Review of Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 1 (7 Disc Boxset)

Introduction

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is the natural successor to one of the most successful space franchises ever created. Some purists may argue that point with me, and while I liked a few of the old Shatner series, I prefer TNG by a long shot. Here we follow Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the crew of the Enterprise on adventures through the galaxy. From the pilot show onwards, there`s a mammoth 1131 minutes of TNG to get to watch.

Video

TNG is presented with the original aspect ratio of 4:3 fullscreen. The quality here however isn`t that great considering it`s an NTSC television series made about 15 years ago. Colours are reproduced well enough and detail is sufficient to see enough of what is happening though some episodes look a little better than others in some places. Where special effects are concerned however, some opticals and mattes are very apparent and others not so, so there`s a mixed bag on show. It`s perfectly watchable though and is similar to watching it on TV.

Audio

This features a remixed DD5.1 audio track from the original Dolby Surround soundtrack and I have to say that it`s perfectly adequate. The sound is balanced and comes from the front speakers quite well with dialogue locked to the centre. I wasn`t expecting a lot from the sound department but what`s here works well enough. I couldn`t notice any crackle, hiss or distortion either.

Features

There are four featurettes on the seventh disc and this totals just over an hours worth of extras. These are: The Beginning, Selected Crew Analysis, The Making of a Legend and Memorable Missions. Watching them proved to be interesting, but just doesn`t seem like enough. I was hoping there would be other extras, particularly from the first season. Are there deleted scenes or screen tests? A commentary on the pilot might have been a good extra to have too. Perhaps Paramount want to preserve the show without delving too deeply into breaking the show down showing us the nitty gritty? Who knows. Before I forget, there are loads of the usual Paramount subtitle options, plus mono langauge tracks for French, German, Spanish and Italian.

Lastly there`s a 16-page colour booklet in the boxset which introduces us to the main characters in the season. Considering that there are going to be seven boxsets in all, I hope that the quality and length of the extras improve with successive discs since this is a sizeable financial investment on our part.

Conclusion

I`m not about to do some sort of in depth analysis of the series and episodes here. While I`m not a die hard fan of the series (I ain`t no Trekkie), I did like watching it on TV, the bite sized chunks of 45 minute stories were great for me to dip in and out of. So it`s nice to have all 25 shows to sit through in one go, and boy I enjoyed it!

Star Trek started in 1965 and 22 years later Star Trek: TNG aired. I was just 15 years old at the time, which was a long time ago (15 years ago!), and time has surely flown by so quickly. Finally Star Trek: TNG gets a DVD release and not just season one. All the other series will be released at regular intervals further fuelling the need to boldly go where...you know what I mean.

The first season of TNG featured slightly wooden acting, in particular from William Frakes as Riker (he always had his chest puffed out a little too far to be natural), and quite a few special effects are hokey looking by todays standards. But the quality of the writing is better than average for the majority of the episodes and this helps you to get over some of the dodgy looking sets and those with a lack of acting ability. Consistency in the writing in the first season isn`t TNG`s strong point either but thankfully this does improve with time as does character development.

Without any doubt the packaging here is novel and has been a subject of much talk. It would certainly be nice to have all the boxsets on the same shelf. The only drawback to this is the price. As nice as it is, I won`t be buying into the complete series for a long time purely on financial grounds. If it were cheaper then it would be a more tempting purchase if only to keep the whole collection intact. Apart from the price, the only other little niggle I have with this boxset is that it takes time to open to get a disc out and then replace, it seems almost chore like, but this is a minor niggle and shouldn`t put off any prospective purchaser!

I think any self respecting TNG fan will buy into the first season, it`s worth having, so try to check out the lowest price available. The shows get better, the stories are more interesting and I think it would be a shame not to check out this cult series.