StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Early installment weirdness is a well known trope. All-too many series have bitten the dust before they managed to get off the ground.

Heck, looking back at season 1 of TNG and those pajamas, (not to mention some male crew members wearing the 1-piece dresses), you'd think it was a bad low-budget parody. Then there's the dust-buster phasers and I think some of those early scripts were lifted directly off TOS episodes...

biostem wrote:Heck, looking back at season 1 of TNG and those pajamas, (not to mention some male crew members wearing the 1-piece dresses), you'd think it was a bad low-budget parody. Then there's the dust-buster phasers and I think some of those early scripts were lifted directly off TOS episodes...

Heh, yes, I thought at the time some of them looked awfully familiar. And I found out later that some of them were actually rewrites from the cancelled series that was eventually turned into ST:TMP.

Ironically the early seasons wierdness can linked to the increased influence Gene Roddenberry had during those seasons. Season 1 does have strong feeling of being in the shadow of TOS and season 2 had plenty of missteps of its own.

Anyone who wants to know just how much of a mess the first couple of years of TNG were should watch William Shatner's documentary "Chaos on the Bridge." In a nutshell, Roddenberry's asshole of a lawyer drove all the TOS mainstays off the series, and Roddenberry himself was vetoing story ideas for silly reasons, meaning that by mid-S1 they were having so much trouble getting workable scripts that it left the series in serious danger of being cancelled. Which in turn resulted in Maurice Hurley personally paying for Roddenberry to take a holiday, and then staging a power grab while he was out of the country.