I’m not a big one for massive binge re-watches of television shows. There’s always so much other stuff to watch, for one thing. So when I see people say that they’re watching all of Friends for the 42nd time, I don’t really get the appeal.
And yet… when I just want to zone out in front of a familiar face, I often find myself stepping aboard the good old starship USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. I like a lot of Star Trek, even the current stuff (let’s not talk too much about Discovery, though), but for me, Star Trek: The Next Generation is the home I keep returning to again and again, more than 30 years after its final episode. There’s a lot of Star Treks now, but TNG will always be my Trek.
There is something very soothing about boldly going where you’ve already gone before. On a recent holiday night at a hotel, we somehow burned through four classic TNG episodes in a row without even meaning to. That’s the TNG spell for you.
The show ended in 1994 and yet Jean-Luc Picard and crew just keep sailing on those voyages long after the actors entered retirement age. All 178 episodes form a comforting narrative that remain eminently watchable – mostly self-contained, with those occasional dazzlingly energetic two-parters to shake things up. (Yeah, OK, the first two seasons are pretty middling, but by mid-season 3, TNG hit its stride and even the dud episodes – I’m thinking of pretty much any one that focuses too much on Deanna Troi – have their moments.)
Perhaps I’m viewing it all through the retro-futuristic zen of a late 1980s imagining of a better tomorrow that didn’t quite work out the way we imagined. TNG posits a world that still has a lot of conflict but rarely feels weighed down by the dystopian tech-troll world of existential loathing we appear to have gotten for our future instead of Vulcans and holodecks. Watching the best TNG episodes over and over again, you know they’ll sort it all out in the end, that Picard will get un-Borged, that Riker will still define space-sexy masculine goofiness, that Worf will be grumpy and Data will be endlessly curious.
One of TNG’s strengths is its willingness to indulge in quieter moments – Data playing with his cat, Picard drinking tea, Beverly Crusher putting together her awful plays. You get a sense of real life in these glimpses at life aboard the Enterprise, in a way that a lot of other sci-fi shows and even other Star Treks never quite settle down enough to showcase. Who wouldn’t want to hang around playing cards with Riker and the gang at the end of a long day battling Romulans?
Terrible things happen all the time on Star Trek, of course – you can get turned into a Borg, trapped in a space-time anomaly, accidentally turned into a child in a transporter accident or Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis might come to life on the holodeck and take over the ship. Every problem can be solved by a generous helping of techno-babble and Patrick Stewart’s soothing narration.
There’s a vaguely cozy vibe to even the very bleakest of TNG scenarios, when you watch them again and again. The NCC-1701-D is ‘90s kitsch of what the future might look like, bold primary colours and a starship full of liminal spaces. It’s never seemed quite as dated to me as the original 1960s series does, and its blandly functional professional aura isn’t as idiosyncratic as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Voyager, which tried to shake up the five-year mission assignments a little more and threw in a lot more interpersonal conflict.
The Next Generation cast moved on to movies after the series ended and I generally like them all too. And while the recent Picard series was a fairly mixed bag, an old TNG fanboy like me still dug seeing the old Enterprise gang coming together one last time in the final season.
Yet none of the continuations ever really hit that blissfully comforting zone that the 178 original episodes of TNG do. Every episode is reset Groundhog Day style, as we hear the latest captain’s or crewman’s log and the crew of the Enterprise get set to go about their business, again and again.
Watched from our jittery world of 2025, there’s a relaxed pace to TNG that feels like a nice cup of tea at the end of a long day. Even when characters lose their temper and shout a bit, it still all feels, well, calm. You just don’t lose your shit on Jean-Luc Picard’s ship, no matter how wacky things get. And when the real world feels crazier than any science-fiction scenario, a little interstellar comfort food is sometimes all that you need.
Nik Dirga 