You can read what I had to say about those episodes over at Superheroes, etc. But here at List SMASH! I wanted to talk a little bit about all the things that bothered me about TNG and what's kept me away until now.
10. This guy.
9. That Guy.
8. The Holodeck.
Yes, I think the idea of the holodeck is very cool. Yes, I want one for myself. Yes, if I had one I would use it for things that would require age verification and a credit card.
But the thing never works like it's supposed to. Ever. Ever. It always tries to kill everyone. It always almost destroys the ship. I love my XBox but if it threatened to blow up my apartment twice a month I think I'd find a way to let go.
7. The races.
First, they're boring. You pick a single defining quality and presto, you've got a Star Trek race. Warlike? Klingons. Greedy? Ferengi. Logical? Vulcans. Annoying? Long Islanders.
Second, all non-human characters are defined by the fact that they aren't human. You never see Picard or Riker pounding their chests and proclaiming, "We! Are! HUMAN!" But if a new Klingon character shows up and doesn't roar "We! Are! KLINGON!" within the first five minutes, the FCC fines Gene Roddenberry's estate.
Third, all of this is particularly annoying because of the recurrent themes in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I mean, it's one thing to watch or read Lord of the Rings and realize that an elf is an elf and that's really all you need to know about him. But it seems to me a series as preachy about tolerance and diversity as Star Trek: The Next Generation should be a bit more imaginative when it comes to conceiving alien races.
6. Time travel.
There seem to be a lot of Trek fans who don't have a high opinion of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Say what you want about Leonard Nimoy's not-remotely-subtle animal conservation message, Star Trek IV treated time travel with respect. It was treated as something unique, something tough to achieve, something incredibly risky, and something not to be undertaken lightly.
I wondered, back when the Trek spin-offs were doing well, why they didn't produce a time-travel-specific Trek series. Star Trek: Journey Through Time or Star Trek: Future Imperfect or Star Trek: Oh Crap, My Watch is Wrong. I quickly answered myself: because, starting with TNG, time travel became so commonplace in the franchise that a time-travel-specific show would be redundant.
More importantly, it seemed eventually time travel became the only way for the writers to actually do something interesting with an episode. When I think of the TNG episodes that genuinely impressed me, they're usually time travel episodes like "Yesterday's Enterprise" and the series finale "All Good Things..."
5. Lights.
What's futuristic or advanced or even particularly functional about having little itty bitty lights that fit in your palm? Sure, the Star Trek creators can't foresee some things. Maybe it isn't their fault that it took them 4 series, 8 movies, and 5 different incarnations of the Enterprise to bring motion sensor activated bathroom sinks into the distant future when rest stops and shopping malls had them for years. But little flashlights? They didn't even try with that one.
4. Morality plays.
Maybe this is a criticism you could easily level at the original Trek series. I couldn't say, I haven't watched it in years. Maybe you could even level it at most television series.
Regardless, I'm not a big fan of TNG's preachiness, in spite of the fact that the beliefs promoted are usually in line with my own. Maybe it's because I want TNG to feel less like other TV. Maybe it's because I just want more spaceships going boom and fewer speeches about intervening in other cultures or why sentient piles of slime shouldn't have to use separate water fountains.
3. TNG's less adventurous spirit compared to the original series.
Kirk fought lizard men hand-to-hand.
Picard mediated trade disputes.
The Borg would never have worked in the original series. Well, okay maybe that's not true. The Borg may have worked in the original Star Trek, but they wouldn't have been as memorable. The Borg would've been a dime-a-dozen in Kirk's rogue's gallery.
But in TNG? With its diplomatic intrigue and Holodeck explorations and its ruminations on the nature of reality? As a race that could not be negotiated with, that would not end the episode by turning the other cheek and admitting that maybe they had something to learn from the Federation too, that would simply kill or consume any jerk in bright tights it came across; the Borg were something truly unique in TNG.
I think this is part of why I've recently found I enjoy Star Trek: Voyager more than I ever liked TNG. Because of Voyager's premise, I feel like there's a constant sense of peril that was also present in the original series but lacking in TNG.
2. The notion that I should care whether or not automated people are real people.
And I don't just mean that in reference to Data. Over and over again, there's this question of whether or not characters in the freaking holodeck are real people with individual rights. I just am not sure how the question of whether or not a hologram facsimile of Sherlock Holmes's fictional nemesis is a real person with the right to exist holds any weight in my life. You know, I think BioShock is a really nifty video game, but I'm not going to march for the characters' rights to vote.
1. Tasha Yar.
The Tupac Shakur of Star Trek. Sneaky minx figured out a way to show up more after she was dead than while she was alive.
