Star Trek TNG Seasons 1-7

I have been having a hard time writing this post, which is strange because I had no problem watching 7 seasons of this show in a month (easy to do when you are marathon training and can't move from being so tired half the time). I watched the seasons so fast that I didn't want to make a short post for each of them adding very little with each additional post. I also didn't want to recreate my Percy Jackson fiasco where my post on the series was longer than any single one of the books. Instead I wanted this post to focus, in brief, on why I decided to watch the series from start to finish and what weird things I took away from it.

My father is a trekkie. We watched 2 hours of Star Trek The Next Generation reruns almost every day in my house growing up. I had probably seen almost every episode of this show before I took on this challenge but I hadn't seen then in the proper order which I think can change the entire feel of a show. When you watch a show in the proper order you get a feel for the characters and how they develop from episode to episode and season to season. This is probably nothing new to you the reader but it made the series seem new to me.

Moderate Spoilers to follow but this show has been off the air for 25 years so...
I had remembered a lot about the characters. I remembered that William Riker was the first officer, that Lieutenant Worf was the security officer, I even remembered the O'brien was the transporter chief. What I didn't remember was that Worf was not the first security officer. In the first season or so this responsibility fell to Lieutenant Tasha Yar, a woman. I did not remember that in season one William Riker did not yet have his distinctive beard. He grew the beard between the first and second season for his role in the mini series North and South. I did not remember that the Android second officer Data never got his emotion chip in the TV series. He got it in the first movie they made after the series has ended. I had also believed that First officer Riker and ship's counselor Deanna Troi had a committed relationship aboard ship but this never happened in the series, she did however date Worf shortly. I had thought they had more encounters with The Borg and fewer encounters with Q but I was wrong. I learned that Counselor Troi also took the bridge captains test in the final season. I had forgotten that the ships chief medical officer Dr Crusher left the show for all of season 2 only to return for season 3 through the end of the series. Im sorry for the slightly incoherent list of things I learned by re-watching this show but these are just some of my favorite moments.

My favorite part of re-watching this show as an adult has to be the number of seemingly insignificant background characters I recognized from other works they did later. To mention a few of them: Diedrich Bader, who played Oswald on the Drew Carey show, was a com officer on the bridge in one episode. Stephen Hawkins played himself in one episode where he played poker with Data on the Holodeck. Kelsey Grammer played a ship's captain. Ken Jenkins, the chief of medicine on Scrubs, was an ambassador in one episode. Kirsten Dunst was a child actor on one episode. Some others include Teri Hatcher, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, and both Jeffrey Tamboor and Jessica Walter of Arrested development. Every episode I was waiting to see who would pop up next.


Sorry for the length of this post. It also seems bigger because of BTown's recent Haiku post bonanza.