful was purely its business model: Gene Roddenberry and Paramount decided to release the show in first-run syndication, which means that the show was produced and filmed without a specific network on board to broadcast it. Instead, broadcast rights were sold to regional or local TV stations, who usually (though not always) were affiliated with a network. Because the regional or local station now owned rights to broadcast, they chose the day and time the show aired. For the 1960s and 1970s, the biggest success of first-run syndication programming was game shows, which stations would air in mornings or afternoons as a niche kind of filler for when they ordinarily wouldn't have network programming. Often during these years, British miniseries were sometimes shown in the US this way. Many cancelled network programs found a second life in syndication, sometimes producing new episodes which were then distributed via the first-run syndication model. The original Star Trek itself (aka the Original Series), though it produced no new episodes after cancellation in 1969, had 79 episodes which were syndicated frequently in the 1970s, giving the show cult status and enough of a fan following to resurrect the show, briefly as a "Star Trek - Phase II" TV show which never got out of pre-production, but ended up paving the way for the feature film franchise.
Gene Roddenberry was heavily involved with Star Trek - Phase II and with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But budget costs spiralled out of control on the movie, and partly because Roddenberry was such a bottleneck for all decisions, Paramount found him easy to blame when the film was poorly received critically, and although the film made money, it was far less than the studio's expectations. Paramount greelit a sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but ended up giving director Nicholas Meyer the lion's share of decision-making. When the film was not only made within budget (and with a much smaller budget than Star Trek I had), and was wildly successful both financially and critically, Paramount continued to release movies in the franchise and continued to slowly sideline Roddenberry. By the time the fourth movie came out in 1986, the creator of Star Trek had almost nothing to do with the film series. But the successes of the films made the public and Paramount want more of the Trek universe, and Roddenberry was able to sell them an idea of a show built around another Enterprise crew, set a century after Kirk's generation, with all new actors (who would cost considerably less).
The catch was, Roddenberry wanted to be the first and last decision-maker on the show. He would run casting, he would decide who was on production team, he would enlist the writers and directors. Together, Roddenberry and Paramount hit upon the first-run syndication model because it got them both things they wanted: it assured no network interference, which Roddenberry had had quite enough of already from NBC in the 1960s, and the syndication deal they decided on meant that stations had to agree to a 2-year contract, and essentially guarantee two full seasons (around 50 episodes) of Next Gen before a word of a script had been written or a casting call had gone out. This made sure Paramount would recoup its investment if the series was a flop, and Star Trek as a brand name had the cache to convince stations to make the 2-year commitment. And because Paramount would be making its money back even if the series tanked, they were quite willing to let Roddenberry be in complete control. After all, lightning had struck for him once with the Original Series in a syndication model - why not twice? If the series was successful in syndication and picked up for additional seasons, that would be cream financially for Paramount, and vindication for Roddenberry that he still knew what was best for Star Trek. Even better for the studio, a new show with new actors meant that not only was the original Trek cast available for more feature films, Roddenberry would be busy on the TV series and could be withdrawn entirely from the films. (Which proved to be true, though a mixed blessing for the studio and franchise: Star Trek V was directed and mostly written by William Shatner and was the poorest received of any original cast film; on the flip side, Roddenberry was adamantly against everything about the storyline of Star Trek VI, which then and now is widely seen as the second-best original cast film.)
This brings up the third and last reason the ghastly first season of Next Gen was successful: the vision of Gene Roddenberry himself. (Yeah, I know, you'd forgotten we were technically still within the three reasons list.) There seems little doubt, historically in both the Original Series and in the Next Generation, that Roddenberry's vision of the future, in general and in specifics, played a large role in the success of Star Trek. Roddenberry, rare among science fiction writers and dreamers, looked at the future of humanity and saw hope and unity. He saw an Earth united under one fair, benevolent goverment and part of a United Federation of Planets. There were not only hundreds of alien races in the universe besides our own, but they were mostly rational, intelligent beings with whom we could have meaningful alliances and advance science, learning, and the general well-being of all species. Poverty was eliminated through the Federation, as was much disease, and there was general enlightenment beyond the traditional barriers of race, gender, class, and creed. With the passing of these things, there was also the passing away of currency, greed, avarice, and most all forms of conflict on a societal level. Starfleet, the exploratory arm of the government, sent ships in search of more intelligent life in other galaxies, and was also an efficient military force for defense purposes against those who preferred to be at war, such as the Klingons and the Romulans.
