Star Trek: The Next Generation: Encounter at Farpoint Review (S1E01)
★★☆☆☆ Picard and Co’s maiden voyage is an awkward hodgepodge
The year is 2364 — one hundred years after Kirk, Spock and the adventures of the original Enterprise. Jean Luc Picard captains the brand new state-of-the-art Enterprise-D, its mission to continue to chart our still vastly unexplored galaxy.
En route to Farpoint, a station unexpectedly constructed by the otherwise primitive Bandi, the Enterprise comes into conflict with a powerful, omnipotent being known only as Q, who condemns humanity as “a savage child race” unworthy of continued existence.
With the future of his entire species at stake, Picard accepts Q’s challenge: to solve the mystery of their miraculous Farpoint destination…
Second chances are a rare thing in television. Well, they used to be, anyway. These days just about everything considered a moderate success on the small screen has a slim chance of being resurrected, a symptom of our never-satiated appetite for content.
Back in the eighties, the idea of resurrecting Star Trek — a show cancelled in the late sixties, but later exploding into a pop culture phenomenon thanks to syndication a few years later — was almost unthinkable. And yet it happened.
Buoyed by several big-screen successes, the studio was convinced. Star Trek was warping back to the small screen.
Contrary to popular belief, Encounter at Farpoint wasn’t actually a pilot. A pilot is a show that is made to demonstrate a concept and its commercial viability. The Next Generation received a full series order, so the term doesn’t apply here. The pressure, at least of a rejection from the studio, was seemingly off, although you wouldn’t think that based on its premiere episode.
Visually the episode is a treat and still looks fantastic over thirty years later. This is largely thanks to fantastic model work, as well as Herman Zimmerman’s production design, which somehow manages to look futuristic despite its obvious eighties milieu. God, I miss the days when Star Trek looked like this.
Equally delightful was the return of Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing theme, originally used to open 1979’s The Motion Picture, while Dennis McCarthy’s score for the rest of the episode is appropriately grand and operatic in all the right places. Far better than some of the overcooked, wince-inducing music we would have to endure for much of the show’s first two years.
The pressure didn’t get to Herman, Jerry and Dennis, but it got to pretty much everyone else.
Much of this premiere’s problems lie in its story and script, which was altered so frequently during the various stages of production that it’s a wonder Patrick Stewart and co-stars had anything to work with at all. Constant bickering over the episode’s runtime and how much people would be paid dominated early production, just the beginning of the show’s behind-the-scenes nightmares so perfectly surmised in William Shatner’s Chaos on the Bridge. Go watch it if you haven’t already.
Encounter’s story is essentially two separate efforts wedged together. D.C Fontana’s original treatment focused on the mystery of Farpoint was deemed too short, so Gene Roddenberry fudged in a second plot involving Q, who is obviously just Trelane with a slightly better costume. Neither story works well enough. The Farpoint mystery barely qualifies as one, while Q’s trial of humanity never really feels like a conflict with species-ending ramifications.
Everyone knows now how it ended for Jean Luc and the crew of this new Enterprise, but this was a rough start; their performances mostly wooden, laden with an abundance of superfluous reaction shots, and bizarre lines like “shut off that damn noise!”, as well as my personal favourite, “He’s frozen!” Yes, he was, Deanna.
All good things have to have a beginning. Thankfully, the bar set by Encounter at Farpoint was quickly surpassed. Eighteen years in the making, Star Trek’s journey back to the small screen was complete, but the real adventure was just getting started.
