Has TNG finally emerged from its turgid first few seasons? I think our ratings speak for themselves.
| Title | Eugene’s Rating |
Torie’s Rating |
||
 |
3×01 | “Evolution” Aired: September 25, 1989 |
3 | 3 |
 |
3×02 | “The Ensigns of Command” Aired: October 2, 1989 |
4 | 3 |
 |
3×03 | “The Survivors” Aired: October 9, 1989 |
2 | 4 |
 |
3×04 | “Who Watches the Watchers” Aired: October 16, 1989 |
1 | 1 |
 |
3×05 | “The Bonding” Aired: October 23, 1989 |
2 | 1 |
 |
3×06 | “Booby Trap” Aired: October 30, 1989 |
4 | 5 |
 |
3×07 | “The Enemy” Aired: November 6, 1989 |
6 | 6 |
 |
3×08 | “The Price” Aired: November 13, 1989 |
Impulse | Full Stop |
 |
3×09 | “The Vengeance Factor” Aired: November 20, 1989 |
Dead in Space | Impulse |
 |
3×10 | “The Defector” Aired: January 1, 1990 |
5 | 5 |
 |
3×11 | “The Hunted” Aired: January 8, 1990 |
Dead in Space | 2 |
 |
3×12 | “The High Ground” Aired: January 29, 1990 |
2 | 1 |
 |
3×13 | “Déjà Q” Aired: February 5, 1990 |
4 | 6 |
 |
3×14 | “A Matter of Perspective” Aired: February 12, 1990 |
2 | 2 |
 |
3×15 | “Yesterday’s Enterprise” Aired: February 19, 1990 |
6 | 6 |
 |
3×16 | “The Offspring” Aired: March 12, 1990 |
6 | 6 |
 |
3×17 | “Sins of the Father” Aired: March 19, 1990 |
5 | 5 |
 |
3×18 | “Allegiance” Aired: March 26, 1990 |
1 | 1 |
 |
3×19 | “Captain’s Holiday” Aired: April 2, 1990 |
2 | 1 |
 |
3×20 | “Tin Man” Aired: April 23, 1990 |
3 | 4 |
 |
3×21 | “Hollow Pursuits” Aired April 30, 1990 |
3 | 3 |
 |
3×22 | “The Most Toys” Aired: May 7, 1990 |
3 | Impulse |
 |
3×23 | “Sarek” Aired: May 14, 1990 |
6 | 6 |
 |
3×24 | “Ménage à Troi” Aired: May 28, 1990 |
Warp Core Meltdown |
Warp Core Meltdown |
 |
3×25 | “Transfigurations” Aired: June 4, 1990 |
2 | 1 |
 |
3×26 | “The Best of Both Worlds” Aired: June 18, 1990 |
6 | 6 |
Are there any ratings you would change?
Eugene: Perhaps I was a bit too hard on “The Survivors.” I’ve been thinking about it some since re-watching it, which is always a good sign, and in the full scope of the season it performs far better than I originally thought–even if it still doesn’t hold up to my recollection of it being super awesome. Yes, the ending is startling and moving, but a good story needs more than a surprising twist. I’ll bump it up to a Warp 3, because it was definitely better than “The High Ground” and “Captain’s Holiday.”
Torie: I would bump “Deja Q” down to a 5, because while I did enjoy it a lot it’s just not on par with the other great episodes we’ve seen this season. I would also bump down “The Ensigns of Command” to a 2, because I already forgot it and re-reading my recap it didn’t sound very good…
Best episode? Favorite episode?
Eugene: This is tricky and surprising, but I’ll call the best episode a tie between “The Enemy” (which I never would have seen coming) and “The Offspring,” which rates higher in my esteem now that I’ve become a sentimental sap. These two episodes are excellent science fiction stories, not just excellent Star Trek stories, which is how I would classify “Sarek.” You’d think the best would be “The Best of Both Worlds,” but that’s stuck forever in my mind as only half an episode. My favorite episode remains “Yesterday’s Enterprise” because parallel universe (duh) and I like inserting a little darkness into my Star Trek (as opposed to inserting Star Trek into darkness).
Torie: The best episode is probably “Sarek,” when you take into account the writing, the performances, and the really strong and coherent story being told. But I think my favorite is still “The Enemy,” because to me that marks a turning point in the series from all unicorns and rainbows and diversity and acceptance to a more realistic understanding that the characters are flawed, racist, biased, and still in the process of working toward the ideals that they so treasure. That said, a close second is “The Offspring,” which still makes me cry.
Most disappointing episode?
