The Best of Star Trek The Next Generation
Star Trek fans can rejoice with the release of the newest Trek movie and a flurry of releases of other Star Trek franchised merchandise such as this Best of from The Next Generation.
Film making 18/25
Cinematography 18/25
Audio 19/25
Choice of Episodes 15/25
Total 70/100
I have watched every episode of Star Trek The Next Generation thanks to a mom with a full VCR series of the popular Trek show. Now you can get a few select episodes in a Best of DVD from Paramount that is a merest glimpse at the good Star Trek episodes that are possible.
While I may have picked a few other episodes as my favorites I do have to say that the four episodes chosen for The Best of Star Trek The Next Generation are very good. They show off not only the best use of technical cinematography with use of a limited budget to make a show but the actors are at their best as well.
Star Trek The Next Generation starred Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Pickard, Jonathan Frakes as Commander William Richter and a host of other stars. Even Whoopi Goldberg had a recurring role for several episodes of the show as long lived Guinan, the ships bartender and is in all of these episodes.
The first show is a two episode one called The Best of Both Worlds and is a big Borg adventure where Pickard is abducted by the Borg and assimilated. When they end up rescuing him they do take out the cybernetic implants but he will always have some memories and a link to the cybernetic race the Borg.
The two part show really does a good job of looking into the man and not the machine to show the fight many have within themselves. The shows two part series finale for season 3 was a great ending for a season but not the best in my opinion of the show.
The first three seasons where really more of a testing the waters and getting familiar with their parts and not really the best in my opinion for most of the episodes. Yesterday’s Enterprise is a great episode and well worth having in this collection as it looked at alternate realities and asked many questions that really are simple.
Would you take a leap to make a difference even though you knew you would die anyway, Denise Crosby reprises her role as Tasha Yar for this one episode and answers it. Other questions like what should you really do if offered the chance to change the past is looked at as well.
The Enterprise encounters a rift in space that is also a rift in time and witnesses an earlier heavily damaged Enterprise coming out of the rift. The crew of the current Enterprise helps the Enterprise from the past to get back into fighting shape and deal one last blow to the Klingons.
The fight that by the current Enterprise crew know as their past is one where the Enterprise-C was destroyed in battle with all hands lost. The Klingons were fighting the human race and saw the courage and honor they fought with and called off their war with humans because of the heroism of the Enterprise-C.
When the Enterprise-C entered the current time all reality was altered and the show used a vastly different uniform and entire paint scheme to show the change. The current timeline was changed due to the Enterprise-C not returning and being lost so the Klingons never called off their war which is going quite badly for the humans.
The show is great and bringing back Tasha Yar is only part of it, there was a definite look at consequences of altering time but more so a look at human courage. What will people think of those that fought and died even if they fought in vain against overwhelming odds.
The show is definitely one of the Best of Star Trek The Next Generation if not the best show of the seven season series. The show had everything that makes all the Star Trek series and movies great including great acting by people who know their roles well and well done technical aspects to the filming.
The Measure of a Man is the fourth, third?, on the Best of Star Trek The Next Generation and is a question of whether Data, the Android played by Brent Spinner, is actually a sentient being with rights. Data has been a star of the show from the beginning as an android created by Dr. Noonien Soong, the renowned robotic and artificial intelligence expert.
The episode asks whether Data is property of Star Fleet or an individual officer with rights and responsibilities like anyone else. Another supposed expert in Star Fleet wants to experiment on Data to try and recreate an android in Data’s likeness and is almost positive his experiments will work.
Data and the crew of the Enterprise are less sure of his possible success and question the right for Star Fleet to experiment on one of its officers. Pickard demands a hearing of the star base legal office who is an old adversary of Pickards to a trial to see if the experiment can go ahead.
Commander Richter as next highest ranking officer on the star base is chosen as lead prosecutor to find Data is merely a machine and therefore property of Star Fleet. Pickard defends Data and finally asks the question of whether Data is a slave or not and whether it is right for anyone to own another being.
The episode weighs heavily on Pickard and ends up with the very question that has led many over thousands of years to ask the same question about rights to ownership of another. The show is great and one of the best I think of the series, but maybe not the top four but definitely in the top ten of the series.
It would be very difficult to pick out four shows of a seven season series as the top four but ten would probably not be that tough. Paramount has done an admirable job of highlighting the series and what Star Trek The Next Generation is all about in these episodes.
The Best of Star Trek The Next Generation is well worth getting and shows a good highlight of the series for those that have not been initiated into the world of the Next Generation. The DVD does not contain any extras or bonus content so I did not rate it as such but it does have the English 5.1 Surround Sound with Spanish and Portuguese monologue audio and subtitles in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
The Best of Star Trek The Next Generation is a great way to enjoy a brief look at a long running series and get a glimpse for yourself what the show is all about.