When you really think about it, it's amazing such a rather utopian vision of the future ever caught on, in the 1960s, '70s, or '80s, or even today. (And yet, the "reboot" of the Star Trek film franchise by J.J. Abrams in 2009 showed the continuing appeal - and financial goldmine - of this kind of hope in this kind of future.) Of course, Roddenberry was never someone you could call "consistent" - one of the favorite jokes Trekkies have with one another, which Roddenberry confirmed privately while making Next Gen, was that the Trek canon was basically whatever Roddenberry felt it was at any given moment. He was a persuasive visionary, but not in any way a businessman or, frankly, much of a showrunner. In assembling a production team for Next Gen he brought back some old partners like Bob Justman and D.C. Fontana, but also took on new talent as well, including Mike Okuda and the heir apparent, Rick Berman, whom Roddenberry groomed to continue the legacy of Star Trek in the way Roddenberry wanted.
Part of the truth of things was that, in 1987, Gene Roddenberry was 66 years old and starting to have health problems. As the first season got underway, there were issues from the very beginning in the writer's room, and Roddenberry increasingly focused his attentions there, leaving more of the daily production to Justman and Berman. There's been much speculation as to the nature of the problems in the writer's room during season 1, and though various facts are known (including that Roddenberry ended up doing the final rewrites, some of them extensive, on the first 14 epsiodes regardless of who else wrote them) there's also been a fair amount of protection Roddenberry's associates onscreen and off have given him. What can be inferred without much difficulty is that Roddenberry wanted the scripts to work a certain way, to generate conflict more from the situations on new planets the crew found themselves in, instead of among the crew themselves. There would be no more antagonism a la Spock and McCoy (well, actually, there would be, but that's in season 2). There would be new, dangerous enemies which would reappear frequently, and the biggest successes of these would come from Roddenberry, who created the idea for the Borg, and created Q entirely on his own. Unfortunately, Roddenberry also created the Ferengi, who were simply creepy in an uncomfortable instead of a threatening way.
Though many of the characters and casting decisions were exactly right (such as a more contemplative, diplomatic captain, paired with a first officer leading Away Missions who seemed to take on the more honorable aspects of Kirk's character), he had to be strongly persuaded by his colleagues to make Worf a main character, and for much of season 1 Worf has almost nothing to do but growl and make recommendations that the captain should act aggressively. Roddenberry's own ideas of who Klingons could and couldn't be were rather shockingly limited; in the first and second seasons, ideas made for advancing Worf's character came from other writers. Perhaps his biggest character misstep, though, was Wesley Crusher, who was given Roddenberry's middle name and who became a surrogate for Roddenberry himself in terms of his own desires: to be a young man in this brave new future who was brilliant and had the rest of his life in front of him. Wesley had little to do in season 1 as well, mostly limited to being in awe of everything, spout arrogant technobabble and, more than a few times, save the entire ship because of his genius. Wil Wheaton played Wesley and rather unfairly got the brunt of almost immediate and long-lasting fan hatred. Really, Roddenberry is to blame for being too close to the Wesley character and for using it as an outlet for wish-fulfillment.
Poor story decisions were made at the outset, too. While the Q sections of the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" work fairly well, little else does, and the second episode, "The Naked Now," is basically a rehash of an Original Series episode called "The Naked Time," with the crew encountering a new strain of an emotion-releasing, deadly fever that the previous crew encountered. Barely after meeting these characters, not only do we unfairly see their deepest emotions revealed all at once, but in a ripoff of a story done 20 years earlier. The next epsiode, "Code of Honor," depicts the bad guys as African tribesmen, and then "The Last Outpost" introduces the Ferengi, who have big electric whips and talk about how shameful it is for humans to clothe their females; neither episode works at all. (One of Roddenberry's more dirty-old-man moments involved a full page of the writer's bible to the first season devoted to Ferengi mating habits.) But people were watching, and maybe through a soft spot for the world of Trek, were saying the new episodes had the flavor of the old series, if not the quality. A basic restatement of why it's important to explore the galaxy came in "Where No One Has Gone Before," and we get a first-grade recitation of why the Prime Directive is important (before Picard breaks it) in "Justice." In these early episodes, Picard is pedantic and rambling, Riker cold and driven, and Troi is Captain Obvious with her Betazoid spidey sense. Wesley is annoyingly right all the time. Wesley will remain annoyingly right all the time for most of the next two years.
