Star Trek The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Like I was saying before, those two first seasons really bugged me. And I fully believe Patrick Stewart when he says that for the first season he was living out of a suitcase because he didn't believe the show would stay on the air for very long.

Everyone I've talked to about that show agrees that the Sherlock Holmes episodes were complete garbage. What kind of ridiculous nonsense is that? That and the episodes where people got stuck in the Holodeck. What was that every other episode? If the holodeck is so dangerous take it offline! Well, hopefully Paramount will learn from it's past mistakes, though it's already made two episodes of Voyager where part of the crew gets stuck in the holodeck. Grrr! If they make ONE Sherlock Holmes episode I'm going to initiate a stream of spatially inverted tetryons to emanate from a tertiary subspace manifold and point it at the writers. Then it will leave minute traces of solonagen peptides (With mint frosting) in their subdermal tissues causing all the neutrinos passing through them to have a left spin. Maybe I'll even turn their blood into a liquid polymer!

The Next Generation has some really good episodes, the ones that made me jump are the ones I remember the best.

There was one episode where the crew de-evolves into other species. Picard and Data run around the ship trying to find a solution to the problem, Picard starts turning into a Pygmy Marmoset. Counselor Troi turns into a frog, Geordi turned into a spider I think... well you have to watch it, it's neat!

Another neat episode is one where Geordi goes back to a planet he surveyed many years ago, a parasite infects him like it did one of his former crew and he begins to transform into some weird invisible creature, the scene on the holodeck where he tries to determine what's casting a certain shadow is chilling!

Schisms has got to be my all-time favorite episode! It deals with alien abductions and confronts them! Man, there were just too many good things about this episode to mention them all, there were also many inconsistencies and errors but, oh well.

Speaking of errors...

Continuity Errors

Don't they have anyone to check for continuity in the Star Trek Universe? I was told that they hire physicists and scientists as consultants for that show! For example, in the very LAST show, "All good things" they royally screwed up, I cannot believe they did not catch such a major blatant flaw at any point of the production. In that episode, the anomaly is traveling back in time from the point at which the Pasteur initiated it's tachyon beam and all three beams converged causing the temporal rift and eventually (Or rather retroactively) destroying the earth and all of humanity. Now, forgiving that this is a paradox (If humanity didn't exist how could they have been in the future to destroy themselves in the past?) the Pasteur would have arrived just as the rift was closing down, and when they scanned the area with a tachyon beam, they would have seen the rift close, since it was traveling backwards in time, presumably from the point at which the Pasteur (in real-time) shut down it's tachyon scan. But instead, when the Pasteur got there, there was no rift, they searched for it with the tachyon beam but could not find it, then supposedly that tachyon beam, converging with the tachyon beam from the other two timelines caused the rift that grew as it traveled backwards in time. Yet it wasn't there when the Pasteur got there, and it WAS there when they came back later in the modified enterprise. So if we were looking at a cone, the bottom section would be missing and we would find it pointing in the wrong direction at the end. This kind of ruined it for me, but it was a real kick to see Denise Crosby again! *faint*

In Schisms Data reads some poetry, it's very good but also filled with errors and I believe Brent Spiner read it wrong. He reads it as follows:

Ode to Spot

Felis Catus, is your taxonomic nomenclature,
an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature?
Your visual, olfactory and auditory senses
contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses
I find myself intrigued by your sub-vocal oscillations
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
for a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents
You would not be so agile, if you lacked it's counterbalance
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion
Oh, Spot, The varying levels of behavior you display
connote a fairly well developed cognitive array
Although you are not sentient, spot, and do not comprehend
I nonetheless consider you, a true and valued friend.

That was an excellent poem! But there were several flaws... For example, There's no such thing as a Felis Catus. The Latin name for cat is Felis Domesticus. And the first verse is read wrong, there should be no coma after Catus (domesticus) and the second line is not a question, it's a statement.

Also a word about the "Endothermic quadruped", I take endothermic to mean "absorbing heat" where I expect the author meant "Exothermic" or giving off heat, but I am told that those definitions only apply in chemistry, not to animals, and Endothermic as it applies to animals means generating heat internally.

Star Trek TNG had a nice long run, towards the end it started becoming a space soap opera so perhaps it's for the best that they ended the series.

I was lucky enough to attend a Star Trek convention here in Seattle, Gates McFadden was the special guest, it was really neat, there was a question and answer session and I got to ask her a couple of questions. I asked about my favorite episode, "Schisms" and whether they had any plans for those solonagen sleastacs in future episodes (They left it WIDE open for more) she said unfortunately she has no control over the script writing process, that indeed in some cases they get the scripts the night before the shooting starts.

I asked her another question but I can't seem to remember what it was, hmm I have the whole convention on audio tape around here somewhere, oh well. I must say that didn't feel like I was attending a gathering of hundreds of random people from around the city, it felt like family, Gates didn't seem like an unreachable super mega-star, she seemed normal, albeit a tad annoying when she tried too hard to be funny. She's just a normal person and we were (for the most part) normal people who met, had a GREAT time and chatted. THAT's my kind of crowd! I love all you fellow Trekkers! We should get together and watch TNG tapes sometime! There were people dressed up as Bprg, klingons, I think there was even a Cardassian, I might be wrong though. There was a costume contest and the Borg won, a Klingon came in second and the third prize was out of sympathy I think to some little kid in a Star Fleet officer's uniform. There were much more elaborate costumes but... well I'm sure it made that kid's day! He'll probably grow up to be president now.

Gates encouraged us to write to her about ourselves, I guess she likes those kind of letters, and I did, I wrote a long essay about me and my friends and what we went through to get to that convention. Unfortunately I never got around to mailing it. Doh! Oh well, too late now, the series has ended and Paramount most likely won't be forwarding her fanmail anymore.

Another episode that I thought was pretty neat was "Darmok". I read in Starlog that one of the set workers started saying "Chaka, when the walls fell" whenever something went wrong and everyone else picked up on it. Neat!

Huge Star Trek TNG site