I posted recently about how TNG is my all-time favourite TV show. They say you don’t know something well enough if there aren’t a few things you hate about it. I think the quote I heard was originally referring to programming languages, but it probably applies to lots of things. Here are some pet peeves about TNG, in no particular order.

I’ve excluded the one that bugs everybody: how every species looks like humans with different ears or a modified nose or forehead. That’s explained by the episode The Chase: an ancient humanoid species seeded the galaxy with their own DNA and so many species started off the same and evolved slightly differently over time. Obviously.

Note that some of these apply to other Star Trek shows, like Deep Space Nine or Voyager, and the movies as well. #1 even occurred in the very first episode of Star Trek: Discovery.

1. Radiation sickness

They seem to treat radiation like something that builds up in your body, with no ill effects, for some predetermined (and precise) period of time and then suddenly kills you. Doctor Crusher or the computer will call out “four minutes until fatal radiation exposure”, but everyone is perfectly fine. In reality, of course, it’s gradual and nobody can predict with that level of accuracy when the dosage becomes fatal. But if you’re four minutes away from lethal exposure, you should already be very sick. At least in Discovery, the person did actually get sick, but on one episode of TNG, the entire crew were minutes away from lethal radiation exposure, then managed to get away from the radiation source in time, and nobody got sick.

2. Data and the computer don’t interface well

In a few episodes, Commander Data sits down at a keyboard and types impossibly fast, or audibly tells the computer to do something. Why? Surely wireless technology in the 24th century is good enough that he can communicate with the main computer much faster than any tactile or vocal interface.

3. Infinite power

Everything that can be done electronically is done electronically. You don’t push a door open, you either walk up to it and it opens, or if it’s a private door (i.e. to someone’s quarters), you press a button and it opens. You don’t flip a switch to turn lights on, you tell the computer to do it. In Star Trek: First Contact, Lily notices that the big window she’s looking through has no glass and Picard tells her it’s a force field. Why wouldn’t you use glass (or clear plastic or “transpari-steel” or whatever) rather than require constant power just to keep the room from depressurizing? (I guess there was a retractable cover which would likely be closed most of the time, but still.) I would hate to be in that room if there was a power failure.

One of the best examples of this is the holodeck. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to spend time in one of these, and they serve a useful purpose in many episodes. I don’t even have a problem with their recreational uses. And if you’re stuck for subject matter, you can write a whole episode around it. But they described a holodeck as something that not only uses force fields and holograms to simulate things but in some cases also converts energy directly to matter. This would require an unbelievable amount of energy. You know, E=mc² and all that, right? In some episodes (more so on Star Trek: Voyager but on TNG as well), the ship is low on power but the holodecks are still working. Those should be the first things to get shut down if you’re rationing power.

Speaking of the holodeck, I have some questions on how it works. People can walk on the holodeck for long periods of time, and they explain it by saying that the holodeck adjusts the force fields to make them work like treadmills so people feel like they’re constantly walking. But what if two people walk in different directions? Say Troi and Riker enter the holodeck and simulate a football field. Troi walks to one end zone and Riker the other. How does the holodeck make each look smaller to the other when they’re not actually 100 yards apart? If Troi shouts at the top of her voice, how does the holodeck make it so that Riker – who is physically separated from her by at most the width of the room – hears her as if she were 100 yards away? There have been episodes where someone walks into the holodeck looking for someone and shouts their name several times to try and find them. Knowing the actual size of the room they’re in, how is that possible?

4. The transporter

There have been a few episodes where someone’s DNA was modified, usually through a transporter accident, and the person experienced immediate changes. Even worse, they later used the transporter to restore their DNA and solve the problem. In one case, they used the transporter to restore Dr. Pulaski to an earlier version of herself after exposure to a virus or something caused premature aging. She was totally fine afterwards. DNA is a molecule that resides within each and every cell of any living being. Yes, it’s responsible for determining many of your characteristics from height and hair colour to how susceptible you are to various diseases. But it’s not something you can tweak with immediate effects. And if they could use the transporter to “beam” Dr. Pulaski younger, why would anyone ever age – or suffer any disease at all? They could just use the transporter to revert them back to before they had the disease.

