My college life was spent discovering the more important things in life – and no, ‘studying’ wasn’t one of them. It was at Temple University in the early 1990s that I discovered the importance of things like Led Zeppelin, Alfred Hitchcock, and Pizza Fries. Aside from our daily trips to McDonald’s and the beer store, there was only one other item on the schedule that meant anything: weeknights, 11:00 PM – “Next Generation” hour. The rules were simple: sit down and don’t speak. If you’d already seen that particular episode, you had to leave.
In the sci-fi television wasteland of the early ‘90s, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a welcome beacon of quality. Borrowing the colourful camaraderie inherent in the original Star Trek series, and infusing it with a clearly modern set of attitudes, the show was a bona-fide sensation. (Heck, I can’t really stand the original Star Trek series at all, yet it only took about four episodes for me to become a lifelong Next Generation freak!) Deservedly one of the most popular syndicated series ever created, the adventures of Picard and Company easily surpass in entertainment anything else ever connected to the Star Trek moniker. (Deep Space Nine and Voyager never even remotely floated my boat, and my impatience with the original is well documented.)
So obviously I’m a fan of this show, but how does season four measure up in the canon? Well, whether you’re a newcomer to the series or an old veteran, it’s an absolute must-see. This is the season in which the characters started to become people we love, as opposed to just a bunch of eclectic adventurers. Fans of Picard, Data, and Worf should particularly love this season, as these characters get the lion’s share of action and exposition. My college buddies and I would wait with bated breath for a random appearance by the nefarious and godlike Q, and the goofy villain makes a few welcome appearances throughout this season.
Ask any TNG freak their favourite Enterprise adversary and you’re likely to hear the word BORG bandied about more than a little. Season four opens with the second half of a delicious cliff-hanger involving the insidious computer zombies, and though the season ‘slows down’ a bit to focus on some individual character adventures, there’s more than enough interstellar derring-do to keep the fans happy. There are a few fascinating trips into the Holodeck, which affords our heroes the opportunity to participate in some classical literary tales – though the show consistently returns to the meat and potatoes of ‘good old fashioned space opera’.
Though the formidable cast often earns much of the praise, it’s the myriad writers that made TNG such a resounding success. Several episodes offer up plotlines so dire and urgent that death and destruction seem all but imminent – yet the intrepid crew (via the clever scriptwriters) always solves their dilemma before the end credits start to roll. (Or maybe not; there’s always that dreaded epilogue “…to be continued”.) Well-crafted adventures have always been the trademark of this superlative sci-fi program; season four is where the characters really started to shine.