Eugene: So many! I rated episodes low this season most often because they failed to live up to an excellent premise. But I’d say the most disappointing was “Who Watches the Watchers?” which really could have been incredible but failed at every turn. Fortunately, they’ll tackle a first contact scenario many more times in the series, with greater success.
Torie: I can think of two episodes with wonderful conceits that are poorly executed: “The Hunted” and “A Matter of Perspective.”
Eugene’s final thoughts on Season 3: Weirdly, although the ratings bear out that this season is a marked improvement over the first two, it wasn’t the home run I was expecting either. It turns out that saying “TNG gets really good in season 3” really means “there are six amazing episodes in season 3, and you can tell the show is getting better.” I suppose I was hoping for more consistent quality over the course of the season. It’s kind of all over the place, and six standout episodes (those that received warp 5 and 6 from both me and Torie) out of twenty-six is an improvement, but it’s not all that good either.
Okay, many of the other episodes came close and I think we hover on the higher end of the scale on average, but the low points are still really low, and on the whole, the show’s shortcomings are only emphasized more when you see how good it can be. It’s also surprising (or maybe not so surprising) that episodes I loved when I was younger are now complete duds, and I’m overall much more critical of even the best ones. I’ve changed a lot as a viewer, favoring more complex stories and characterization, original plots, and stories that present thought-provoking questions. TNG still isn’t quite delivering on all those things, at least, not always at the same time.
But we are absolutely on an upward swing, and “The Best of Both Worlds” is a hell of a note to end on. After the slog of seasons 1 and 2, I’m looking forward to revisiting more episodes in season 4. Will this be the grand slam I’ve been waiting for? Looking over the episode list, I’m very optimistic. Let’s see what’s out there.
Torie’s final thoughts on Season 3: This house had the season 3 DVD set before any of the others (thanks, Eugene!) and that speaks for itself. It’s hard to believe that this is the same show from the first two seasons, with “Code of Honor,” “Justice,” and “Up the Long Ladder.” *shudder* I think the difference for me isn’t necessarily the science fiction–those first two seasons have some great science fictional ideas–but the complexity and nuance of the storytelling. The best episodes, like “Sarek,” “The Enemy,” “The Offspring,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” and “The Best of Both Worlds” are tinted with a bit of darkness. They’re not merely let’s-go inspirational adventures about how great the future can be if we just try (which admittedly appeals to me), but they show the chinks in the armor and the flaws that people as they are now would have to overcome to make that future possible. Yet despite everything, the stories are not sad or gritty, because the implication is always that the darkness precedes the dawn. Worf may be irrationally racist toward that Romulan, but he’s really one of the last guys with a grudge–the rest of the world has moved on. Sarek may have “fallen” from the great repressed Vulcan he once was, but he also gets the rare gift of being able to express to his wife, his son, and his friends all the love he has bottled up over the centuries. And sure pretty much everyone dies in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” but they die to build a better world. That core optimism is there, but it’s finally tempered by meaningful difficulties and sacrifices.
And while I credit Eugene that the show isn’t excellent quite yet, it has still very much turned the corner. Those first two seasons are barely watchable! And it’s interesting to see what aspects of the show resist any kind of improvement: for example, anything to do with women. That’s actually just going to get worse. (Crusher ghost sex: still pending.) But while it struggles to make its women real people, it’s doing a great job making its aliens real people, and you have to take your joy where you can find it. Looking at Season 4, I am so excited about the new challenges these characters will face, and I’m especially excited to see what you all have to say about them, too.
It is a bit surprising that this season was as weak as it was. Of course, it got off to a terrible start with what felt like leftover scripts from earlier. Looking at your ratings, what really stands out to me is that there is very little middle ground. Fives and sixes, twos and worse, but not a lot of threes and fours. High narrow peaks and low broad valleys.
Torie talking about seeing the chinks in the utopia made me realize why this is better. We can aspire to be those people who have problems but strive to live up to the angels of their better nature. When everybody is a paragon, it’s all too easy to just say, “Well, I/we can never live up to that, so why bother?” But if real-seeming people can live like this, then hey, maybe we can too.
I’m looking forward to season 4. It starts strongly, has consequences (a little) for what has gone before, and actually stretches a theme out subtly over the first few episodes following the resolution of “Best of Both Worlds”. I’m not sure how they do with women as time goes on (probably not great), but really Crusher’s family incubus is a tremendous outlier that absolutely everyone hated.
(And Eugene needs to update his bio. He’s now an AWARD-WINNING novelist with more than one book out.)
