Star Trek: The Next Generation
“Star Trek: The Next Generation’s greatest sin was the way it failed some of its cast members.”
Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Episodes Reviewed: All (Seasons 1-7)
Creator: Gene Roddenberry 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Gene Roddenberry 👨🏼🇺🇸 (176 eps), Brannon Braga 👨🏼🇺🇸 (26 eps), Ronald D. Moore 👨🏼🇺🇸 (26 eps), René Echevarria 👨🏽🇺🇸 (26 eps), Joe Menosky 👨🏼🇺🇸 (26 eps), Naren Shankar 👨🏽🇺🇸 (23 eps), Tracy Tormé 👨🏼🇺🇸 (23 eps), and various
Reviewed by Dana 👩🏼🇺🇸♿
Technical: 4.5/5
Despite not becoming a Trekkie until my thirties, memories of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) live in my head with surprising clarity. My late mother was a fan and though I love TNG now, I make no apologies for my childhood pleas to change the channel to reruns of Golden Girls (1985-92). (I’d argue that begging for more of Betty, Bea, Rue, and Estelle is a mark of my good taste as a 6-year-old.)
For a show I didn’t want to watch, it’s uncanny how it stuck with me. I can remember Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) exuding empathy like a superpower, Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) fixing all manner of ills, and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) standing at the center of the bridge, keeping the ship—and the world around him—on an even keel. As an avid Reading Rainbow (1982-2006) fan, LeVar Burton had a special place in my heart, and more than once I stood in the mirror with a headband over my eyes, peering over the edge to see if I looked as cool as Geordi did in his high-tech visor (I did, obviously). Tied to memories of my mother and to the warmth and safety of the kitchen where we’d watch, I found solace in the show when the world pitched into the terror and uncertainty of a global pandemic. The characters felt like family; Gene Roddenberry’s vision, a more perfect future.
The key phrase there is “more perfect.” The Next Generation is the follow-up to Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69), which broke ground by featuring a multiracial crew and airing the first interracial kiss in television history. Nichelle Nichols, who played comms officer Lt. Nyota Uhura, represented such a landmark that when Nichols considered leaving after one season, Martin Luther King, Jr. implored her to stay on, emphasizing the necessity of having a positive Black female role model on television.
While TNG builds on the original’s model and continues the franchise’s tradition of tackling difficult and complex global themes, it falls short of depicting a truly equitable utopia. The series, to its credit, features a more gender-diverse and racially diverse cast than most shows airing at the time, which tended towards tokenism. It takes the vision of the original series and creates new worlds and new civilizations beyond nearly any other fiction franchise. The Next Generation gives viewers adventures fantastical enough to provide an escape, frameworks solid enough to have served as the fuel for another three decades of Trek lore, and characters so familiar that they can serve as makeshift family in times of crisis.
Yet Roddenberry’s overarching goal of presenting “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” was all but impossible to achieve with an overwhelmingly white, male roster behind the scenes. An imagined future created from a largely homogenous perspective simply cannot envision the hopes and fears of an infinitely diverse world.
Gender: 3.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? Rarely (Less than 20% of the time)
Compared to its predecessor, The Next Generation does make more space for its female characters to develop and suffuses them with greater autonomy. In the context of the time it aired, however—the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—it didn’t push the envelope very far. While depicting single women with active sex lives still got pushback from some corners, contemporaries like Golden Girls and Murphy Brown (1988-2018) did the same while giving its leading ladies far more room for daring adventures and complicated emotions entirely removed from men—and without, or in defiance of, male producers with certain ideas about how women should act.
Among the most overt examples of sexism in The Next Generation comes by way of Season 4’s “Qpid,” in which Picard and company find themselves dropped into a Robin Hood-themed adventure by Q (John de Lancie), a mysterious entity with a fondness for irking the Captain. The men engage in swordplay, while the women—Crusher and Troi—are left armed with potted plants. Though both McFadden and Sirtis were trained in sword fighting, director Cliff Bole rationalized his choice to leave them without weapons as a matter of historical accuracy, and that “the sight of using weapons would have disrupted the timeline.” (The explanation conveniently fails to account for the historical inaccuracies of dropping a Klingon and an android into 12th century England.) The example not only highlights the insincerity of Bole’s rationale but a deeper, structural view of female characters and the actors who depict them as less capable than their male counterparts. One of the great tragedies of the show is that it imagines layered, multifaceted women whose rich depths are often wasted. Through the series, men—white men, specifically—dominate the weekly plotlines, while women and Black characters revolve around them like satellites. On the rare occasions that women do center the week’s story, they often focus on romance or motherhood.