But after ten or so episodes, things do pick up. It's hard to say exactly why: there was a revolving door on the writer's room, as scribes frustrated with Roddenberry's reworking of their stories left and others came and then they left too. Eventually it seemed like a few writers began to grok the world Roddenberry wanted to create, and also that these characters were not cardboard cutouts for Roddenberry's ideals, though sometimes he wrote them as such. In the slightly better episodes, Q returns in "Hide and Q" to tempt Riker with phenominal cosmic powers, and "Haven" takes what could have been a disastrous story idea, of the arranged marriage Deanna Troi's father set up for her long ago, into a roller coaster ride with a brilliant guest star and character: Lwaxana Troi, played by Majel Barrett, Roddenberry's wife. "The Big Goodbye" introduced the holodeck, which now we all know is for porn, but in 1987 was a real innovation for storytelling and played into the virtual reality craze of the time. The episode, where Picard, Data, and Dr. Crusher don 1940s attire and muck about in the noir world of Dixon Hill, private eye, was given a Peabody Award, the first syndicated show to receive that honor. It's actually difficult to imagine Next Gen without the holodeck, and if there's one cultural referent which Next Gen alone can entirely be credited with, it's that empty black room with the yellow gridlines which can become anything.
Episodes remained hit and miss for the rest of the season. Cast members seriously wondered if Paramount would pull the plug, and some started looking for other jobs. (Denise Crosby, who played Tasha Yar, found another gig and asked to be let go from her contract, which Roddenberry permitted. Her character died near the end of the season in "Skin of Evil.") The holodeck was again used and its ability to mimic nature analyzed in more detail, speculating on its abuses, in "11001001," a rather enjoyable episode despite some heavy-handed plot twists. Data's evil twin brother appeared in "Datalore," an entirely cringeworthy event. What could have been a mature exploration into gender roles becomes a series of predictable whiny rants in "Angel One." Still, there's some stories which are moderately well-done and definitely feel like classic Trek: an old negotiator uses an experimental drug to make him younger for one last mission in "Too Short a Season;" Picard's long lost love reappears, married to a sweet but nutjob scientist who may accidentally blow the universe apart in "We'll Always Have Paris;" and even Wesley gets to be less of a jerk when he and other Enterprise children are kidnapped by a society who have become sterile in "When the Bough Breaks." Worf gets to be the focus of the episode "Heart of Glory," as rebel Klingons are rescued by the Enterprise and try to convince Worf to join them against the Klingon Empire. Though it skirts the real relationship of the Federation and the Empire, as a set piece for learning more about Klingons and Worf's character, it's actually rather well done.
The season ends with two quite odd episodes, "Conspiracy" and "The Neutral Zone," the former the most hard sci-fi episode I know of in Next Gen, with flesh-consuming aliens living inside a highly-placed Starfleet aide and trying to take over the organization, the latter involving the Enterprise finding three humans cryogenically frozen for thousands of years and trying to help them adjust to the 24th Century, while also dealing with the Romulans, who suddenly appear in the Neutral Zone and accuse the Federation of destroying their outposts there. The former is a scary, creepy episode and one I've never liked; the latter is quite flat and boring, even with the Romulans. When the cast and crew reminisce about season 1, they tend to describe it as being exciting in the beginning, but then just as a slog to get through, lots of growing pains, and they're just thankful things kept moving and got better in season 2.
And season 2 really is better than season 1. In fact, the series' first two truly excellent episodes show up, the eighth and ninth of the season. The first, "A Matter of Honor," involves Riker participating in an officer exchange program with the Klingons; he has to overcome both the Klingons' distrust and a very real Ferengi threat to the Enterprise at the same time. It almost perfectly blends the action-adventure and intelligent character drama which Next Gen became famous for and which I remember growing up. The show's willingness to take on important social debate appeared in the next episode, "The Measure of a Man," where a Starfleet engineer wants to take Data apart to make many more copies to serve on other starships. Picard takes him to trial and fights for Data's right to choose his own fate as an individual, not as the mechanical property of Starfleet. The one-two punch of being an almost perfect illustration of what Star Trek is all about and Patrick Stewart's acting prowess makes the episode one of the best Trek episodes ever. Watching it this month, probably for the fifth or sixth time, I still got a shiver when Picard turns to point at Data and says "Your Honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life - well, there it sits! Waiting."
Season 2 also had many solid, enjoyable episodes, from Data and Geordi's first run on the holodeck as Holmes and Watson in "Elementary, Dear Data" to a deaf guest star appearing as a deaf mediator who must find a new way to communicate when his "chorus" is accidentally killed in "Loud as a Whisper." There's the first of several "time loop" episodes with "Time Squared," where a Picard from 18 hours in the future appears adrift in a shuttlecraft. There's an updated version of Romeo and Juliet with "The Outrageous Okona," Riker's dad stops by and causes problems in "The Icarus Factor," Worf's first love stops by and causes problems in "The Emissary," and Lwaxana Troi stops by and causes lots of problems in "Manhunt" as she looks for a new husband and decides the captain would be an excellent choice. The TNG writers were learning that the show was often at its best when exploring the personal lives of the main characters, not something sci-fi was known for in the 1980s, and something the Original Series itself had dipped into only infrequently.
