New Gen Trek-a-thon

I’ve been on a nostalgia trip.

Sometime last year I got the urge to go back and watch the television I loved as a teenager. Top of that list was Star Trek. Not the original series - the new generation, as I still think of it: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

So I downloaded all three shows in their entirety and started at the beginning.

I watched in the gaps. While cooking, while cleaning, while getting ready for bed. An episode here, an episode there. All in, it took me somewhere in the region of 11 months to get through every season of all three.

I’d not watched most of this in about 30 years. These are my thoughts on it, mostly for my own benefit.

The Next Generation #

Obviously a show of its time. It’s very post-80s, and the majority of episodes are episodic in the way all television was then. There’s a lot of alien-planet-of-the-week, where the crew get themselves into a conundrum with a species whose way of doing things they don’t understand, and occasionally get into trouble for it.

But there’s something about this particular Trek that I feel embodies the whole Gene Roddenberry philosophy far more than the original series did. TOS always felt to me like Americans in space getting into fights. Cowboys on a frontier. TNG was about morality, diplomacy and keeping the peace wherever possible - while still standing up for yourself when you had to, to defend what you thought was right.

Where the original got it wrong, I think, was exploration. TNG explored for the sake of exploring, and respected what it found rather than imposing its will on it.

Rewatching it, I realised how much of my own moral compass came from this show. I was a teenager, that compass was still being assembled, and Star Trek probably did more to shape it than any other source in my life at the time. It presented an extraordinarily optimistic view of the future: a society with no money, no crime, no poverty, and at least internally, no war. Nations had faded away. Planets had replaced them, and planets had gathered into a united front on the basis of a shared philosophy and a desire to explore.

The characters grow on you. Picard, of course, but also Data, Worf, Troi and Riker. Even Wesley Crusher, shut up Wesley. Geordi La Forge obviously. You go on a journey with all of them, watching them work through their own struggles and grow inside an environment that cultivated their strengths and rewarded them for it - a military-shaped organisation that somehow isn’t an aggressive one.

Then there are the specials and the two-parters, which were frequently incredible. Anything with Q was entertaining and philosophical in equal measure. And the Borg, introduced by Q as a demonstration that the galaxy is a much more dangerous place than the Federation had assumed. The episodes that humbled the Federation and challenged its own preconceptions were often the very best ones.

It’s not without its flaws. There are a couple of episodes I hit on this rewatch that simply wouldn’t get made today, being overtly sexist or racist in one way or another. And there’s a fairly sizeable laundry list of episodes that just aren’t good - no real message, not entertaining, obvious filler.

But on the whole I’d say at least 80% of them are genuinely great. I laughed, I cried, I smiled, and I remembered exactly why I loved this show. TNG will always have a special place for me as the one I first engaged with and grew up on, and having watched it end on an absolute banger of a double episode, I moved straight on to Deep Space Nine.

Deep Space Nine #

A very different kind of show, and it knows it.

Instead of going out to explore, this one stays put on a reclaimed space station that happens to sit at the mouth of a wormhole. That static nature is the whole point. Because nobody is going anywhere, the character development runs much deeper, and there’s far more variety in who those characters are - different cultures, different parts of the galaxy, all housed together. Even the backdrops are unfamiliar, all Cardassian architecture we’d never really seen before.

It starts episodic. But they very carefully seed the big bad across the whole run. The Dominion and their Jem'Hadar soldiers creep in slowly, and the threat of this looming force from another part of the galaxy gradually takes over the storyline, building to war.

Revealing the Changelings as the power behind it, and tying Odo into that, was genius. Shapeshifters who can become anyone and quietly take over people in key positions to steer the enemy in the wrong direction. A kind of covert terrorism we hadn’t seen in Trek before.

And all of it built on the back of the end of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, with Bajor’s possible entry into the Federation hanging over everything. This is a show tackling terrorism and resistance head-on, with the resistance being carried out by the people we’re supposed to be rooting for, in order to survive a tyrannical occupation. Given what was happening in the Middle East at the time, that’s not subtle, and it shouldn’t be.

The war changed things again. Enormous space battles, a completely different mindset, running missions that would end hundreds of lives while continually looking for a way out - either by winning or by negotiating. Trek had never had to hold its moral high ground under that kind of pressure before.

It’s this that makes Deep Space Nine the better written show, at least in the respects I care most about. The continuing storyline and the character development are on another level, and its underlying arc is far and away the most compelling thing any of the three shows attempted.

The ending is the problem. It stops suddenly and strangely. The main storyline lands more or less well, but nearly every other thread needed tidying and there wasn’t the time to do it satisfactorily. Given how much they had to pull together, I think they did a decent enough job. It’s still a little disappointing as an ending to a series of television.

Voyager #

A different take again. This time the crew are thrown to the far side of the galaxy entirely outside their control, and the show is about getting home.

Everything follows from that. New races, new problems, and the constant question of whether you can uphold your values when you’re this far from anything that enforces them. The shared mission and the desperation of the situation give you the best character work again, with a set of genuinely unique people to spend it on. Neelix. The Doctor.

I think the writing of the individual episodes in Voyager is by far the best of the three, and probably still the best of any Star Trek made. The quality of the storylines is on another level. The time travel, the anomalies, the properly science-y episodes are exemplary.

The weak ones are almost always the same shape: a strange civilisation that does things differently, a crew member accused of breaking one of their laws, and an episode spent battling that system to get them off the hook. Even those they usually found a way to make interesting.

They developed some good recurring enemies too, including the return of the Borg, who dominate the second half of the show’s life and bring Seven of Nine with them. The cynical read is obvious - putting a blonde bombshell on the crew to boost the numbers - and they leaned into it far too hard at times. You can hit three or four Seven-focused episodes back to back. But the writing for that character is incredible. Rediscovering her humanity and trying to integrate into it is one of the best arcs in any of the three shows.

Voyager also feels like it ran out of runway at the end. Things change very quickly and it’s clearly rushed, but they did a good job with it and it wraps up reasonably satisfactorily. You get the conclusion and the payoff the series had promised.

So which one wins? #

It depends entirely on what you’re measuring.

Deep Space Nine wins on the continuing story and the character work. Nothing else in Trek builds an arc like that, and nothing else has that much to say by the end of it.

But if you judge them the way most people actually watched them, episode by episode, Voyager takes it. The individual scripts are stronger, the production is better, and the hit rate is higher. It’s a close call, and I could be talked out of it on any given day.

On personal favourite, I honestly can’t separate them. Each has its own thing that it does better than the other two, and on this rewatch I genuinely struggled to pick one. They’re all great, and I enjoyed all three equally, for entirely different reasons.

The strangest part of the whole exercise was how little of it I’d actually lost. I’d seen every one of these episodes before, 30 years ago, and usually within 30 to 120 seconds of an episode starting the details would come flooding back. It was still enjoyable. It was a wonderful trip down memory lane and I’d happily do it again in another couple of decades, once enough of the detail has drained out of my head.

Next I’ll go back to Enterprise, which I know for a fact I’ve barely watched - the first season, and that’s about it. So that should at least be new. After that, on to the more recent shows, most of which I’ve seen fairly recently.

I’ve lowered my expectations though. I’m not sure anything is going to give me as much joy as watching these three again did.