Rare exceptions prove the strength of TNG’s leading ladies, as in Season 6’s “Face of the Enemy.” When Troi finds herself aboard an enemy ship, she is forced to impersonate a member of the ruthless Tal Shiar, the Romulan equivalent of the KGB. Normally focused on the emotional well-being of the Enterprise crew and diplomatic by her very nature, Troi suddenly transforms into the cold, authoritative persona of a Romulan operative while facing off with a hostile commander. It’s a treat to see Troi barking commands from the center chair and engaging in high-stakes espionage, but it begs the question of why women so rarely get to helm the narrative aboard the ship.
Peeking behind the scenes by way of three decades’ worth of cast and crew interviews, panels, podcasts, and reporting, it becomes clear how much sexism shaped the way The Next Generation treated and depicted its female characters. At the start of the series, Denise Crosby portrayed Security Chief Tasha Yar, but quickly grew unhappy and asked to leave. Crosby later explained that she was “struggling with not being able to do much with the character,” describing herself as “just stage dressing.” Shortly after Crosby’s departure, Gates McFadden was fired for what she described as “speaking up too much” and “upsetting the men in charge,” namely co-executive producer Maurice Hurley. Once Hurley was gone as showrunner and McFadden’s replacement (Diana Muldaur) failed to mesh, producers asked McFadden to return, and she remained through the end of the series and returned for several of Star Trek’s feature films.
On set, Marina Sirtis’ primary and seemingly perpetual fight was with the wardrobe foisted on her character: Rather than the stiff, somewhat forgiving material of the standard Starfleet uniform, Troi—originally conceived by creator Gene Roddenberry as an oversexed, four-breasted piece of eye candy—cycled through a series of low-cut, form-fitting outfits, as well as an impractically short skirt that thankfully didn’t survive past the series’ premiere. Producers reportedly told Sirtis to lose weight at the start of the series and, in decades since, the actor has made no secret of her frustration with the way her body was scrutinized, critiqued, and objectified on the show. She has also openly complained about on-set sexism, recounted the frustration of having to fend off inappropriate touches and, to this day, seems to rarely manage to get through an interview or a panel without being reminded of her status on the show as material for male fantasy.
Race: 3.75/5
As noted, TNG’s has a frustrating tendency to center on the white men in its cast—Stewart’s Captain Picard, Jonathan Frakes’ Will Riker, and Brent Spiner’s Data. Like Troi, Crusher, and Yar, non-white characters Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) and Worf (Michael Dorn) tend to play secondary or tertiary roles in the stories of the week.
In the fictional postracial society in which the series exists, it becomes difficult to explore contemporary issues of race, but one of the strengths of the Trek universe comes from its use of allegory to address prejudice. Such attempts are often thoughtful and well-crafted, if reflective of thirty-year-old views that have since evolved. In “A Matter of Honor” (Season 2, Episode 8), Riker participates in an exchange program, serving aboard a Klingon vessel where no Starfleet officer has gone before. Proving himself far more sensitive than the average 21st century college student headed to study abroad, Riker makes a concerted effort ahead of his assignment to learn about Klingon culture, even going so far as to try a bowl of writhing worms known as the Klingon delicacy gagh, and follows the customs of his hosts once aboard. The underlying message woven through the episode—that learning about and respecting other cultures and perspectives serves to better us all—still resonates today.
Not all attempts to challenge prejudice fare as well, as in the infamous “Code of Honor” (Season 1, Episode 4) that is so cringe-worthy, members of the TNG cast (and at least one writer) have called it racist, an embarrassment, and “the worst episode of Star Trek ever filmed.” In the story, the Enterprise crew visits Ligon II, a planet inhabited by dark-skinned humanoids dressed in a mishmash of vaguely African-inspired lamé vests, bedazzled turbans, and Hammer pants that seem meant to pass as Afrofuturist style. The image of a Ligonian kidnapping the blonde Tasha Yar to make her his wife draws ugly parallels to historical racist caricatures of brutish Black men snatching innocent white women, as well as of the more modern version in which "animalistic" Black criminals victimize white women and must be stopped at any cost.
While “Code of Honor” represents an anomaly in The Next Generation’s canon, and the episode’s director was fired, the case hints at a broader problem that mirrors the show’s culture of sexism—the directors, writers, and producers on the show are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. In an interview with Rolling Stone, LeVar Burton explicitly calls out the way his character, Geordi, never had a successful romantic encounter, even as Data, an android, managed to regularly get his binary groove on. “Whether they are aware of it or not,” Burton notes, “those white men who wrote the show had an unconscious bias that was on display to me and to other people of color.”
Dorn, the Black actor who depicts the Klingon warrior Worf, describes an incident in which producers reassured him that they would never hire a white stuntman to double him in dark makeup. Dorn notes how such an action would have seemed like using blackface, and while producers may not have employed such a tactic in that specific scenario, the specter of the reviled, racist tactic of darkening white actors’ skin to portray someone of a different race raises one of the toughest questions about the series’ legacy. Somewhere along the way, the creative team behind TNG made the decision that all Klingons would have dark skin. Consequently, nearly all of the actors who would go on to play Klingons in the series were white actors in dark makeup. Whether or not this qualifies as blackface—and how the fact that producers opted to use white actors rather than hire Black actors—proves an uncomfortable question that the cast and crew have not fully dissected, despite the exhaustive dialogue and analysis that has emerged since the show’s conclusion.
