alt title(s): The Next Generation; Next Generation
Crusher, Worf, Data, Picard, Riker, LaForge & Troi
Space... the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise;
Its continuing mission - to explore strange new worlds,
To seek out new life and new civilizations:
To boldly go where no one has gone before.
- Captain Jean-Luc Picard, title sequence voiceover
Star Trek: The Next Generation is a science fiction show created by Gene Roddenberry as part of the
Star Trek franchise. After struggling for a few seasons trying to establish itself apart from the Original Series, it exploded into one of the most well respected television shows ever made, partially because of a change in direction (its creator had health problems starting around season two of the show's run, forcing him to appoint life-long Trek fans such as Brannon Braga and Rick Berman to be the new standard bearers) and an increased willingness to experiment with the format and scope of the show, and science fiction as a whole.
Set in the 24th century, about eighty years after the
original series, the program features a new crew (including Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard), new perspectives on established cultures (a Klingon Empire as a semi-friendly ally against a Romulan Empire emerging from decades of isolation), new antagonists (notably the Ferengi and the Cardassians, as well as the Borg) and a new
Enterprise (Galaxy-class starship, registration NCC-1701-D). The series aired in first-run syndication, premiering with "Encounter At Farpoint" the week of September 28, 1987 to some 27 million viewers. It ran for 178 episodes - currently the largest of any Star Trek show - over seven seasons, ending with the two-part finale "All Good Things..." the week of May 23, 1994.
While much of the show was dedicated to the same mantra of the Original Series, there were some
Story Arcs over the course of the series. The omnipotent
trickster character of Q would show up form time to time to put
Humanity On Trial, becoming a
Book End storyline
epitomizing the series. It also created one of the most infamous foes in
Sci Fi - The Borg, a cybernetic organism with a hive-mind consciousness and the intent on enslaving all humanoid life. Their second appearance, the two-parter "The Best of Both Worlds," is considered to have one of the greatest
Cliff Hanger moments in television history. In an effort to break the Klingons out from their "Black Hat" role, the Klingon Worf was a regular character and his duality between
The Federation and the Klingon Empire defined their
Proud Warrior Race Guy complex. The sneaky Romulans return to their old tricks, providing plenty of espionage and paranoia. And in the later seasons established the Cardassians and the resistance force "The Maquis" made up of Federation deserters; both became a major part of the setting of the following series,
Deep Space Nine.
The show won 18 Emmy awards and became the first syndicated television show to be nominated in the Best Dramatic Series catagory. It was also nominated for three Hugo awards, of which it won two: the first television show to do so since the original Star Trek.
The series formed the basis of the seventh through tenth Star Trek films -
Generations (1994),
First Contact (1996),
Insurrection (1998) and
Nemesis (2002). The success of the series led to an expansion of the franchise and is responsible for the creation of
Deep Space Nine,
Voyager and finishing with
Enterprise. Though fans will usually agree that the consistency of the plots and general physics of the universe were less than adequate, the best episodes make for genuinely compelling viewing, and form part of Gene Roddenberry's intriguing and far-reaching legacy.
Character profiles and roles in the script:
Is the
Trope Namer for:
Notable trope-based episodes include:
- Acting For Two: Time Squared. Any episode with Data & Lore or their "father" Dr. Noonien Soong. (Also see the episode Brothers which was Acting For Three (including one stint in enough make up to make a Klingon's actor cry.)
- Alternate Universe: Yesterday's Enterprise
- All Cavemen Were Neanderthals
- Amnesia Danger: Conundrum
- Authority Equals Asskicking: Starship Mine. Absolutely.
- Big No: Timescape, said by Picard while suffering in temporal narcosis.
- Chained Heat: Attached
- Clarke's Third Law: Devil's Due
- Clone Degeneration: Up the long ladder
- Costumer (Several times; mostly holodeck adventures, although the most famous was "Q-Pid", which is decidedly not set on the holodeck)
- Cuckoo Nest: Frame of Mind
- Day In The Life: Data's Day
- Deus Ex Machina
- Dropped A Bridge On Him: Tasha Yar in Skin of Evil, Captain Kirk in The Movie.
