Lower Decks

Having now definitively come into its own, ‘Next Generation’ was free to dig deeper than ever before both into its characters and into the future. The fourth season saw the show blossom still further, perhaps able to truly take itself seriously. And why not, as far as Star Trek was concerned, a fourth year was breaking new ground. Anything was possible now.

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The costume change in the third season of ‘Next Generation’ is a cosmetic distinction, but it might as well represent how the series suddenly seemed to embrace a newfound confidence. Behind the scenes, it was as if Nicholas Meyer were stepping into the muddled pre-production of ‘Star Trek II’ again, with the rise of such familiar creative names as Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, and Ronald D. Moore, all of whom would, along with Rick Berman, help guide the franchise for much of the next decade. It was 1989, the beginning of a new season, and just perhaps, the true beginning of a new era.

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Following a debut season that anyone might have characterized as “instructive,” ‘Next Generation’ made a few changes for its second year, moving into more confident writing, giving Riker a beard, and replacing Dr. Crusher with Kate Pulaski (Diana Muldaur, who like “Lwaxana Troi” Majel Barrett had acted in the original series twenty years earlier). When I say “more confident writing,” I mean the quality of the episodes was infinitely more even, though still not quite representative of the show fans would grow to wholeheartedly embrace. Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) signed up, too, during this season, proving to be the second most enduring addition, after some Swedish dudes named the Borg.

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After the completion of the animated series, there were four Star Trek movies released before 1987, more than twenty years after the debut of the original series, when ‘The Next Generation’ premiered. Featuring Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, a seeming polar opposite of Kirk, ready to talk where his predecessor was all cagey calculation, not to mention a good deal older, this new incarnation was meant to feel at once completely familiar ,and yet, quite different at the same time. Just what that meant as a working reality would be the focus of the shakedown cruise that was the first season.

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In 1973, four years after ‘Star Trek’ was cancelled, it returned. Well, sort of. For one season, fans had a chance to revisit their old friends in animated form, with most of the original cast (except Andrew Koenig, beloved as the Russian boy wonder Chekov) intact, all the designs exactly as they were remembered, with a few things thrown in that only a cartoon could deliver (a feline bridge officer, plus a dude with a bunch of extra limbs).

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After two seasons, ‘Star Trek’ had developed enough fans to win a third year, but as much as those fans were forming a community, they weren’t multiplying. In 1969, the show broadcast its final episode.

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The first season of ‘Star Trek’ certainly set a definite tone to what became an instantly iconic television experience. In many ways, I think, it was a tough act to follow, at least as reflected in the second installment of my favorite episodes from the franchise.

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Star Trek debuted in 1966, after one failed pilot and an extensive casting overhaul that secured William Shatner as the iconic James T. Kirk. In the first of a series, I begin exploring the episodes and films of the ensuing franchise that helped make me a fan, a narrative and chronicle that attempts to capture the mounting impact of the material, and how it combined to make the franchise continually irresistible.

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