Blu-ray Review | Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season One

My excitement at the prospect of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“TNG”) in HD was admittedly tempered by the inexorable fact that the remastered Season 1 would be released first. Whilst the Enterprise-D’s first year was certainly an eventful one, it generated very few classic episodes and more than its fair share of clangers. The belatedness of this review is largely down to the psychological block that I ran into when I knew that “Haven” was up next – almost six months passed before I was able to force myself through it and resume my 1080p mission. Of course, it would be unfair in the extreme to dismiss a season that contains episodes as powerful as “Justice” and “Symbiosis”, or as thrilling as “Conspiracy”, on the strength of its poorest showings, but unfortunately there are far more poor and average episodes here than there are good ones.

It’s quite helpful, then, that the Blu-ray release complements the episodes with not only all of the special features originally released on the series’ 2002 DVDs, but also a candid and compelling retrospective ‘making of’ feature that, for ease of digestion, has been divided into three half-hour parts. Stardate Revisited not only offers you an alternative to the unappealing next episode that you can’t bring yourself to face just yet, but an explanation as to why it isn’t all that it perhaps might have been. Whereas the DVD’s Making of a Legend was quite a warm and pleasant feature that told the potted history of the show’s creation, Stardate Revisited is much more honest and revealing. A lot of the blame for the first season’s comparatively poor quality is laid at the door of the late series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry, which could raise a number of Trekkies’ ire despite the picture painted being one of a man passionate about his vision rather than a creative despot working without a net. Many former writers and members of the production team are on hand to discuss the stifling guidelines within which they report being forced to work, with one contributor even pointing out that “...at his best, Gene could take a bad script and turn it into a good one; at his worst, he could take a great script and turn it into a good one”. This is perhaps understandable though given the circumstances. With superstar salaries threatening to take most of the profit out of future Star Trek movies, Paramount had set about creating a new Star Trek television series starring relative unknowns, and their early concept work did not meet with Roddenberry’s approval. When he stepped in to take over the project, and was given the freedom that first-run syndication offered, it isn’t surprising that he made that show that only he wanted to make.

What I found especially interesting about Stardate Revisited weren’t so much the accounts of grievances and revolving doors, but the instances where Roddenberry is said to have given up some ground, and the results of him so doing. Whilst everyone seems to be in agreement that everybody’s favourite ensign, Wesley Crusher, was the brainchild of Roddenberry, and Roddenberry alone, it seems that Bob Justman had to fight long and hard to get a Klingon onto the Enterprise’s bridge. Roddenberry is said to have mooted getting rid of the Enterprise altogether in favour of some other means of conveyance, and had to be gently reminded that, at least at that point, the Starship Enterprise was Star Trek in the audience’s eyes. While Roddenberry tried to cast Stephen Macht as Captain Picard, Justman pushed for Patrick Stewart - so strongly, in fact, that Roddenberry issued a memo stating that he never wanted to hear the Englishman’s name in conjunction with TNG ever again. Even when Roddenberry eventually bowed to studio pressure, it was with the stipulation that Stewart must wear a wig. Fortunately Paramount executives thought better of it.
 

However, the documentary is careful not to incur the wrath of Trekkies everywhere even in its segments that suggest Roddenberry was detrimentally controlling; on the contrary, in fact. The fixated Roddenberry seems to have been more committed to his inspiring vision of the future than ever before, to the extent that he went so far as to effectively prohibit interpersonal conflict amongst the Enterprise-D’s crew due to his firm belief that even banter of the Spock / McCoy variety would no longer exist by the 2360s. To most writers, who believe that compelling character drama is borne of such conflict, particularly in long-running episodic television, this must have seemed like a ludicrous conceit at the time, yet it’s come to set TNG’s characters apart from all those that followed them, and indeed all those that they followed. The crew of the Enterprise-D really are a band of “brothers and sisters” in all but the strictest sense, and for every lost Spock / Bones; Odo / Quark; Seven / everyone strained relationship, there’s a blind man teaching an android how to paint; a disciplined Frenchman successfully reining in and bringing out the best in a Klingon warrior; even a pair of star-crossed lovers letting go of the trappings of their long-since forsaken love life and becoming something that’s ostensibly less, yet somehow more.

