Ric Crossman
- Jun 7, 2022
- 10 min read

3.1 Mellow Submarine

The Next Generation Season 1 Retrospective

The bad - if hardly new - news: the first season of TNG really doesn't work. The good - if hardly new - news: it fails in ways that are far more interesting than the ways most other shows succeed.

A Confession Digression

I've never really been able to get into The Beatles. This is, I realise, not a revelation likely to trouble the surviving 50% of the world's greatest pop band. Or their fans, for that matter - even if I wanted to dabble in yum-yucking, I wouldn't want to take a run at the Beatles. Dissing the Fab Four is like dissing happiness. You've wandered so far from the herd that no-one can understand enough your bleating to get annoyed by it.

So why bring it up? I promise this is going somewhere. I've got a pet theory about why the Beatles don't really spread my Nutella. I think it's because, due to some exceptionally odd choices by first my parents and later myself about my early music experiences, I came to Merseyside's finest rather older than most. I think I was nineteen, maybe twenty when I first heard a full Beatles album, as oppose to catching indivual songs piped through shitty speakers in pub family rooms. By that point, I had thrown myself so fully into the American alternative music scene that anything delivered without a sneer seemed impossibly, risibly quaint.

Eventually, I realised how stupid I was being. I really was dissing happiness, with entirely predictable results. By the time I decided to actually, properly give the band a chance, though, it was too late. I'd already heard however many hundred songs building on the foundations the band had provided. I'd already tasted a formula that, like the Brekkian's felicium, had been refined and concentrated a dozen times over.

Imagine a world without beer. Imagine how colossal a debt western civilisation owes to whomever brewed the very first barrel of ale.

Now imagine how awful it must have tasted.

The Way We Were

I don't think I need to spend much time spelling out how this works as an analogy for the first season of TNG. The thing about trailblazers is that the path they forge is supposed to be worked on later, to improve the experience of travelling along it.

This first year of TNG blazes a very bumpy trail. The season ordering placements graph shows a show that, after an above-average pilot, was almost never in the top half of ongoing seasons. When you're struggling to stay ahead of the thrown together reactionary mess of The Original Series, the befuddled fluff of The Animated Series, and the "What if Trek but racist?" misfires of Enterprise, that's no small issue.

That summary masks some important details, though. Firstly, TNG ends up beating both the latter two shows. Not by much, in Enterprise's case, but still. A win is a win. Losing out to its predecessor is perhaps more concerning, or at least, it needs more careful thought about why the rankings fell the way they did.

It's here that we can return to the Beatles analogy. Because Kirk's voyages didn't have anything like the same problem, path-wise. The thing about The Original Series was that it wasn't all that, well, original. Certainly TV space opera had been done before, and making sci-fi by remixing western tropes was established practice as well - indeed the phrase "space opera" itself mutated from not just "soap opera", but "horse opera" too. Roddenberry's framing of his show as "Wagon Train to the stars" was nonsense for any number of reasons, but prime among them was the fact the Enterprise was travelling roads already laid down.

Nor can we point to the egalitarianism of TOS as evidence it was trying something genuinely new. In large part, that's because, as we've talked about, there isn't really much of that egalitarianism on display in the first place. Even at its most progressive, the show' commitment to imagining a better future for humanity is restricted entirely to imagining gender- and colour-blind hiring practices. Or not even that, given the fact almost every Starfleet officer is a white man. All we see here is an organisation for which not being male and white doesn't completely disqualify one from service, something which - as again we've noted before - was already true of America's armed forces at the time. Roddenberry genuinely did want to change the television landscape to be more inclusive, but TOS doesn't imagine a better way of doing things. It just doesn't lie about how things were already being done.

That isn't nothing. Clearly representation is important, and Roddenberry was genuinely risking something by insisting on it. But unusual and original are not synonyms. Roddenberry wasn't imagining a better future, he was refusing to pretend the present wasn't worse. And let's not forget that the present he was so keen to replicate was bad enough. The spectres of the '60s haunt every episode here. The outbreaks of misogyny and racism that mar the show weren't betrayals of his vision, they were entirely consistent with someone who took their own experiences of life in the US military and threw it onto the screen.

