My favorite sci-fi TV series of all time, #10: Star Trek: The Next Generation

I’m going to take a Stand here. (That never gets old!) I know that Trekkies all over will want to punch me in the face, but I really don’t like the Original Series. Even as a kid, I thought it was stupid (except for the salt monster episode that gave me nightmares). I thought, ever so briefly, about watching the entire Original Series again before remembering it was crap. It’s like Mission: Impossible’s fight scenes — everything is so unbelievably absurd that I can’t take the show seriously. I haven’t seen every episode, but I have seen about 90% of them. (I probably have seen them all, but I’ve forgotten them.) I talked about Voyager and DS9 in my original post, and I’ve never seen the new series with Scott Bakula.

Now that that’s out of my system, I will explain why I did like TNG. Everything that was good about the Original Series was taken and improved upon. It’s a longer series (obviously), goes to more interesting places, and with the holodeck established a number of other interesting possibilities.

Favorite character: Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart). Stewart is a brilliant actor who was really “discovered” by American audiences thanks to this show.

Favorite secondary character: Q (played by John de Lancie). Probably my favorite Trek villain, by far.

Favorite moment: The Sherlock Holmes episodes. It was a chance for the characters shine in a way that they couldn’t in TOS.

Advertisement