A Brief Guide to Star Trek

GeneRoddenberry,
Family Guy
creator Seth McFarlane noted: ‘The people [on
The Next Generation
] were not militant cardboard soldiers, far more they behaved like people you’d work with in your office, except they were thousands of light years from Earth. I remember watching the famous two-part episode where Captain Picard is captured by the Borg – it was exciting, thrilling, beautifully put together. Then next week the writers brilliantly followed it up with an episode that contained no sci-fi element at all: it focused on Picard returning to his home in France to sort out the psychological ramifications of the experience while reconnecting with his estranged brother. In two weeks I felt like I’d gone from
Star Wars
to
Upstairs, Downstairs
– I never knew what I was going to see, and I loved it. How many science fiction franchises are so well-founded they can tell a purely character-based story with no pyrotechnics? Gene knew
Star Trek
was about the people and the ideas.’
    Another example of this in-depth character exploration of the captain came in the late fifth season instalment ‘The Inner Light’. Picard is targeted by an alien probe and awakens as a man named Kamin. He goes on to apparently live a full life as part of the extinct Ressikian culture, falling in love and producing a loving, extended family of the kind he does not have in ‘real life’. On the
Enterprise
, Picard is unconscious for only a short time but in his mind he experiences decades of this alternative life, one that is both as real to him as his life on the ship yet as artificial as a holodeck experience. For Picard, the life he lived and the experiences he enjoyed were ‘real’, and they and the long-gone Ressikian culture live on within his memory. Such events were not forgotten by the show, and served to deepen characters such as Picard, making them more relatable among all the crowd-pleasing space hardware and alien zapping that was a necessary part of a
Star Trek
show.
    Other characters were also well developed, such as Worf and Data. However, others still had episodes that focused on them, but across the show’s seven-year run it could be argued that secondary lead characters did not fare well in this respect– especially Riker and Troi, who more often than not were called upon to exhibit their basic characteristics and little else. The general approach, however, was a great step forward from the dramatic reset button of
The Original Series
.
    The Next Generation
was the most successful of all the
Star Trek
television incarnations, proving a hit with general viewers and fans alike. It updated Gene Roddenberry’s concepts about the future of humankind and put them through a filter of the real world of the 1990s to great effect. Paramount, however, failed to realise that such in-depth exploration of issues and characters prospered effectively in the format of ongoing television story arcs, rather than in the less than two-hour format of movies. Like
The Original Series
before it,
The Next Generation
would be heading to the big screen – but with far less success than its predecessor.

Chapter 8

Future’s End:
The Next Generation Movies

‘
The Borg are the greatest nemesis of all things
Star Trek
. It made
Star Trek
not only an action-adventure movie, but made it a horror movie as well
.’ Jonathan Frakes

    The cast of the original
Star Trek
had signed off (literally in the end credits) with
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
. Age, a theme first explored in
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
, had finally caught up with them. Now a new crew was waiting in the wings to take their place. After seven years of exploratory voyages on television, the bridge crew of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
were ready to step up to the movies – with a helping hand from William Shatner’s Captain Kirk.
    The baton of
Star Trek
on television was being carried forward by
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
(soon to be joined by
Star Trek: Voyager
) so Paramount believed they could continue the big screen incarnation of
Star Trek
by promoting
The Next Generation
crew. After almost half a decade longer on air than the original series managed, the cast and creative crew of
The Next Generation
were rather tired. The show had gone out on a high and most of the cast were looking to move on to something new. The speed with which they were switched to the big screen proved to be a problem for some, not least Captain Picard himself, actor Patrick