“I run a clean place.”

“BACK BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT!” screamed the cover of Star Trek: The Next Generation Magazine’s issue #9, proudly trumpeting the return of Dr. Beverly Crusher to the series as though it were the modern equivalent of the letter-writing campaign that had saved the original Star Trek. I don’t know the real reasons behind Gates McFadden’s return, though I doubt it was anything so dramatic; nonetheless, no single piece of entertainment news probably made me happier in the entirety of the 1980s. Dr. Crusher easily cemented herself as my favourite character throughout Season One of Next Gen – and the Dr. Crusher who returns to the ship after a year at Starfleet Medical in Next Gen’s third-season premiere, “Evolution,” is even more my favourite. Call her Dr. Crusher 2.0.

“Don’t confuse style with intent.”

“Peak Performance” is one of the rare episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I didn’t see at all in the original run, waiting five years till the series was stripped for second-run syndication during Season Six before I finally caught up with it. It’s a shame – it’s hard to imagine a more perfectly balanced, beautifully executed Season Two episode than this. It’s not trying for anything particularly heavy – even the “make the threat real!” plot twist at the end, where the Ferengi show up during the battle exercise, seems like a perfunctory concession to needless dramatics. But who cares? It’s Picard vs. Riker in a space battle, the matchup of fanboy wet dreams.

“I’m just not overly thrilled at the prospect of my innards being made the subject of Starfleet gossip.”

 “Samaritan Snare” is one of those rare instances of a premise so oddball it actually works, or at least, is really memorable: it’s the one where Geordi gets kidnapped by the race of… really dumb guys. The Pakleds, who are one makeup flourish shy of being a full-on hate crime against differently-abled people, are sold with commitment enough to overcome the general implausibility of the idea. I think this is largely down to Christopher Collins (returning after his appearance as a Klingon in “A Matter of Honor”) as Grebnedlog, and Leslie Morris as Reginod, both of whom give solid Pakled performances and basically tell you everything you need to know about the species with line delivery and body language. I doubt there’s much more gas in the tank on the Pakled concept after “Samaritan Snare” (and the series never returned to them as a featured species), but it was still fun to see them referred to occasionally for the rest of the series, or turn up in the back of Quark’s bar on Deep Space Nine. They made an impression.

“What a perfectly vicious little circle.”

“Pen Pals” has its heart in the right place but is a fairly boring affair; both of its plotlines are competent but uninteresting. In the A-plot, Data makes contact with a little girl on a dying planet, and drags the Enterprise into a debate about the Prime Directive when trying to determine whether they should intervene to save her. In the B-plot, Wesley is given his first taste of command, leading a team that is studying the geological instability of Sarjenka’s world. I should, at least, eat the B-plot up like candy, but it’s weakly done, and gets dropped halfway through the episode anyway. And meanwhile – there’s no point denying it – Sarjenka just creeps me out. She’s one of the less successful makeup designs on the show (bright orange, with overlong fingers and sunken, skull-like eyes), and one does well not to think too deeply about the modern-day equivalent of adult Data trolling the universe for little girls to cyber-chat with. That dog don’t hunt.

“I dream of a galaxy where your eyes are the stars, and the universe worships the night.”

Wesley Crusher’s first love story is so goddamned adorable that I rank it highly among my favourite episodes of the second season, even though I know full well that there are some beats missing in the storytelling and that its ending arrives perfunctorily. Salia apparently abandons the direction of her plot (will she fulfill her duties to her people, or follow her heart?) at some point during a commercial break, which is hardly stalwart writing, but I don’t much care. This episode is so. Goddamned. Adorable. Given that Wesley’s first… er, Crush… was an inevitable pitch from the writers for somewhere in this brace of shows, “The Dauphin” pulls things off brilliantly.

The infinite tunnel of Data and Wesley playing… pattycake?

“Don’t be so vain.”

I struggled with how, or even if, to include the Star Trek: The Next Generation feature films in Blogging the Next Generation. They are such weaksauce antecedents to the series. Of the four films, only Generations – yes, Generations – bears any real stylistic, thematic, or conceptual relationship to the television show it’s adapting. The rest are widely hit-and-miss efforts at fulfilling whatever Paramount felt were the requirements of a big-screenization of the Star Trek franchise. They are horrible stories, made by (at best) mildly competent craftspeople, viciously underserved  by miserly budgets and categorically unable to compete in the widening world of big-screen blockbusters in which they found themselves. They are, in sum, a wholly unworthy effort for the legacy of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And yet, they’re a part of the family. I didn’t really want to conclude #BloggingTNG by doing a run of four pieces on the feature films, as the real Next Gen, the one I grew up with, ended (and ended brilliantly) with “All Good Things.” But nor did I want to omit the feature films entirely, for obvious reasons. So here I am: sprinkling them into the mix, haphazardly over time. And in reverse order.

“Some eager beaver at play.”

It is “The Child’s” formidability as a prototype for Next Gen 2.0 that earns it my substantial fondness. The episode’s plot proper isn’t awesome – a hasty affair wherein Troi gives birth to an enigmatic alien child, who then allows himself to die when he realizes he is jeopardizing the ship – but in all other regards, “The Child” moves boldly to establish credible adjustments to Star Trek: The Next Generation that answer most of, if not all, the series’ weaknesses from the initial season. With the series off to a wobbly start critically and popularly, and with the entire industry subject to a writer’s strike in the summer of 1988 which delayed the start of the fall season indefinitely, Next Gen’s return for Season Two was far from a foregone conclusion. Thankfully, the confidence on display here propels the entire franchise towards strange new worlds.

“It’s a good thing you’re cute, Wesley, or you could be really obnoxious.”

This is one of my favourite episodes, and a highlight of the first season. It’s an odd exception for me, in that it’s one of the few episodes that I didn’t see until many years after it initially aired – I missed it in Season One and had to wait till the series was stripped for syndication after the end of Season Five. It has the further rarity of being one of the few Wesley-focused episodes that’s quite solid, and the further distinction still of being an episode where both the A-story and B-story are equally engaging. It’s sharply acted by the entire principal cast, and cleverly assembled by episode director Mike Vejar.

“The legend will die, but the people will live.”

I get this episode mixed up with its predecessor, “Too Short a Season;” they both deal with the notion of age in one way or another, and they both have particularly generic Star Trek titles. This is the one, though, where Wesley and the kids get kidnapped by the Space Atlanteans, who can’t have children of their own. Bland and inoffensive overall, the best that can be said for it is that it could have been worse.

The presence of children and families on the Enterprise was one of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s key conceits, and – second only to Roddenberry’s assertion that no one in Starfleet would ever argue with anyone else in Starfleet – is one that the writers on the series would forever carry uneasily. While Roddenberry’s design strove towards a notion of the Galaxy-class starship Enterprise as a kind of Ark in space, a vast mobile village carrying the torch of humanity into the darkness as a living exaltation of our complete nature, the inevitably easier code to which the franchise’s presentation of Starfleet life hews is that of a military vessel. (For unspoken, but highly pointed, commentary on the subject, look at the Starfleet uniforms in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which Roddenberry actively produced, vs. the exceedingly militaristic redesign of the uniforms for The Wrath of Khan, where Roddenberry was little more than a powerless adviser. There sure as hell weren’t any kids on Old Man Kirk’s Enterprise.)