Star Trek

When Star Trek The Next Generation first came on air, a lot of mainstream fans dissed it as a Shoddy Knockoff Product and "rip off" of TOS.

The first season didn't help. Crap scripts: TOS era stories in The '80s vs. the post Vietnam War "militarism is bad" and "violence isn't the answer".

The second season saw soap opera writers brought in due to Development Hell and RecycledScripts due to the writer's strike.

And yet we still got stories like "Q Who" and "The Measure Of A Man".

If it wasn't s Star Trek show, TNG wouldn't have lasted past season two.

My vote for worst episode might have to be "Arsenal of Freedom." That story isn't even interestingly, flamboyantly ridiculous. It doesn't have the energy. You have Vincent Schiavelli in the utterly wasted role of an alien pitchman and a couple of inanimate orbs floating around a jungle.

"Angel One" was another bad choice. In addition to the mangled Apartheid allegory (with an all-white cast of course), you have Frakes wearing a window drape and Wesley passing on a killer flu to the entire crew. We get a peek into Gene's mind as militant lesbians get all gooey in the presence of Riker's charms, and their matriarchy is on the verge of collapse. My inner Blue State is pulling its hair out and we're not even thirty minutes in.

edited 16th Nov '14 10:00:59 AM by johnnyfog

Code of Honor hands down. The director was even fried for being a racist POS. It's crap, utter crap that should not have been filmed in The '80s.

Enterprise may have given us genocide in a candy coating (Dear Doctor) and Voyager may have given the finger to Native Americans (Tattoo) but that was a backhanded one, given the cluelessness of the VOY writing staff.

Arsenal of Freedom is actually one of my favorites. Geordi gets a taste of command, Picard and Crusher get good character scenes together, there's a saucer separation, and it introduced me to how awesome Vincent Schiavelli is (and I do like the holographic salesman).

The chief engineer in that episode was Argyle, right? Whatever his name was, as I recall they were considering making him a regular until they discovered that the letters they'd gotten praising him had actually come from the actor (according to Wil Wheaton's Memories of the Future.)

Fried? I wish.

According to Will Wheaton, the first director was a racist asshat.

Yes, but nobody got boiled in oil for that.

They might have done better reverse casting Troi and Yar, but given the disparity in their actresses' figures, it wouldn't have been likely. Sirtis's wardrobe wouldn't have worked that well on Crosby, and they wouldn't have had as much chance to dress an officer up the way they dressed Troi.

And I still think it's a shame Crosby quit. It would have been incredible for the show to explore her relationship with Data in-depth.

The thing I hate most about "The Aresenal of Freedom" is that such a great name is wasted on an episode the is at best mediocre.

To be frank I don't think Sirtis's wardrobe looked that great on her either.

I do think that Crosby staying on is the great What If of TNG, I think once the writing got better she could have really gotten a chance to shine.

edited 16th Nov '14 8:36:41 PM by BigMadDraco

Oh, I agree about Troi's wardrobe. It highlights her assets in all the wrong ways. We get a slight taste of what the better writing could do with Yar in Yesterday's Enterprise and everything to do with Seela.

I thought Yar's sister, Ishara, had some promise (hairdo aside). She doesn't even appear in any books, which is strange, because a character like that is ordinarily begging for an expanded universe story. Then Ensign Ro came along and basically re-did her story from Picard's view instead of Data's.

Funny how TNG kept introducing these long-lost relatives who kept getting exiled or killed! Ishara is one step ahead of the law, Worf's foster brother is stuck on a planet, Picard's brother died, Troi's sister died...

At least Picard's brother had an episode before he died. He was already an established character when he got fridged to trigger Jean-Luc's midlife crisis.

Fact I've learned from TNG S1 remastered: Troi's first non-uniform outfit was grey denim. Sirtis describes it as "imagine wearing skintight jeans up to your neck".

A woman could die from so much eighties.

edited 17th Nov '14 11:41:50 AM by johnnyfog

I've always felt "The Arsenal of Freedom" to be one of the more underrated first season episodes. Certainly not top ten of the series and below "11001001," "Heart of Glory" or "Where No One Has Gone Before," but when put up against "Justice," "Code of Honor" and "The Naked Now" it looks pretty good. The story structure was solid, had good pacing, strong acting, interesting action and utilized almost the entire cast extremely well.

I'd take that episode much more seriously if it wasn't just an orb thing casually floating around.

It was made out of a shampoo bottle somehow.

There was a spacedock shuttle that had disposable razor blades as engines. The "Mars defense permiter" ships were Typhoon and Los Angels submarine models kitbashed together. Greg Jien jokingly called them Blue Grey Octobers.

The Borg Cube was mostly plastic sprues, the excess plastic that hold model pieces. Model work is mostly taking existing objects and kitbashing something new out of it. You don't make something brand new unless you have to.

I think Arsenal of Freedom, like season 2's Peak Performance would have benefited from being latter in the show when they had better directors, tighter script editing, and better production values. To me it feels like an episode with many good elements that doesn't quite come together (hence mediocre). I will agree that it is one of the better season 1 episodes, but I don't really see that as an accomplishment.

What would "Angel One" have been like if it was written now?

I'm kind of interested in having a story set in a world where male and female gender roles are reversed and it's almost completely irrelevant to the plot.

How about a tyrannical world of women forcing men to wear burkas?

When Riker was made to wear a slinky negligee, part of me suspected he got off on it.

He was totally into it.

As Sf Debris put it: it was the product of The '80s and the sexism of the time. "Chick in charges blows our minds man!"

-_-

It was more like a creative writing exercise that went awry.

BBC Star Trek reruns have gotten into Season 2 now. Wesley is such a little shit it hurts.

Anyway, I never could appreciate Picard's speech during the hearing about Data being property before. I'm finding that this show is quite a bit more intelligent and deeper than I realized now that I'm older.

Maddox is a douche. I dunno how to feel about Data still being in contact with him and sending reports and still helping him with his research. Personally I'd tell him to shove it.

edited 25th Nov '14 9:00:45 PM by LeGarcon

Wesley is at his worst in The Naked Now and The Battle.

"I was playing around with boosting the long-range sensors..." "I glanced at those brain scans and they looked familiar..."