Disability: 4/5
On several occasions, the Enterprise crew finds themselves interacting with another culture or species whose regressive notions about genetic purity and physical perfection harken back to the darkest parts of Earth’s history. For these cultures, perceived weakness or imperfection are intolerable, setting up a clash with Burton’s Geordi, who is blind and wears a VISOR, a medical device that allows him to see via ultraviolet and infrared spectrums. This attribute, though it might be considered by many to be a disability, is never treated as a flaw.
In Season 5’s “The Masterpiece Society,” Geordi assures a scientist, whose society has been carefully selected for their ideal genetic composition, that he has never been embarrassed by his blindness. “It was the wish of our founders that no one have to suffer a life with disabilities,” the scientist explains, to which Geordi asks who gave them the right to determine whether he deserves to live, or whether he has something to contribute to their society.
As the pair work to find a solution to a potentially catastrophic planetary threat, Geordi proves his point when, through his VISOR, he is able to pick up on an anomaly that wouldn’t be detectable to organic human eyes. It's perfect, Geordi says, “[i]f the answer to all of this is in a visor created for a blind man who never would have existed in your society.” The exchange stands out in The Next Generation as the loftiest peak of Roddenberry’s vision: a world in which not only does diversity exist and thrive, it proves invaluable.
Deduction for LGBTQ: -1.00
When The Next Generation began airing in 1987, the AIDS crisis was beginning to gain national attention and opposition to same-sex marriage was getting significant traction. Before the series had even premiered, creator Roddenberry faced a question from a fan: Would Trek ever feature a gay character? He soon raised the issue with the show’s creative staff and was reportedly met with surprise and at least one derogatory remark. Nonetheless, writer David Gerrold took the lead on a script that drew clear parallels to the AIDS epidemic: The episode would feature a gay couple serving on a ship afflicted with a deadly pathogen and, to treat those affected, members of the Enterprise would donate blood. But before Gerrold’s script could be shot, arguments with members of the staff led Gerrold to quit, and the episode was never made. As he left his office, Roddenberry’s lawyer, Leonard Maislish, reportedly berated Gerrold with homophobic slurs.
Though Roddenberry expressed his continued desire to introduce a gay character, his failing health and eventual death meant that those around him and who succeeded him got the final word, and the word was not “gay.” The closest the show came to touching on an LGBTQ story was in “The Outcast” (Season 5, Episode 17), when Riker falls for an androgynous alien named Soren (Melinda Culea) whose society considers gender a taboo. Soren confesses to Riker that she identifies as female; when members of her society discover this, she is put on trial and subjected to reeducation. The episode drew—and continues to draw—some praise from LGBTQ advocates, but many saw the episode as too hesitant or even regressive, and Frakes, who played Riker, has repeatedly complained that having Soren played by a female actor was too timid a choice for the episode.
Mediaversity Grade: B- 3.75/5
Time travel may only exist in fiction, but Star Trek: The Next Generation will soon be granted an opportunity unique among such a beloved and culturally impactful show. Season 3 of Picard (2020-23), the Paramount+ series following Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard, has pulled off a near-miracle by gathering the entire main cast of TNG for one final adventure. Unlike in its first run, this iteration will be written, directed, and produced by a creative team that not only represents the diversity of its audience and cast, but has made a stated commitment to inclusion.
When it aired thirty years ago, and in the movies released in the following years, The Next Generation’s greatest sin was the way it failed some of its cast members. Picard seems primed to correct some, if not all, of that. McFadden, as Beverly Crusher, will finally get the chance to show more range and “kick ass.” Geordi will have a family, including a daughter played by Burton’s real-life progeny, Mika Burton. For some fans—me—who feel such affinity for characters and the actors who play them that the injustices suffered on- and offscreen feel personal, there’s little chance that everything will be wrapped up in a bow and all things forgiven. Certain plotlines cannot be undone, and fanservice isn’t known for being an ideal driver of stories.
But if all fans have to hold onto winds up being the seven seasons, four movies, and a reunion that can never fully measure up to expectation, well, there’s a Hebrew word for that—dayenu. “It would have been enough,” we say, recounting all the miraculous gifts our ancestors received, each of which would have been enough of a blessing. Thinking about Star Trek and all it has provided fans—an escape, a community, a surrogate family—each series would have been enough of a gift, let alone 12 series over 43 seasons. The Next Generation may be flawed, but in a world that can leave us feeling lost and alone, it also offers a hope for more.
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