- Enemy Mine: Darmok
- First Contact: First Contact (the episode and the movie. The first one reverses the polarity by having the aliens be the ones experiencing first contact with humans.)
- Fish Out Of Water: A Matter of Honor
- Former Teen Rebel: Picard in Tapestry
- Future Imperfect: Episode of the same name. An interesting Alternate History arises and thanks to a Trauma Induced Amnesia Riker (now Captain of the Enterprise) can't recall any of it.
- Ghost Ship: The Naked Now, Night Terrors, Hero Worship, Booby Trap
- Government Drug Enforcement: Symbiosis
- Groundhog Day Loop: Cause and Effect
- Humanity On Trial: Encounter at Farpoint and All Good Things...
- In Another Mans Shoes
- Invisible Main Character: The Next Phase
- Kangaroo Court: The Drumhead
- King In The Mountain
- Laser Guided Amnesia: Conundrum again
- Let Us Never Speak Of This Again: The Naked Now
- Lower Deck Episode: Lower Decks
- Moral Myopia: Coming of Age and Chain of Command
- Nightmare Fuel: Night Terrors, which actually did give this editor (then twelve years old) nightmares for days after watching it.
- The Poseidon Adventure: Disaster
- The Puppet Masters: Conspiracy
- Snapback
- The Rashomon: A Matter of Perspective
- The Virus: The Best of Both Worlds, Identity Crisis
- Two Plus Two Makes Five: Chain of Command, with lights instead of fingers.
- What Measure Is A Non Human: Measure of a Man
- Wrongly Accused: Justice, to name one
- You Are In Command Now: The Arsenal of Freedom, Disaster, Descent
Tropes used by this show in general are:
- Absentee Actor: Some episodes struggle to include all the actors, even with the Mandatory Line.
- Alternate Universe
- Applied Phlebotinum: Star Trek runs on this and all the subset variants, justified with heavy heaps of Techno Babble.
- Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Data, though his Character Development starts to negate this towards the end.
- Catch Phrase (Several: "Make it so", "Resistance is futile", etc.)
- Character Development: Part of the reason the show came into it's own was building up the origin stories and social habits of the crew, which served to make them more real.
- Clarke's Third Law
- Darker And Edgier: The episode Conspiracy was jarringly graphic, and featured Moral Dissonance on the part of several characters to the point of Character Derailment.
- Death Ray: The Varon-T Disruptor, capable of painfully killing rather than just disintegrating
- Double Dont Know: The Battle
- The Dutiful Son: Robert Picard
- Ensemble Darkhorse: Both Data and Worf came to share the spotlight with Picard among fans. Originally the series focused more on Picard, Riker and Dr. Crusher.
- Evil Twin: Lore, which usually gave Brent Spiner a chance to show off more of his range as an actor outside of the stoic Data character.
- Brent Spiner actually stated in an interview that he preferred playing Lore to playing Data. Why? Because "we have more in common."
- Face Framed In Shadow: For a surprise revelation about long lost Tasha Yar's fate.
- Facepalm: The best known picture happens to feature Picard facepalming.
- Fighting From The Inside
- Fling A Light Into The Future
- From A Single Cell
- Good Troi Episode: Trope Namer.
- Government Drug Enforcement: The former plague cure that became a narcotic in Symbiosis plus the 21st-century drug-addled supersoldier Q conjures up in Encounter At Farpoint.
- Great Gazoo: Q
- Hyper Awareness: Data, due to being an android would see more into events then was actually relevant.
- Jerk Ass: Q and most of the Cardassians that show up
- Just Between You And Me: A lot of enemy plots are foiled when their plans are revealed, only to have the crew member in question escape and foil the whole thing.
- Just Ignore It: A device that can kill anyone with a single thought. However, being a Vulcan invention, it only works on the aggressive.
- Lights Off Their Eyes: The Soong androids.
- Limited Advancement Opportunities: The reason why any promotions were token, or short-lived, or part of
- Magnificent Bastard: Q in all his appearances, to one degree or another, often with very entertaining results.
- Mega Manning: The Borg have the ability to assimilate technology and knowledge from other species. It is at the very core of their philosophy.
