Far Point Far Away

Netflix has finally come up with Star Trek:  The Next Generation on instant view, and heaven help me, seriously.  Today I watched Encounter at Far Point for the first time in probably at least fifteen years, if not all of the 24 years it's been since TNG made its debut.  I know it can't have been that long; but I do know it's been thirteen years or so since I had cable, and perhaps even longer than that since I had access to weekend afternoon Trek marathons.  So.

I'm pleased at how very well the show seems to age.  For its debut, "cinematically", the soundtrack is quite annoyingly obtrusive - but I can't think of a lot to say in complaint on a production level.  Probably the worst moment of that was a Disney motif for Wesley's entry onto the bridge (... seriously, guys ... ?) - but I found its cheesier looks to be much more a probably-very-canny-choice in homage to the original.  Ahh, the obvious soundstages and orange flat skies.  There are a lot of production design choices we recognized very clearly, even then, as nods to TOS (for the innocent:  the original series = TOS).  The elaborate 'do on Troi, the short skirts they abandoned almost instantaneously (did we have an outcry in the 80s? ah, how I would miss that, if it were so; these days, there seems a positive vogue for objectifying women on TV ... sad to think of the 80s as a golden age of LESS gender discrimination), the explicitly Statement plots.

In that way, not only has the show aged well, it's about enough to show up current television.  But that is probably best left to another rant (particularly the bit about sexism).  The effects really aren't bad.  Yeah, the jellyfish looked a bit stiff.  But we thought so at the time, I recall it very clearly.  And having one "mate" glow pinkish and the other a bit bluish is an amusing sort of "here is the boy and here is the girl" kind of artifact.  But then, TNG had a great love of magenta.  Let it be possible for ANYTHING to glow pink, and it would.  No different, I suppose, than the current sci-fi vogue for LED white, or blue, or the green of ten years ago - or even the ubiquitous purple-saturated gelling one sees tackying up the "fairy tale" worlds of dating game reality teevee.  We have a passion for fashion in lighting.  So it goes.  At least the orange gave us a grin about the sixties.

I'd forgotten Jean Luc's loathing of children, and suddenly remember what a big part of the character that was.  I wonder whether I will come to feel, watching the first season or so, that making JLP a much warmer character over time was a bad idea.  Heh.

Not that I dislike Wheaton.  Given the man he's become, it'd be impossible to do that, though I hardly remember him as the major enhancement of the series in its day.  No, the irritating character honor goes, as it always has, and as freshly and vividly as ever, to Gates McFadden's Dr. Crusher.  Prickly and unappealing from the word go, I could not stand her even into her vanishingly thin presence in the films - and her opening scenes are no reassurance that "she couldn't have been that bad."  She was.  A nice looking lady, and I can't blame the actress - but, ugh, what an irritant, that character.

Love Q, though.  Even in this, his somewhat unformed debut, John DeLancie is as DeLancie-licious as he can be, and G-d love THAT character and his actor all together now.  You can savor him, even this early on, even if only for knowing what fun Q ended up being.

I tend to forget Yar's existence at all, but she was a nice, strong presence.  For some reason, I remembered Denise Crosby's acting as being rather wooden, but years seem to have given perspective, and she just seems assimilated now, into that certain school of Trek acting which is a little bith toothy, but not actually bad.  Again, maybe further episodes will remind me why she seemed embarrassing at the time, but Far Point makes a nice point of her authority without getting *too* overwrought (this soon) about her strength.  And, again, its very possible that the contemporary atmosphere, in which women have become objects and shrews all over again for a new millennium makes this now-vintage take on a female character exciting again.

Inevitably, the central effect of watching these again is going to be an invigoration of my need to own the series.  And here I am only up to season 4 of DS9!  Thank goodness the car has been paid off.  I can see spending far too much money on reruns in my future.

(She says ... even as she plans a comparison-shopping jaunt by Amazon and eBay to see what prices look like on season 4 of Big Bang Theory ...)