Indeed, even in their first season infancy, TNG’s stars each show great promise. Stewart’s Shakespearean-yet-somehow-fittingly-French Picard is instantly iconic; so different from Shatner’s lascivious and hasty Kirk, yet so unobtrusively dominant that he makes it difficult to imagine anyone else ever sitting in the captain’s chair. Data hits the ground running too, Brent Spiner immediately capturing the character’s compelling childlike wonder and innocence even as he’s led into an intoxicated Tasha Yar’s bedchamber. Geordi also makes an instant impact as the black and blind everyman; Troi too as the (only two-breasted, in the end) intergalactic cheerleader cum psychologist. I was even surprised by how palatable Wesley actually is when revisiting the episodes that he finds himself carrying – I’d remembered him as being far more insufferable. Perhaps Will Wheaton’s recent Big Bang Theory turns have softened my views. Will Riker, Worf and Beverly Crusher fare somewhat less well, although in the latter two’s case this is largely down to a lack of exposure (though the good doctor doesn’t help herself by allowing pretty much every patient that she treats over the course of the season to die), and in Riker’s it’s because he’s just playing a softened and subservient Kirk instead of the bearded audience anchor that he’d eventually become.

  

One of the strongest characters of this season, oddly, is Denise Crosby’s ill-fated Tasha Yar. Not only does the streetwise refugee turned security chief kick arse, but she’s surprisingly subtle at times, and always very articulate. Watching her episodes again, I noticed some really nice moments as she would explain things in a child’s terms to Wesley, or Data for that matter, while offering the likes of Geordi and Troi sympathetic shoulders as and when needed. It’s odd that she elected to leave the series as she felt that her character had little room for development within such a large ensemble, when in the series’ first twenty-two episodes only Picard, Wesley and Riker get more screen time. Yar’s always there, always contributing, right up until the closing moments of her final episode.

Probably my favourite thing about Season 1, though, is how it often subverts expectation. I remember watching later seasons of the show in the early 1990s on Sky One – 5pm daily, except on Thursdays and Fridays when a parental ruling would only allow me to watch the 10pm repeat showing, as my little sister insisted on watching the clashing Clarissa Explains It All on another channel - and then catching the occasional BBC Two re-run of the original series, and being amazed at the difference. When I finally got to watch Season 1 of TNG, however, I couldn’t see much of one. If you look at some of its earliest episodes, it is just the original series but with a different crew and a dearth of humour - “Code of Honor” is a prime example. Yet as the season progresses, little flourishes of flavour start to surprise you, then the flavours increase in frequency and intensity. Picard failed his entrance exam to Starfleet Academy the first time around. Off-limits Earth is infiltrated by aliens. The Romulan Neutral Zone has been devastated by a not-instantly-revealed foe. A member of the bridge crew suffers a staggeringly-effective, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it death, which has since been made even more remarkable by virtue of the person in question having the decency to remain dead (which Spock, Kirk, Sisko, Data and Janeway all pointedly refused to do).

This initial run must also be credited with laying the foundations for the show’s future success, as well as that of its subsequent 24th century spin-offs. Between “Encounter at Farpoint” and “The Neutral Zone”, viewers are introduced to the Q Continuum; holodeck technology; the Ferengi; Lore; the legacy of the Khitomer Accords; the reinvention of the Prime Directive; and even, in an oblique sort of way, the Borg threat. Whilst it’s true that some of these imaginative elements would not play out in the way that had originally been envisaged, the Ferengi especially so, their legacies have became as integral to the fabric of the Star Trek universe as the Vulcan nerve pinch or the merits of cheating on the Kobayashi Maru.

When watching TNG on Blu-ray though, in stunning 1440 x 1080 resolution and with a DTS soundtrack that literally turns to your living room into one of the constantly-humming decks of the Enterprise-D, the most arresting thing about it is its splendour. It’s more than just big-budget television – it’s aided and abetted by four motion pictures’ worth of silver-screen ships, sets and sounds; four motion pictures’ worth of props, make-up and costumes. Even the show’s defining theme, with its goosebump-raising Patrick Stewart voiceover, is consciously cinematic, fusing the movie-remoulded Star Trek fanfare with The Motion Picture’s closing theme. Not only does it hold up today, but it bests almost every television show currently in production. 