- Mexican Standoff: A staple of later seasons. There is plenty of exposition at gun/disruptor/phaser-point.
- Milky White Eyes: Geordi's blindness, later averted in the second (or eighth, depending on how you count) movie.
- Mind Screw: Several episodes, with "Frame Of Mind" being an outstanding example with a standout performance from Jonathan Frakes as Riker. Not so much a case of Breaking The Fourth Wall as breaking the fifth, sixth and seventh walls.
- Also occurs with the back-and-forth dialogue between Gul Madred and Picard in "Chain Of Command (Part II)" too, along with some Mind Game Ship.
- Mr Exposition
- Mysterious Past
- Near Death Experience
- Negative Space Wedgie
- Not Even Bothering With The Accent: Jean-Luc Picard, a Frenchman played by an obviously English actor using Yorkshire idioms - Grand.
- I belive they said at one point the UK took over France in WWIV to explain this.
- Fun with the almost last-minute additions of exclamations like "Merde!" during the first season, dropped partway through.
- Not Named In Opening Credits: Dr. Pulaski
- Not So Harmless: Q in some instances, but especially after the Enterprise's first encounter with the Borg (which he engineered).
- Ontological Mystery
- Out Of Character Moment
- Pals With Jesus: Q, to Picard's chagrin.
- Psycho Prototype: Lore.
- Replacement Scrappy: Dr. Pulaski -briefly- for Dr. Crusher. Disliked not so much for the fact that she was not Dr. Crusher as for her abrasive, unsympathetic and arrogant personality despite characters regularly claiming otherwise. She had her moments, though.
- Requisite Royal Regalia: Lwaxana Troi brags she's "Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed", among other boasting of her position, which likely means she's high nobility at the very least.)
- Rescued From The Scrappy Heap: Wesley; he went back and forth after he left the show.
- Rubber Forehead Aliens: So much so that it is often difficult to tell alien species apart.
- Space Clothes: The uniforms worn by the engineering staff and several other crew members during the first season are truly astonishing. And the clothes worn by the denizens of the utopian paradise in Justice make them look sensible.
- Space Friction
- Space Is Cold
- Space Is Noisy
- SORAS
- Screaming Birth
- Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The entire race of Q, and the mysterious creature in The Survivors.
- Technobabble: Teraquads of it.
- Teleporters And Transporters
- Tin Man
- Tinman Typist
- Touched By Vorlons
- Trickster Mentor: Q...usually. Sometimes he's just screwing with them.
- Two Keyed Lock: Used for the auto-destruct.
- Viva La Evolution: The Borg, by any means necessary.
- Voice Of The Legion: The Borg.
- Warrior Poet
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Tasha Yar, actress Denise Crosby felt she wasn't useful and asked to be let go. Her death was so sudden that it took a while before you realized she wasn't coming back. A Time Travel episode briefly brought her back and the subsequent timeline screw-ups resulted in a recurring enemy that looked exactly like her.
- Will Not Tell A Lie: Betazoids.
- You Look Familiar: Suzie Plakson as Selar and K'ehlyr, to name one.
- Look out for the future Tuvok (Tim Russ) playing a terrorist in Starship Mine.
- Marc Alaimo who would become, in DS 9, Gul Dukat, played 4 different characters in TNG, including the first Romulan seen in TNG in "The Neutral Zone".
- Robert Duncan McNeil, Voyager's Tom Paris, as Nicholas Locarno in "The First Duty."
- Ethan Phillips, Voyager's Neelix, as Dr. Farek in "Ménage à Troi."
- Viewer Stock Phrases: Some things that somebody watching this show might say
- "Not bad at all. In fact, I think I like this one more!" - Initially, just the thought that a new Trek was being made minus the beloved Kirk and Co. prompted cries of They Changed It Now It Sucks. But after Growing The Beard, many accept it as the premier incarnation of Star Trek.
- "I know him/her.." - Famke Janssen appearing as an empath. Glenn Morshower (pre-Aaron Pierce) as a lieutenant j.g.
- "Best episode ever!": Best Of Both Worlds, The Inner Light, Tapestry, just to name a few.