The Tomorrow People

TNG is an entirely different animal. The desire to imagine how humanity could genuinely do things differently is on full display. A spaceship that looks more like a hotel than a battlecruiser. A service where one sails alongside ones civilian family. A commitment to at least attempt to resolve differences through communication, in the hopes of creating the most pleasant working/living environment for everyone aboard. It was clear an effort was being made to present a new and better approach to Starfleet and humanity both, even before the show casually throws in the fact its characters are so post-capitalist they don't even understand what could have motivated the capitalists.

Nor is this simply the backdrop against which these stories play out. The show constantly foregrounds the idea that it has conceived of a new and better approach to being human. An eagerness to prove this vision fit for purpose is central to the first season. There's a reason "Encounter At Farpoint" begins with an Enterprise still assembling its full crew on the eve of its first mission, and that reason is not simply that that's how you do first episodes of a sci-fi show. The fact almost every Trek show since TNG has started out with the same combination of new ship/station and new crew [1] makes this approach seem like standard practice, but both the original and the animated series begin midway through the Enterprise's mission, and nothing prevented TNG from following suit.

But it needs to be the ship's first voyage that Q interrupts. Picard's defence has to based on his vision of the future, rather than the evidence of the past. In part, this is just the show (wisely) choosing not to go anywhere near the argument that its existence could be justified by past glories. But it's also about something else, a realisation that there generally is a need for this new philosophy to prove itself fit for purpose. For all that Picard argues to the contrary in "Coming Of Age", external validation is not completely irrelevant. When you're a white dude flying around in space, you can't just tell yourself you know you're trying your best, and nothing else matters. We cannot simply insist we are good enough. We have to accept the judgement of others about whether we have genuinely changed, and whether that change matters.

This isn't an idea dropped by the end of "...Farpoint". Q's conclusion does not constitute the end of the conversation - "oh, well, we've got the greenlight from that one alien, so everyone else has to follow suit". Humanity is required to prove itself again and again across the season. "The Last Outpost" and "Hide And Q" are almost as explicit about this fact as is the pilot episode, but it shows up in "The Naked Now", "Code Of Honor", "The Arsenal Of Freedom", "We'll Always Have Paris" and "The Neutral Zone" too. It's even present in the otherwise politically muddy episodes involving the Prime Directive - "Justice", "Angel One", and "Symbiosis" [2]. For all that I (along with many others) have laid out the case as to why Starfleet's first principle doesn't and cannot work, it does at least echo the leitmotif. The Enterprise is a ship so huge and technologically advanced, the challenge comes not from surviving encounters with those who abuse their power, but in resisting the urge to abuse the power they have access to themselves. [3]

Speaking of power, let's bring up the subject of weaponry. The Enterprise-D is a vessel specifically designed to be able to be able to separate its civilian sections off to become a potent and imposing warship, a capability Picard refuses to use in almost any circumstance. The ship fires its phasers in anger during precisely one story this season (against an unmanned drone, no less) - the same number of episodes in which the weapons are used to liberate a sentient alien jellyfish. The season finale here may be desperately shonky, but it still rejects a repeat of the Enterprise/Romulan battle of "Balance Of Terror" it in favour of negotiation. The all-guns-blazing approach is even more stridently rejected in "Too Short A Season", in which Kirk-style heroics are cast as relics of a bygone era it would actually be dangerous to try and return to.

This was unambiguously the right call. The franchise's first iteration often succeeded - sometimes brilliantly - despite itself. But it was despite itself. Ironically, it took a spin-off that followed the original material, an animated remix, and three films in a sequence born from the collapse of a planned second TV series to enter truly new territory. The Next Generation took its source material and completely reforged it into something genuinely different.

It's little wonder it had its share of teething troubles.

You Can't Spell "Utopias" Without "Us"

And what troubles they were. The obvious rejoinder to the The Beatles analogy is that the lads from Merseyside /\never sucked quite so hard as this season of TNG does. I'm not actually sure that's right in any case - though as we've covered, I'm not really the dude you want weighing the evidence. To the extent there's truth in the counter, though, it wouldn't be hard to see why. TNG set itself an almost unachievable task. Like, I'm not saying upending the very concept of pop music was an easy task. But there's a qualitative difference between writing music better than anyone else's, and writing humans better than you know how to be yourself.

