Category: Blogging The Next Generation
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Blogging the Next Generation: “We’ll Always Have Paris”
“I can’t compete with a ghost from his past.” I was twelve years old, and I had seen Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and, perhaps, a couple of episodes of The Original Series with my mom, who would not have suggested Star Trek to me at all if she’d had any notion of what…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Skin of Evil”
“Au revoir, Natasha.” I never saw “Skin of Evil” in its original run, which I guess is just as well, although it did result in me tuning in for the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and wondering, “Where’s Tasha?” like a dumb kid whose parents were lying to him about the disappearance…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Symbiosis”
“Wesley, I hope you never do.” “Symbiosis” is inevitably a poignant episode of the series for reasons having nothing to do with its content; this is the last Star Trek appearance by Merritt Butrick, who played David in Star Trek II and III, before dying of AIDS in 1989. He’s quite good here, too; as…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “The Arsenal of Freedom”
“The name of my ship is the Lollipop. It’s just been commissioned; it’s a good ship.” Here’s an episode that set my 12-year-old heart thundering: “The Arsenal of Freedom,” a proper run-and-jump-and-rayguns show that also pressed the eternal near-romance of Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher into a confined space beneath a planet ruled by a…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Heart of Glory”
“I would rather die here than let the traitors of Kling pick the meat from my bones!” “Heart of Glory” is a very rich episode, and if it doesn’t ring entirely successful to me as a completed piece, it nonetheless delivers so much mythology for the series as a whole that it’s hard not to…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Coming of Age”
“It’s a good thing you’re cute, Wesley, or you could be really obnoxious.” This is one of my favourite episodes, and a highlight of the first season. It’s an odd exception for me, in that it’s one of the few episodes that I didn’t see until many years after it initially aired – I missed…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Home Soil”
“Ugly bags of mostly water!” This episode is so freaking bad I often forget it exists; it is not the worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s in the bottom five, and any gymnastics it does to keep itself off the bottom of the barrel are solely due to its heritage as…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “When the Bough Breaks”
“The legend will die, but the people will live.” I get this episode mixed up with its predecessor, “Too Short a Season;” they both deal with the notion of age in one way or another, and they both have particularly generic Star Trek titles. This is the one, though, where Wesley and the kids get…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Too Short a Season”
“Annie, with the golden hair.” One can admire “Too Short a Season” for its ambition, certainly, being a story about a nonogenarian admiral who ages backwards, Benjamin Button-style, to respond to an old threat. One can admire Clayton Rohner’s performance, too, as the actor strips away layer after layer of arthritic body language with surprising…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “11001001”
“You got that straight, slim. Too real is too right.” Few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation have benefited from the blu-ray upgrade as completely as “11001001,” which also happens to arguably be the first season’s best episode; that it is chock-a-block with magnificent visual effects is beside the point, but a nice bonus…