There were a lot of duds in this season, and a couple of episodes that really aren’t as good as memory makes them (“Yesterday’s Enterprise” to pick the most obvious example), but look at the high points! I don’t think it’s quite unjustified to call this season one of the best. TNG is usually all about blandness and mediocrity, so the fact that as many as a half-dozen of episodes emerge from the sea of tapioca pudding that is the usual TNG fare and stand out as truly memorable television–that’s no small matter.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and wager that it never really does get better, for anything like a sustained period, than Season 3. And that’s not because Season 3 is particularly stellar, but because whatever quantum improvement the series had over the previous seasons is never again duplicated. We’ll see many fine and memorable episodes in coming seasons, but even more—and more and more—dreck, until the air really starts to go out of the tires in Season 7. The arcs do mature and grant some grand scale to the whole, but—boy!—there are a lot of clunkers to come.
I think the episode I found most surprising was “Who Watches the Watchers,” because (while I generally hated it) I haphazardly imagined that it came later in the series, based on its (tired, lazy) comfort with PD themes. I recently caught Season 4’s “Devil’s Due,” and that one struck me as a clunker that really ought to have bombed earlier in the series, based on the inane immaturity of the storyline. You’d think we’d have been past that stuff at the point in the series when that episode aired. It has about the same level of sophistication and internal coherence as “The Most Toys.”
@3; Don’t forget that “Devil’s Due” ( or as a friend of mine called it “Devil’s Doo-Doo” ) was actually a recycled script from “Star Trek Phase II” which would have featured Captain Kirk in Picard’s place and, presumably, the new Vulcan, Xon, in Data’s. Would it have played more comfortably as an original series cast episode? Who can say, but anytime they tried to make Picard ( or Riker ) into a Kirk styled ladies man, it just smelled funny.
The real question is why they decided to recycle this script at all.
I should add that while season 3 still had it’s ups and downs, it still had to be said that it was a quantum improvement over the embarrassments of seasons 1 and 2. I found myself cringing a lot less when watching season three.
I am very happy to have put the first three seasons in the rear view mirror. This one was a dramatic step up from what’s come before, but I totally disagree with Lemnoc that it doesn’t get even better. In my ranking of Star Trek episodes, there’s an expression I use: The Infinite Vulcan Threshold. That episode of the animated series is a benchmark for me, because, while it’s dreadful, it still has enough going for it to make it worth watching at least once. There are bad episodes in season four, sure (Devil’s Due being the worst) but none of them end up below that marker.
General note: if it weren’t already clear, posting will be infrequent over the next two months. Eugene’s writing a book (what-EVER) and I’m knee-deep in law school, so we’ll be posting when possible, rather than strictly on a weekly schedule. We figured this was better than a formal hiatus.
@ 1 DemetriosX
That is old! I’m not in NY anymore, either.
I agree about the problem with paragons, and I think your point can be extended beyond characters to societies as well. Utopias are impossible–but the ideal of a utopia that imperfect beings strive toward, well that we can do, and make a pretty good close-enough world in the process. I also think “Yesterday’s Enterprise” makes the intriguing point that we could now be (and to some extent, forever be) on the edge of a knife, where a single decision could tip the balance toward or against a positive future. Heady stuff.
@ 3 Lemnoc
I think it does get better, in that the level of mediocrity is a little higher, without such frequent lows. But we’ll see!
I agree with Lemnoc. While I always will have a soft-spot for TNG, I visit a friend for a few days, a couple of times per year and we always watch quite a few episodes. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve stopped episodes that we realize are too ridiculous or boring, or even have a hard time picking ones in the first place. We gravitate toward the same few from each season but that’s beginning to grow stale.
@8
I’m with you. I’m a TOS fan from the beginning ( 1966 … yes I saw it on NBC ), but I was a big fan of TNG as well. However, when I’m feeding my inner nerd, I am more likely to pull out a TOS ep than a TNG. I suppose that also explains why I have yet to pick up any of the Blu-ray sets even though the vids and screenshots I’ve seen show a marked improvement in picture quality ( well, that and having to really prioritize what I spend any meager discretionary income on ). In previous decades I would have pounced on each volume as it came out.
I figure I’ll wait until they get marked down or packaged into a multi-volume box set.
I would tend to agree with Eugene’s assessment of the season. There are still plenty of cringe-inducing episodes, but at least there are enough standouts to keep hope alive. My own TNG re-watch started mid-way through the second season (in conjunction with the replay schedule on “Space” in Canada). By the sounds of it, I didn’t miss much in the first season, so maybe it’s for the best.
While there were others that I have enjoyed, “The Best of Both Worlds” was the first episode re-watch that reminded me of why I started watching this show as a kid.