The season’s twenty-five episodes are presented in stunning 1920 x 1080 resolution, although only 1440 x 1080 of the frame contains the pillarboxed picture – the remainder is made up of black bars running down either side of the screen. Whilst I’m sure that most would have welcomed The Next Generation in 16:9 widescreen, unfortunately the programme was shot in 4:3 and at present the technology to convincingly ‘invent’ material to fill in the empty spaces doesn’t exist. Dependent on the specifications of your Blu-ray player or media centre, you may be able to zoom in on the 1080p image, should you so choose, though I’d advise against this as not only does it soften the image, but you lose part of the image altogether. Even were such losses acceptable, what you’d be watching wouldn’t be what the episodes’ directors agonised over framing.

The picture quality is nonetheless stunning. To their credit, rather than cheaply upscale standard definition video, CBS have instead retrieved and cleaned-up around twenty-five thousand reels of 35mm film negatives; digitised them in high definition; and then meticulously reconstructed each and every episode from the ground up, adhering strictly to the original in every case. The only changes that have been made have been to fix relatively minor visual gaffes that would probably escape notice; otherwise the much-loved episodes remain inviolate.

I found the most striking aspects of these episodes to be their deep colour. The Next Generation’s standard definition episodes (and, indeed, Deep Space Nine and Voyager’s too) are decidedly dull in comparison, the signature hues of the crew’s Starfleet uniforms devoid of any vibrancy. Their HD counterparts, however, are loud and resplendently vital. The HD model shots are an even greater improvement, particularly those that feature the incredibly-detailed Enterprise-D - it says a lot about a programme when its opening shots can take your breath away. Each episode’s once-analogue soundtrack has also been deconstructed and reassembled in 7.1 DTS audio, to my ears putting them on a level pegging with most motion pictures’ dynamic soundscapes.

However, as with any HD media drawn from film, these episodes don’t look exactly like they’ve been shot with HD digital cameras. Every episodic television show that I watch at the moment looks incredibly sharp on my television, as they’re all shot in digital HD, whereas Blu-rays drawn from film prints always look a little grainier. I understand that this is because 35mm analogue film retains even more information than even something shot in 8K, but not all of the film’s information crystallises in a 1080p picture. These 1080p TNG episodes thus look distinctly ‘filmic’, though whether that’s a boon or a curse is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Moreover, the Blu-ray discs are not without their technical faults, as I found out to my horror when I finally made it to “Haven”. On certain episodes, the DTS soundtrack is corrupt, possessing a bizarre, tinny echo that utterly ruins the surround sound experience. A quick Google search is all that it takes to identify the problem and put you on the road to obtaining replacement discs, and while you’re waiting the affected episodes’ (of which “11001001” appears to be the worst) original two-channel soundtracks are perfectly listenable, but when you pay a premium for HD picture and sound, it’s an infuriating inconvenience. Another potential issue for some will be the discs’ streamlined packaging, which whilst much more likely to endure than the ornate but flimsy 2002 DVD box sets, will probably be a little too economical for collectors’ tastes. There’s not a booklet in sight as the discs’ basic contents are printed onto the underside of the Blu-ray sleeve, where they’re often obscured by the discs themselves. So frugal is the packaging, in fact, that unless you’re a real stickler for sky-high bitrates, it’s almost worth opting for the iTunes 1080p downloads instead. I throw in the qualifying ‘almost’ because the digital edition is not accompanied by any bonus material whatsoever, whereas the Blu-rays are absolutely saturated with it, and it’s all accessible through a beautiful HD Okudagram-style interface. Stardate Revisited and the DVDs’ archive mission logs are only the tip of the iceberg here - contemporary trailers, commentaries, a surprisingly naughty blooper reel, even the Energized! feature from The Next Level teaser Blu-ray – they’re all packed onto these six svelte discs.

Overall then, the TNG HD experience is certainly a powerful one, even when it’s the show’s first and worst season under the microscope. The Blu-ray box set might come with a hefty price tag, but unlike its straight-transfer DVD counterpart (which was even more expensive than this box set when it was first released), I can’t say that I begrudge it. “The largest film restoration project ever attempted” looks to have been a real labour of love – one that I hope will revive interest in one of television’s greatest ever shows.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season One is available in 1080p HD on Blu-ray (cheapest price online today is £36.35 from Amazon) and in digital format from iTunes (the whole season costs £40.99, but individual episodes can be bought for £2.49 each, save for the feature-length “Encounter at Farpoint”, which will set you back £4.98). The iTunes digital version does not include any of the bonus material discussed above.