Category: Blogging The Next Generation
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Angel One”
“Blogging the Next Generation” returns today after a one-week TIFF 2012 break, and now moves weekly, posting on Tuesdays, for the remainder of the series. At the advice of my brother, I’m also now incorporating a new feature: Enterprise ratings! See below. “On Kabatris I had to wear furs to meet with the leadership council……
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Datalore”
“Are you prepared for the kind of death you’ve earned, little man?” For an episode that is generally well-remembered and which ceded Star Trek: The Next Generation one of its most popular recurring characters in Data’s evil duplicate, Lore, “Datalore” is rather preposterously written and scarcely hangs together at all as a final episode. Were…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “The Big Goodbye”
“Civility, gentlemen. Always civility.” Oh yeah. This one. Everyone speaks highly of “The Big Goodbye,” and it won all sorts of awards and regularly turns up on lists of the best episodes of Star Trek of all time. It kicked off The Next Generation’s fascination with the holodecks – their nature, their malfunctions (malfunctions so…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Haven”
“Unlike some people, I am in growth.” Deanna Troi was one of the series’ largest ongoing problems – certainly, to hear the writers tell it; and certainly, I agree, in watching. Like all of TNG’s principal characters I remain doggedly attached to the good Counselor, but it’s hard to ignore the sheer arbitrariness of the…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Hide and Q”
“Oh, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction: what a piece of work is man.” It seems I’m not the only one who’s become interested in Riker – Q returns to the Enterprise for his sophomore bout of pestering, and dangles the omnipotent abilities of the Q Continuum…
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Blogging The Next Generation: “The Battle”
“It may be true that headaches were once quite common. That was in the days before the brain was charted. Before we understood the nature of pain.”
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Justice”
“State. The. Purpose.” “Justice” isn’t particularly successful as a piece of drama but it’s a bracingly open shot across the bow on three of Roddenberry’s core beliefs – sexual libertarianism, atheism, and the evils of capital punishment. On the first point, at least, “Justice” is probably as far as Star Trek: The Next Generation (and…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Lonely Among Us”
“Yes. Normal.” “Lonely Among Us” is batshit crazy and generally godawful, a long, meandering joke without a punchline – so I’m gonna talk about the action figures instead. The B-plot of “Lonely Among Us” involves the Enterprise stewarding two groups of delegates, the Anticans and the Selay, to peace talks on a planet called Parliament.…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Where No One Has Gone Before”
“Why is this child here?” The first great episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation represents such a substantial elevation over its brethren that it takes a minute or two to become accustomed to its quality; everything about “Where No One Has Gone Before” is sharply done. The script is partially from Diane Duane, who…