5. Data and the crew don’t interface well

In the first season of TNG, Data seems like a naïve but very smart child. He knows facts and can calculate things but doesn’t know much about human behaviour. Over the next few years, he learns a lot and becomes less awkward. But as of season one, he’s already been in Starfleet for over twenty years. Does it make sense that after that long, he’s still that naïve? Does it makes sense that he learns more about people in the next 3-4 years than he had in the previous 20? After two decades in Starfleet, he still thinks “how long until we reach the starbase?” requires an answer including fractions of a second?

6. Nebulae

In a number of episodes, the Enterprise enters a nebula, which is a large cloud of interstellar dust. Each nebula has a distinct border and once inside, sensors and visibility are somewhat blocked (completely, partially, or not at all, depending on what the plot requires), similar to a plane flying through a cloud. In reality, a nebula is indeed a cloud of dust but in astronomical terms, “dust” is pretty much anything bigger than a molecule. Large collections of dust, usually thousands or millions of light-years wide, can be seen from great distances because of the way the particles affect the light passing through them, but up close, they’re nothing like a cloud. You could be in the middle of a nebula and not know it. They aren’t anywhere near as thick and soupy as portrayed in the Star Trek universe.

7. Gravity

Note: This isn’t specific to TNG by any stretch. It shows up in just about every other sci-fi movie and show as well – Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, etc.

All of the planets and ships (even the non-human ships) the crew visits have exactly the same gravity. Even the smallest shuttlecraft have artificial gravity generators. The artificial gravity generators never fail (except in Star Trek VI) – even when life support is failing and everyone is struggling for breath, artificial gravity is still working perfectly. I totally understand why they do this – filming anything with a different level of gravity would be difficult, expensive, or both – but it’s still a bit predictable.

8. Measurements of time and distance

Language is similar to the gravity issue: every species speaks English. On TNG, that’s mostly explained away by the universal translator, which also never fails. But every species also uses Earth-specific units for time and distance. A light-year is a measure of distance based on how long it takes Earth to go around its sun. A parsec is also Earth-specific, as are measurements of time like days and hours. Why would Romulans or Ferengi use them? Sometimes an alien refers to “one of your hours” or “an Earth day” or something but they never say “you have one of our shmlergs to respond”, leaving the Enterprise crew to find out how long a shmlerg is. However, Klingons have used a unit of distance called, I believe, a “kellicam”.

9. Alien species and stereotypes

The Ferengi are described as a greedy species who are only interested in acquiring wealth. The Klingons are only concerned with honour and being a warrior. Betazoids are telepathic and are usually the peacemakers and diplomats. But how did any of these species advance to where they are without having a wide range of individuals? The Klingons have cloaking technology and warp drive, so there must be Klingon scientists and engineers. But if there is no honour in dying of old age even after having been a warrior all your life (a warrior must die in battle), how is there honour in studying warp field theory? How does the Ferengi chain of command function if it’s widely known that every officer can be bought (and according to their culture, should be able to be bought)  for the right amount of profit?

10. Drama

People can just tap their badges and talk to anyone, but sometimes they’re not very helpful. Riker calls Picard from engineering or cargo bay 2 or wherever because something odd is happening. Picard asks what’s going on and Riker just says “I think you should see this for yourself”. Picard says “on my way” and heads down, not having the slightest idea what he’s in for. He can’t think about the situation on the way down or even know whether he needs to go down at all. His real answer should be “drop the dramatics and Just tell me what the hell is happening.”

This past week was the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which probably takes the prize as my favourite TV series of all time (sorry Firefly). I was in first-year university at the time (wow, does that ever make me feel old), and it was a big deal for us; the TV room on the North E floor of Village Two was quite full as we were all introduced to Captain Picard, Riker, Data, Geordi, and the rest of the gang. I remember not liking the shape of the Enterprise at first: the saucer was far too big. After a while though, I got used to it and now it’s the quintessential spaceship.

I was never a big Star Trek (the original series) guy, and to this day I have only seen a few episodes. I did like the movies though, so I was excited about the debut of TNG. Thinking back, it was a big part of my university years. Throughout my time at Waterloo, TNG was must-see TV as often as it was on. My roommates and I would watch it every night at dinner; one benefit of it being in syndication from the get-go was that you could see reruns several times a day if you looked, even only a couple of years into the show’s run. I worked for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington for four months, and a bunch of us got together on Sunday nights to watch TNG.

