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Love, exciting and new. Come aboard. We've been expecting you. The Love Boat...
That's right, Love Boat: The Next Generation.
This show had some potential in the beginning. Two crews from nearly opposite sides of a three-sided conflict forced to merge into one. Dragged from their "home" in the Alpha Quadrant tens of thousands of light years away into the far reaches of the Delta Quandrant by an extremely powerful, yet not overly burdened with intelligence, super alien, they'll have to learn to live and work together for a voyage that may take the rest of their natural lives. (Yeah, like that was ever a real possibility.) On the way, since, hey, we're Star Fleet, mostly, we're going to explore strange new worlds, etc, etc. You know the drill. We'll break the Prime Directive when it suits us (although we'll agonize over it because that adds dramatic tension), discover bits and pieces of Earth's past hanging around, lose a few crew members, pick up a Borg babe and some kiddy-Borg and generally make a nuisance of ourselves wherever we happen to pass by. All in the name of Mom, Apple Pie, and <sniff> the Federation which we miss with all of our hearts and really want to get back to while we're still young enough to enjoy it.
And because they're alone in the middle of nowhere on a long, long, long trip, relationships will form among the crew. Harry and Belana. Neelix and Kes. Tom and whatever female happens to be nearby. Chakotay and Janeway. No, Belana and Tom. No, Chakotay and 10 of 10, I mean 6 of 9, I mean 7 of 9. The sexual tension is so thick you could cut it with a hand phaser.
The Doctor is a hologram and, except for one episode, is named The Doctor. This has some potential for interesting stories, some of it even realized. Kes has a lifespan of seven or eight years. What's Tuvok going to do when Pon Far comes around? And speaking of Tukov, why is he the first black Vulcan we've seen. We've been told in the past that much of Vulcan is hot and desert-like, so shouldn't evolution tend to dictate darker skin tones? I understand that in the original series, when the audience was assumed (wrongly) to be mostly made up of us pasty white folk, but that didn't cut it for TNG or DS9. (Okay, Sisko was black, but he and Jake were pretty much the only ones, and only Geordi on TNG, other than the occasional disposable crew member and most of them weren't around long enough for us to notice or care about. Not that there was much of a variety of other ethnic types, either, the original series had a better track record there. But I'm getting sidetracked.)
So there's a lot of potential for melodrama inherent in the way that they've put things together - much potential for a SF soap opera. And we got a lot of it in the first couple of seasons as the crew slowly bonded and became the one big happy family that we've all grown to expect from Trek since the late 1980s. There's also a great deal of plot rehashing going on, and no small part of it rehashing plots that were rehashed from other sources in TNG and DS9. But, hey, who expects anything vaguely resembling originality from Hollywood. Again, when DS9 ended and the "good" writers moved over to Voyager, the writing got better. Maybe.
The series finale was a disappointment, but not so bad as that of DS9. They tried less to tidy up everything but it was kind of like, ohmigod, we're in the middle of this huge battle with the Borg, then we pull something sneaky out of our pocket, stolen from our future selves, and voilą! The Borg are dead and we're home. Throughout the series, not that I've seen every episode but I've seen at least part of every season (more, certainly, than I've seen of DS9), there were high points and low points, good episodes, bad episodes and quite a few mediocre episodes. Music was nearly absent, special effects were what we'd come to expect and most of the actors had some range of emotion.
And at least they were boldly going (and doing it with limited resources and no Starbases to stop in for R&R, repairs, or replacements) and there weren't any kids along that could be avoided. Definitely better than DS9 and a bit more internally consistent than TNG was.
But, still. Love, exciting and new...
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Page last updated: 13 Apr 2003.