Perhaps most important in terms of episodes, Q shows up in "Q Who?" and sends the Enterprise spinning into the Delta Quadrant, where they first encounter the most popular adversary ever in the Star Trek universe: the Borg. And there's one of my own personal favorite episodes of the series, "The Royale," which sees Riker, Data, and Worf trying to solve the mystery of why a casino populated with alien beings in human forms appears on an otherwise uninhabitated planet... and why the three of them can't leave the casino. It's just so classic Trek, with an amusing script and a rather clever explanation. Season 2 marked the beginning of a recurring role for Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan, ship's bartender (and a new permanent set in Ten-Forward, the Enterprise bar/social space). The role was pursued by Goldberg herself, having been a fan of the Original Series and of Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, specifically. At first the producers didn't take her seriously, but when she was persistent, Roddenberry happily cast her and created the role of Guinan for her. Goldberg would guest star in several episodes over the rest of the series, ocassionally playing a major role (including another of my all-time favorite episodes, Time's Arrow, where the crew go back to 1893 and meet Mark Twain).
But as the casting of Goldberg was satisfying to fans, another big casting decision was a minor disaster. At the end of season 1, Gates McFadden, who played Dr. Crusher, was let go and Roddenberry decided to bring on Diana Muldaur as the new ship's medic, Dr. Pulaski. Muldaur had appeared twice in the Original Series as two different supporting characters, so she had the Trek pedigree, and definitely had the acting chops as well. Unfortunately, Roddenberry decided to try to build up some of the old McCoy-Spock antagonism, this time with Dr. Pulaski and Data. It didn't work, not only in the scripts (except in rare instances) and never on screen, as Data had been a fan favorite from the beginning of the show, and Dr. Pulaski was seen as too prickly, too stubborn, and as played by Muldaur, enjoyed mocking Data a little too much. As the season continued, some of her antagonism was switched to Picard from Data, but this didn't work very well either, and thankfully the character was removed at the end of season 2. McFadden was approached to return for season 3, and wasn't planning to, but Patrick Stewart called her and convinced her to give the show another try. McFadden stayed for the rest of the run.
There were, of course, a large handful of dud scripts too. An arrogant, selfish scientist near to death transfers his brain into Data in "The Schizoid Man." Aliens who are rather dumb trick the Enterprise crew into helping them by playing dumb in "Samaritan Snare," which is the worst episode of the season. What had the potential to be a decent story, of a scientific community developing eugenically enhanced children getting struck by an aging disease, instead becomes a vehicle for Dr. Pulaski being stubborn for an hour in "Unnatural Selection." Wesley has his first crush, on a young shape-shifting diplomat in "The Dauphin," with predictably cringeworthy results. Cut short by a writer's strike, season 2 only wound up with 22 episodes, but over half of them are what I'd call good, with a few standouts as I've mentioned. The world of Next Gen was taking shape, the writers' room still had a bit of a revolving door but had settled some, and though Roddenberry's decisions were hit-or-miss, overall the fanbase and even most of the critics had judged Next Gen as not only a worthy successor to the Original Series, but an enjoyable show in its own right.
It's interesting to think about how, as Roddenberry's health would decline in season 3 to the extent that Rick Berman took over all showrunning duties, how that season marked the beginning of Next Gen's best years, which I'd say are seasons 3, 4, and 5, with the overall quality of episodes in seasons 6 and 7 still being measurably better than seasons 1 and 2. To me, it doesn't diminish the idea that lightning did indeed strike twice for Gene Roddenberry, but I do think that for Next Gen to really move forward, it had to be entrusted to other writers and showrunners. Roddenberry set it all in motion, and kept it going through a rough first two years, and on the basis on his vision, his inheritors continued creating memorable, enjoyable science fiction worthy of being Star Trek. We could of course debate how far that could stretch, as with each new Trek series (Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise) there was a law of diminishing returns. Still, the franchise only lay fallow for four years, 2005-2009, between the last episode of Enterprise and the Abrams reboot of the Original Series in film form. I look forward to seeing the "continuing missions" of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and who knows who else in the years to come as the franchise reinvents itself once again. For this year, though, I'm quite content to revisit my old friends in the 24th Century, commemorating how I enjoyed exploring the final frontier with them as a kid, and how a decade ago they helped me out once again, by getting me through grad school and by contributing to the viability of TV on DVD, both of which I'm very grateful for.