After I graduated, I worked at Corel in Ottawa for a year, and one of my co-workers had one of them thar newfangled satellite dishes. I don’t know how it’s done now, but at the time the networks would broadcast shows over satellite in advance (on Thursday, if memory serves) to the local stations, who would record it and then re-broadcast it later (Sunday night). My co-worker would record it from the satellite and then on Friday at lunch, we’d watch it in one of the big presentation rooms at Corel. This was before big-screen TVs, but we had a “video wall” which consisted of 25 TVs in a 5×5 array, and they all collectively acted like a single screen. It was then that I really discovered the background ship noise during the show – the presentation room also had a “bass cannon”, which was a huge horizontal cylindrical subwoofer which must have been six feet long. This was also my first exposure to surround sound, and because we had the special satellite feed, there was a sound check track at the beginning. But it wasn’t just beeps or some guy talking to separate the channels: they had gotten Michael Dorn to do it in his Worf voice. Imagine Worf’s deep silky smooth voice saying: “THIS is the left channel. THIS is the right channel. Center. And surround.” At the time, “surround” was a single channel which had not yet been split into left and right. I guess this was 4.1 surround.

When the series ended in 1994, I was at the University of Western Ontario doing my master’s degree. Gail and I watched the series finale (and a few other episodes) at the Grad Club in Middlesex College.

TNG was the first series I knew of to appear on DVD, and I bought every season as it was released – at about $100-120 per season. I’ve gone through all seven seasons several times, and my kids have been through at least twice as well.

At the time, I’m sure I thought every episode was awesome but it wasn’t until I had seen lots of reruns that I started to recognize the really good ones from the not-so-good ones. Honestly, a number of episodes in the first season really weren’t very good, but the quality picked up in season two. Dr. Pulaski replaced Dr. Crusher in the second season; I wasn’t a fan of Dr. Pulaski and it turned out neither was anyone else.

Season three is when the series really started to get good, and the the next four seasons were excellent. The characters had been fleshed out enough that there were very few occasions when one of the main characters would do or say something that made us think “that’s out of character”. The stories were usually well thought out and many episodes had two storylines: one technical and one personal. The technical stories were sometimes solved through “techno-babble” (aha, they reversed the polarity of the dilithium matrix and reconfigured the main deflector to send a neutrino pulse. Good thinking) but the personal ones never were. I thought the quality began to go downhill a bit in season seven, so perhaps they ended the series at just the right time.

My favourite episodes by season:

1. 11001001 (the one with the Bynars), Where No One Has Gone Before
2. Loud as a Whisper, Peak Performance, The Royale, The Measure of a Man
3. The Enemy, The Vengeance Factor, The Survivors, Captain’s Holiday, Yesterday’s Enterprise, The Offspring, The Best of Both Worlds
4. Remember Me, Future Imperfect, Clues, Redemption
5. Darmok, Disaster, Conundrum, Cause and Effect (very clever), I Borg, Time’s Arrow, The Inner Light
6. Rascals, Chain of Command, Ship in a Bottle, Tapestry, Starship Mine, Frame of Mind, Timescape, Descent
7. Gambit, Parallels, All Good Things…

The Inner Light is regarded by many as one of the best TNG episodes, and I must concur. The story was thought-provoking and rather sad, and Patrick Stewart was outstanding. I still tear up a little at the end when Picard realizes the purpose of the probe they’re launching.

The series was followed by four TNG-cast movies, which oddly followed the same pattern as the previous six original-cast movies: the even-numbered ones were much better than the odd-numbered ones. Generations wasn’t bad but had some big plot holes. First Contact was excellent. Insurrection… I barely remember. Nemesis was pretty good and featured a young Tom Hardy (Bane without the bulk) as the bad guy.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the show, but I think I’ll leave that for another article. For now, I’ll just stick with “It’s the best show ever” and leave it at that. If you haven’t watched the episodes I listed above, you should head over to Netflix and check them out. Make it so.