After Star Wars and the successful big-screen Star Trek
adventures, it's perhaps not so surprising that Gene Roddenberry
managed to convince purse string-wielding studio heads in the
1980s that a Next Generation would be both possible and
profitable. But the political climate had changed considerably
since the 1960s, the Cold War had wound down, and we were now
living in the Age of Greed. To be successful a second time, Star
Trek had to change too.
A writer's guide was composed with which to sell and define
where the Trek universe was in the 24th Century. The United
Federation of Planets was a more appealing ideology to an America
keen to see where the Reagan/Gorbachev faceoff was taking them.
Starfleet's meritocratic philosophy had always embraced all races
and species. Now Earth's utopian history, featuring the
abolishment of poverty, was brandished prominently and proudly.
The new Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, was no longer a ship of war but
an exploration vessel carrying families. The ethical and ethnical
ship also carried a former enemy (the Klingon Worf, played by
Michael Dorn), and its Chief Engineer (Geordi LaForge) was blind
and black. From every politically correct viewpoint, Para
executives thought the future looked just swell!
Roddenberry's feminism now contrasted a pilot episode featuring
ship's Counsellor Troi (Marina Sirtis) in a mini-skirt with her
ongoing inner strengths and also those of Dr. Crusher (Gates
McFadden) and the short-lived Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby). The
arrival of Whoopi Goldberg in season 2 as mystic barkeep Guinan
is a great example of the good the original Trek did for racial
groups--Goldberg has stated that she was inspired to become an
actress in large part through seeing Nichelle Nichols' Uhura. Her
credibility as an actress helped enormously alongside the strong
central performances of Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard),
Jonathan Frakes (First Officer Will Riker), and Brent Spiner
(Data) in defining another wholly believable environment once
again populated with well-defined characters. Star Trek, it
turned out, did not depend for its success on any single group of
actors.
Like its predecessor in the 1960s, TNG pioneered visual effects
on TV, making it an increasingly jaw-dropping show to look at.
And thanks also to the enduring success of the original show,
phasers, tricorders, communicators and even phase inverters were
already familiar to most viewers. But while technology was a
useful tool in most crises, it now frequently seemed to be the
cause of them too, as the show's writers continually warned about
the dangers of over-reliance on technology (the Borg were the
ultimate expression of this maxim). The word "technobabble" came
to describe a weakness in many TNG scripts, which sacrificed the
social and political allegories of the original and relied
instead upon invented technological faults and their equally
fictitious resolutions to provide drama within the Enterprise's
self-contained society. (The holodeck's safety protocol override
seemed to be next to the light switch given the number of times
crew members were trapped within.) This emphasis on scientific
jargon appealed strongly to an audience who were growing up for
the first time in the late 1980s with the home computer--and gave
rise to the clichéd image of the nerdy Trek fan.
Like in the original Trek, it was in the stories themselves that
much of the show's success is to be found. That pesky Prime
Directive kept moral dilemmas afloat ("Justice"/"Who Watches the
Watchers?"/"First Contact"). More "what if" scenarios came out of
time-travel episodes ("Cause and Effect"/"Time's
Arrow"/"Yesterday's Enterprise"). And there were some episodes
that touched on the political world, such as "The Arsenal of
Freedom" questioning the supply of arms, "Chain of Command"
decrying the torture of political prisoners and "The Defector",
which was called "The Cuban Missile Crisis of The Neutral Zone"
by its writer. The show ran for more than twice as many episodes
as its progenitor and therefore had more time to explore wider
ranging issues. But the choice of issues illustrates the change
in the social climate that had occurred with the passing of a
couple of decades. "Angel One" covered sexism; "The Outcast" was
about sexuality; "Symbiosis"--drug addiction; "The High
Ground"--terrorism; "Ethics"--euthanasia; "Darmok"--language
barriers; and "Journey's End"--displacement of Indians from their
homeland. It would have been unthinkable for the original series
to have tackled most of these.
TNG could so easily have been a failure, but it wasn't. It
survived a writer's strike in its second year, the tragic death
of Roddenberry just after Trek's 25th anniversary in 1991, and
plenty of competition from would-be rival franchises. Yes, its
maintenance of an optimistic future was appealing, but the strong
stories and readily identifiable characters ensured the viewers'
continuing loyalty. --Paul Tonks
