Even the heavens are denied me here.

With the Bluray release of the first season of Star Trek The Next Generation I decided it was time for me to finally catch up canonically with The Next Generation on Netflix. Over the years I've watched a lot of The Next Generation, but all in bits and pieces. Since it was all syndicated by the time I got to originally watching, their are huge holes in my knowledge of the show.

Space Opera is a genre close to my heart, but never Star Trek, even The Next Generation which is held in the highest regard by most people I've talked to familiar with the show. I never quite dug the homogenization of space. Entire episodes have you meeting an entirely new planet where everyone is essentially the same person. The first season is incredibly bad about this, the worst offenders being the episode with Aryan blonde haired blue-eyed Eden planet and the sexist African tribal planet. Those two episodes don't just homogeneous to an absurd amount, they are racist which is an entirely different discussion that I won't get into.

After that first season their is a turning point in the series I've found, specifically the eighth episode of the second season. The show changes it's original formula, it goes from focusing on the collective conflict of species and starts to try slowly focus on telling the conflicts between individuals. Don't get me wrong, codifying still exists in terms of giving species certain parameters in which they can express emotionally but the range of individual expression within the parameters is much wider.

In that eighth episode they had Kligons take Ricker onto their vessel as a first mate, while assimilating both species got to learn about each other. After that point the show slowly begins to evolve, to progress where you get to planets and surprisingly you find out that not everyone's the same. It's an incredible concept, that only took about 30 to 40 episodes for the shows writers to come to. Although towards the end of the second season they undo all this good will and you meet the Borg, who are by their very definition, homogeneous.

I haven't met the Borg in the show since, the collective hive mind is actually an interesting concept and I look forward seeing if the show can approach Alastair Reynolds in their story-telling of a collective hivemind. To me he's the pinnacle of a space opera writer, and I judge other space operas to his Revelation Space series. If you haven't read that I highly recommend it.  I'm half way through the third season and the show has continued to progress, not only in the types of stories being told but in production value. I look forward to what awaits me in the next episodes, hopefully more of Captain Piccard prancing around the bridge spouting Wilfred Owen poetry as he does deploys some new Trojan horse tactic to overcome his opponents. I don't know if he has done that in what I've watched so far, but that does sound like a skit from the show to me. Either way I look forward to seeing if the show can progress anymore, hopefully I'll be back to say it has!