Lower Decks

The term “widescreen” has been used for certain large scale comic book storytelling in the past, and is meant to suggest a summer blockbuster scope. I’d suggest that starting in the fall of 1995, ‘Deep Space Nine’ got into widescreen mode, now that anyone who had been paying attention previously knew everything there was to know about the particular circumstances of the station at the edge of the final frontier. Now it was time to have a little fun.

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I still consider this one to be my favorite season of Star Trek, and it’s not strictly because it was the first one I watched completely as first run material. It was the year ‘Deep Space Nine’ seemed to finally click on all cylinders, make bold strides toward the future, mold some definite franchise ground of its own. More importantly, the actors themselves really seemed that much more invested in the material, and maybe that’s what makes all the difference with these things. I know I talked a lot about confidence when ‘Next Generation’ hit its own third season, which on that show meant simply earning the right as the second incarnation of Gene Roddenberry’s vision, but here, there was half a season where the series was going to be the only Star Trek on TV, and then all the attention would go from the end of the predecessor to the beginning of a successor. It was if ‘Deep Space Nine’ was saying, yeah, we’re definitely here, too.

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Up to this point in my Star Trek experience, I had been following the franchise in second run syndication, but finally, in 1994 (quite handily, with the still-memorable occasion of the broadcast of “All Good Things…” looming), I started catching it the first pass around, notably as ‘Deep Space Nine’ was wrapping up its second season, which I can say with all honesty to this day probably made me the fan I still am, forever invested in this crazy future.

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In January of 1993, Star Trek expanded once again, notably for the first time in its history to have two series run simultaneously on television (though it might be noted that competing crews had been a problem for fans since 1987, not just as a matter for debate but as a practical concern, between movie and TV adventures). ‘Deep Space Nine’ was the first franchise incarnation to launch without the hand of Gene Roddenberry, guided instead by the emerging new creative generation led by Rick Berman and Michael Piller.

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In 1994, ‘Next Generation’ concluded its run, a fact that seemed completely incomprehensible to fans, a premature end to a series that had eclipsed the length of the original series by four seasons already, and seemed capable of continuing for so much longer. It was more than a quarter century into the franchise, though. Things were changing.

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In 1992, ‘Next Generation’ had half a season to be the last Star Trek TV show to air alone before the end of the millennium, which to anyone looking back, and realizing just a decade later the final film featuring its cast would face a great amount of ambivalence, would look pretty strange, because at this point the franchise is just about at its peak of popularity, at least in this incarnation.

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The fifth season of ‘Next Generation’ saw everyone grow comfortable with the quality and possibilities of what they’d been doing since the third season. It was the final time one Star Trek series would be on the air during a single TV season until the fall of 2000. It was 1991, and everyone was in love with the franchise. There was going to be no stopping it this time.

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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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