On 27 Apr 2025, I finished Star Trek: The Next Generation in my Star Trek marathon.   It’s a little bit of a weird beast because I finished the actual STTNG TV series on March 15th.  But after that came the four STTNG movies.  But I had to add on.  What I did additionally was Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard.  Picard was  a sequel series to TNG, but mostly focused on Jean-Luc, it wasn’t a TNG reunion. It did a new thing with a couple of TNG cameos, but it was its own beast.  That changed for Season 3 of the show, however.  Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard became a full on TNG reunion as the entire cast (well, not Denise Crosby or Wil Wheaton) were reunited on screen.  It felt so much like “more TNG” that I had to do that.  I would have eventually gotten to the three series of Picard in the natural order than things, but I didn’t want to wait that long.  I wanted to cap off “TNG” here, so I did Picard Season 3 now.  When I get to Picard in the release order, I’ll do the other two seasons, but I didn’t want to wait.

Going back in time, I was there on 16 Sep 1987 when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered with “Encounter at Farpoint“.  When TNG started I was 22, and I said in my Original Series wrap-up, I was there with the original Trek from Day, although I was just 1 year old back then.  I was old enough to see the original animated series new, but Next Gen was the first one released once I became old enough to appreciate the larger scope of the Star Trek franchise.  I remember at the time both being excited that it was new Star Trek, yet fearful as it was the first Star Trek ever without Kirk & Spock.  The first year was a bit rough.  Some episodes were genuinely bad.  Some were decent, but they definitely had a weird vibe in the first year.  It was VERY Roddenberry as he was the direct supervising producer.  There was a lot of behind the scenes issues that first year, and that the show survived at all behind the early years was a bit of a miracle.

But they persevered, and the TNG crew got more used to each other despite a few changes over the seasons (departure of Tasha Yar, departure of Wesley, the departure and return of Dr Crusher and the one year experiment with Dr Pulaski).  The quality improved as they went along, and unlike the original series, TNG hit its stride in the third season.  Once they passed the original series and went into a fourth year, they were firing on all cylinders.  Next Gen grew up and became its own thing.   Riker & Picard were just as important to the overall mythos as Kirk & Spock were.   You obviously wouldn’t have Next Gen (or any of the following series) without Kirk & Spock and the original, but Picard/Riker aren’t just “replacements”, they’re their own important chapter in the entire franchise.

There’s so many moments in here that are epic, but the one that probably is the best story for me is the Season 3 cliffhanger “The Best of Both Worlds“.  It was the season three cliffhanger, and Riker’s “Fire” and a fade to black was the first and best season ending cliffhanger any Star Trek series has ever done (and was right there with Dallas’ “Who Shot JR” as well).  The build up was awesome, and when I watched it the first time, I had no idea of time as I was so sucked in, so when it faded to black with “To be Continued” I verbally yelled “AARRRRRRRRRRRRGH!” out loud.  That was a fun summer – because in 1990 we didn’t have social media, so we had to communicate with other fans on things like Fidonet & CompuServe and the like.  Most fans had no idea how it would get resolved.  Which brings up a story about my wife.  Many years later, I showed her Best of Both Worlds, and in-between Parts I & II, I asked her what she thought happened. Without even pausing, she rattled off exactly what happens in Part II.  That annoyed the crap out of me, because I spent months in real time when it was first on trying to figure it out and I didn’t.  I accused her of knowing what happened ahead of time, but she claimed she didn’t know.   It was a fun Trek moment with my wife.

I’m tempted to just list tons of episodes and why they were awesome, but truly there were so many moments I’d write 25,000 words doing it.  I’ll just go with two.  The first was Yesterday’s Enterprise, which brought on screen the at that point unseen USS Enterprise NCC-1701C.  It’s still the only appearance of that ship in the franchise.  It was so much fun, because I love self referential things, and more importantly a good alternate universe story. That episode was a high point.   The other episode I loved was “Sarek“.  That brought back Mark Lenard who played Spock’s father in the original series and movies to the same role 75 years down the line.  Given he was  Vulcan, this was no problem.  But the best part of this episode was Patrick Stewart’s acting in the scene when Sarek had left his mind in Picard’s body so he could fulfill a Federation duty.  Patrick’s acting in that scene is probably the best acting he did in the series, except for possibly when he was captured and tortured by the Cardassians a few seasons later.  Stewart’s acting in the series was a major high point.  They didn’t always give Patrick that level of material to work with, but when they did, man he nailed it.

The series ended well in 1994 I thought.  However, it was inevitable that they’d go to movies, and we got four movies with the TNG cast.  The first one included a few TOS characters to hand things off, but it was pretty much a TNG movie.  After three more the quality had declined a bit when a planned fifth TNG movie didn’t happen. The second one was the high point – Borg on the big screen just worked.  That left Nemesis as the end of the TNG storyline, which was unsatisfying as that movie wasn’t the best.  Which made Season 3 of Picard such a joy as it made THAT the end of the TNG storyline which was handled perfectly.  It wrapped up everything, and I loved they picked up several dangling storylines from various places in the franchise and brought it all together in a satisfying (to me) way.   I’m so glad Terry Matalas talked Patrick Stewart into doing the TNG reunion in Season 3 of Picard because it closed things out in a way that I loved.

That series does set up the possibility of a “Star Trek: Legacy” series which would carry on not necessarily the TNG story, but would use a few characters borne from that timeline, so things would carry on.  I hope we get to see that, as Star Trek Legacy would definitely carry on the legacy of Star Trek: The next Generation.

A final thanks to Gene Roddenberry, who created this show.  While he died when the show was in production of its fifth year, and he had from what I gather some knowledge of Deep Space Nine, this series is where his direct hand stopped being involved in Star Trek.  We wouldn’t have any of the subsequent series without Gene’s original vision in the 1960’s, so all hail the Great Bird of the Galaxy for giving us Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I loved going through the episodes over the last four-ish months.

If you’ve never watched Star Trek: TNG, you should.  Just don’t give up when you got through some of the slog of the early first season.  It gets better – it’s awesome.