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| The series gets a dignified final bow. Too bad it comes at the end of a desperately uneven final season! |
All Good Things Must Come to an End...
And in the case of Star Trek: The Next Generation, they probably should have come to an end a season earlier. Despite a handful of bright moments and a genuinely superb series finale, the iconic science fiction show's final year is largely flat and stale, to the point that it's often a chore to plow through it.
THE FLAT EARTH SOCIETY
In my look back at Season Six, I observed that the series had not gotten stale yet, but that it was showing signs of doing so. Well, Season Seven sees the series grow as stale as a crust of a cheap bread left out for a week on a kitchen counter. Most of the episodes are so dramatically flat, I half-expected Christopher Columbus to sail off the edge.
There are echoes here of TOS' third season. The first half of the season is weaker than what preceded it, but not disastrously so. There are a few very strong episodes in the mid-season... and then it collapses into a sustained rut of shows that are downright awful, with only a scattered few rising to the heights of mediocrity.
I will say that the last regular episode makes a stab at recovery, and the series finale is genuinely fine television. But this dignified final bow is preceded by a full third of a season of dross, with the series too often seeming to be wheel-spinning while waiting impatiently to take the crew to the bigscreen.
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| When you've run out of ideas, that's when you turn one of your regulars into a ghost-sex maniac. |
CHARACTERS
In defense of the production staff and writers, I'll acknowledge how difficult it must have been to do much with characters already so thoroughly explored. But for the most part, the season doesn't even try to do anything new with them. Geordi feels bad when his mom dies, but that reveals nothing about him unless you were under the impression that he was the android regular instead of Data. Worf continues to struggle with his son's resistance to Klingon ways, but that is also nothing new. And Worf's not-quite-relationship with Troi is something that comes out of nowhere and never feels convincing - Just a desperate attempt to try to do something different with the characters.
A few episodes try to get around this by doing downright wacky things: Data gets possessed by an entire race's consciousness; Dr. Crusher is transformed into a ghost sex maniac; Troi becomes a hyper-jealous murderess; and the entire crew embrace their inner animals. I suppose when you can't think of anything to do with your characters, making them behave out of character is one solution... Though given how poorly all of those episodes are regarded, it doesn't seem to be a very good one.
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| Riker is unhappily reunited with his former captain in The Pegasus, one of the season's best episodes. |
FLECKS OF GOLD IN THE MUCK
Faring better are those episodes that reinforce and build on the characters' established attributes. Attached revisits the Picard/Crusher attraction that had been prominent in Season One, folding their unspoken mutual feelings into the "trusted friends" dynamic that had built up in later seasons. By working with what had already been established about the characters and and allowing the actors some mature and intelligent conversations within the framework of the story, it quietly emerged as an enormously entertaining piece.
Even better was The Pegasus, the mid-season Riker episode. A conversation between Picard and Admiral Pressman calls back to the very first Picard/Riker scene, in which Picard pressed his new first officer about overruling a previous captain's orders. That early scene is given new context, as we learn that the very thing Picard seemed irritated about was, in reality, the reason he had requested Riker be assigned. This adds a new level to their heated exchange in the pilot, making it a stronger scene in retrospect than it was at the time.
Thine Own Self proves to be a solid Data-centric episode (though the less said about the subplot, the better), simply because Data is so perfectly written that even a predictable story ends up being enjoyable. Pre-Emptive Strike brings Ensign Ro back to complete her arc from outcast to Starfleet officer in a way that isn't what most contemporary viewers would have expected, but that fits perfectly with who she has always been.
Basically, when the episodes don't try to push the characters in bizarre directions and just take them as they are, they tend to work. When the writers try to compensate for us already knowing the regulars by presenting bizarre situations for them to deal with, then the results tend to be a lot worse. The obvious exception is the excellent Parallels - but that one gets the characters so right that the strangeness is grounded in a way that isn't true in, say, Genesis or Masks.
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| Data gets possessed in Masks, one of the weirdest episodes... well, ever. |
FINAL THOUGHTS
I'm not quite done with Star Trek: The Next Generation, because there are still four TNG movies to review. Though I saw all four at the time, none of them is fresh in my memory so I will be able to rediscover them as new.
I won't write up a wish-list for them, save to hope that the lessons of Season Seven will be applied: That the drama works best when the characters are comfortably in-character, reacting to situations that have been well thought-out; and that it works much less well when the characters don't feel like themselves and are left to react to scenarios that have been poorly thought-out, that are bizarre with minimal explanation, or that are just plain dumb.
Basically: More flecks of gold, please, and a lot less muck.
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Next: TNG Movies
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"Lower Decks" is way better than "Attached".
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