Aaron Sorkin once said that the one thing actors can never do is convincingly play a character who is smarter than they are themselves. That feels either a little unfair to actors or too narrow a definition of smart - or both - but I think there's utility to the idea that there are some states of mind you can't just imagine being able to understand. Certainly, it must be nearly impossible to write a character you believe has a better moral philosophy than you do. If you thought their approach to the world was genuinely better than your own, surely you'd just adopt that approach?

TNG attempts to square this circle by imagining a bevy of technological wonders that could afford humanity enough breathing room to listen to our better angels. This is both an obvious dodge, and evidence the writers couldn't imagine a better philosophy, just better circumstances. Moreover, since people are absolutely terrible at separating what is situationally contingent from what is irreducibly human, and absolutely brilliant at convincing itself that something must have been the right thing to do simply because it was what we did, even fudging the way by which our worst instincts are left behind doesn't help much. We just don't have what it takes to understand what our worst instincts actually are. At best, you can catalogue what you consider all the worst instincts of humanity, but that ends up being so cynical an exercise it rather defeats the purpose of imagining something better. We find it easier to imagine devices that can distort space or reorder every molecule in the human body than conceive of a better model for humanity as a whole.

As individuals, at least. As a community, we have the opportunity to learn from the best of each other. Building a better future is - must be - a communal act. Perhaps that's why, even within this season, the problem lessens as time goes on. Maybe the writers found themselves able to riff off each other's strongest ideas, and to compensate for each other's blind spots. The back third of the season sees the show take the first of its great leaps forward. Yes, those eight episodes only bat 500, with four confirmed clunkers. All of them though can be explained away by external factors - the switchover from Roddenberry to Hurley, Crosby leaving, the writer's strike, the chaos out of which "Conspiracy" was born. The four episodes in which Hurley just gets to run a show represent a genuine sea-change, as the hard lessons of TNG's early outings are... well fuck it, let's say assimilated.

To the extent the "I can't understand why Voyager Season One wasn't as good as TNG at its best" crowd I created IDFC to oppose have anything approaching a point, it lies here. This season of TNG crawled so that everything which followed could run.

We might even make the case that "The Neutral Zone" could have been a fitting capstone to the year, had the Writers' Strike not, well, struck. A rejection of both contemporary society and The Original Series' reliance on war stories (however well-written). An explicit claim that the social politics and gentle humour of The Voyage Home had more value than the claustrophobic spittle-convention of Wrath Of Khan. The awareness that we have a duty to own and learn from the mistakes of our past, while refusing to let the past mistakes of others make present cooperation possible.

The Next Generation was an almost impossibly ambitious show taking flight in almost impossible circumstances. That doesn't excuse the turbulence, but does it contextualise it. Besides, once the show had passed through the clouds and hit cruising altitude, it ended up mastering its blend of optimism and wonder so completely that nobody ever dared fully attempt it again, even the subsequent Trek shows.

Sometimes you blaze a trail while everything is on fire, and sometimes the flames of your beacon end up scorching your fingers. This first season of TNG doesn't really work as a year of television. But that was never all it was.

[1] Lower Decks is the only obvious exception, and even there the show begins with a viewpoint character transferring to their newest assignment.

[2] "Symbiosis", admittedly, isn't so much muddy in the sense of being unclear, so much as being absolutely pristine except for the dirty footprints someone has left all over it.

[3] Indeed, arguably the larger problem than the Prime Directive itself in these three episodes is that in two of them, our heroes attempt to directly violate said law twice, and the third sees Picard knowingly using the letter of the law to defeat its spirit, in the most destructive way possible. As a result, our protagonists come off as cruelly mercurial, committed neither to sympathy nor legal principle.

Episode Rankings

1. The Arsenal Of Freedom

2. The Last Outpost

3. Symbiosis 4. Enounter At Farpoint

5. Heart Of Glory

6. Too Short A Season

7. Haven 8. We'll Always Have Paris

9. The Big Goodbye

10. The Battle

11. Datalore

12. Lonely Among Us

13. 11001001