Star Trek Week #3: The Next Generation
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Growing up in the US in the 1980s meant more than simply becoming acquainted with Star Trek. It meant coming to refer to it as "classic" Trek - to distinguish it from Gene Roddenberry's new show, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I was seven when Picard et al. first blew across my television screen. Though my parents ordinarily discouraged tv watching (Mystery! and 60 Minutes aside), they had both liked the original Trek, and our famiy tuned in to watch its new iteration. And we weren't disappointed. The new series, though it took a while to find reach its stride, not only updated Star Trek for a new world, but created its own iconography in the process. Where Shatner's James Kirk was impulsive, Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard was meditative; in place of Kirk's swaggering bragaddicio Picard brought the Enterprise thoughtful decisiveness. Picard would prove to be every bit as passionate and devoted to his ship and crew, and every bit as tactically cunning as Kirk - Picard simply had a different style. Softening his sharp edges were his First Mate, William Riker, whose youth and exhuberance provided a strong contrast to Picard's cerebral stability; the android Data, who represented the fundamental naivete of total intellecutalism, and a host of other characters. While some of these characters were less successful than others - neither Troy nor Dr. Crusher were particularly interesting characters - the majority of the Next Generation's main cast proved to be every bit as exciting and, eventually, iconic as their predecessors.
The Next Generation suffered a bit from an overbearing, and at times, unbearable, moral rightousness. Classic Trek, clearly, was not unafraid to use heavy-handed metaphors to hammer home messages about the evils of, say, racism. But watching classic Trek decades later both the messages and the medium tend to come across as relics of a lost age rather than blunt demaoguery. As such, what would strike a contemporary audience as almost offensively obvious moralizing becomes forgivable, even lovable when viewed through the prism of time. Occasionally transferred almost whole from classic Trek to the Next Generation, however, those same heavy-handed messages came off as annoying or condescending. It wasn't until the Next Generation found a way to get its points across with some degree of subtlety that I found the show more enjoyable as an adult. (Although, to be fair, the show never fully excised its tendency towards overbearing messages.)
And Next Generation had its fair share of crackpot weirdness, like the crew's enthusiastic use of the holodeck to blow off steam, or the fact that the bridge-crew made up an after-hours jazz band. (To be honest, I always liked the episode where Professor Moriarty came to life, thanks to some sort of holodeck glitch, and took over the ship. Good times!)
The Next Generation reached its apogee in 1996, two years after the show had left the air. Star Trek: First Contact was not the first Star Trek movie to feature the Next Generation's cast, but it was the best - and, arguably the second best Star Trek movie. (Pride of place, naturally, belongs to the Wrath of Khan. Is it any wonder that both movies take cues from Moby Dick?) Although flawed, First Contact is a pretty cool movie: the plot's pretty exciting (the Borg go back in time!), Data has sex with the Borg Queen (!?), excellent actors James Cromwell and Alfre Woodard make for interesting new characters, and Worf makes a turniquet for himself out of a bad guy's arm.
Perhaps Star Trek: The Next Generation's most enduring legacy? Proving to the world at large just how very sexy a smallish, bald, middle-aged Englishman could be.