Trekking in HD: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season Three (review

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Three

But it was in the third season that (Star Trek: The Next Generation) began to come into its own, at least in part due to the arrival of Michael Piller as head of the writing staff. Piller had both written and produced for the TV series “Simon & Simon”…. Says Piller, “I can’t claim full credit (for the success); we had a lot of good writers here. I will claim credit for my contribution, which is that I just have an idea for what I think makes a good dramatic story….”  - J.M. Dillard, Star Trek – Where No One Has Gone Before: A History in Pictures


The third season of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST-TNG) was yet another period of transition for the series, albeit one with good portents rather than bad ones. Maurice Hurley, one of the show’s co-executive producers, left the staff, as did several other writers, including Michael Wagner.

 Meanwhile, Roddenberry, the series’ creator, took less of an active role in running ST-TNG due to his deteriorating health. To fill the creative void, Roddenberry hired Michael Piller, an experienced writer-producer who had worked on Cagney and Lacey and Simon & Simon.  Piller was named as co-executive producer (along with Roddenberry’s protégé, Rick Berman) after The Bonding, the third season’s fifth episode, aired.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Three: Arrivals, Departures, and Sea Changes

Piller, who was in charge of the writing staff, thought that ST-TNG needed to focus less on Big Ideas and more on the show’s “family” of characters. He believed that the first two seasons’ episodes were hamstrung by the Roddenberry-Berman team’s emphasis on “lesson stories” where (a) the Enterprise crew made contact with a new civilization and learned something along the way, or (b) the Enterprise crew learned something from interactions with aliens or super-beings such as Q.

Piller not only moved away from this rigid storytelling philosophy, but he also took an unprecedented step of implementing an  “open door” policy  and accepting stories and “spec scripts” from writers outside the staff. Many young writers, including Ron D. Moore and Rene Echeverria, were hired to work on the series after turning in spec scripts which made it past the selection process.

The third season was also one of transition for the cast. Gates McFadden (Dr. Beverly Crusher), was brought back in part because fans missed the “spark” between her character and Patrick Stewart’s Capt. Jean-Luc Picard. Ironically, actor Wil Wheaton, who played Crusher’s son Wesley, asked to be let go at the end of Season Three to pursue a movie career.  Wheaton would make several guest appearances in later seasons, as well as a brief cameo in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. (In the behind-the-scenes documentaryResistance is Futile: Assimilating Star Trek: The Next Generation, Wheaton explains that he felt frustrated because the producers and writers couldn’t figure out what to do with Wesley as a character.)

The new emphasis on the Enterprise-D “family” of characters not only freed the writers from the restrictive “alien of the week/situation of the week” paradigm, but it also allowed them to introduce overt continuity to the Star Trek TV franchise.

At first, both Roddenberry and Berman were dead-set against anything that smacked of continuing storylines. They believed that it would hurt the show’s prospects as a re-run “property” once its original run ended. Continuity was conspicuously absent from Star Trek: The Original Series and TV station programmers aired them in any order they liked. Roddenberry (and to some degree, Berman) wanted to stick to this formula for business reasons.

Piller and the writers saw it differently. They understood that in the old days of television the formula for scripts was to give each episode a well-defined beginning, middle, and end but not to change the regular characters’ lives in a major way. This made audiences feel comfortable with their favorite shows; the characters and situations would be dependably familiar, and if viewers missed an episode or two it wouldn’t be a big issue.

But by ST-TNG’s third season, it became clear to the writers, especially the newer staff members, that if the show was to break out on its own, its characters had to grow and evolve. If the Enterprise-D and her crew was locked into a closed-story, no-continuity paradigm, then ST-TNG would stagnate and its ratings would drop like a stone.

Although the series never adopted episode-to-episode continuity a la 24, the writers started creating story arcs in which events from one episode would have repercussions later in the same season or even farther in the future. Sins of the Father, written by Ronald D. Moore, is the “set up” for Season Four’s Reunion andRedemption – Part I.

Season Three would also begin the Star Trek franchise’s tradition of the season finale “cliffhanger.” Michael Piller’s The Best of Both Worlds – Part I (itself a continuation of Season Two’s Q Who?) told the chilling story of Capt. Picard’s abduction by the Borg but left the resolution hanging until the Season Four premiere.

The Blu-ray Set:  
CBS Blu-ray, which produces Star Trek  HD home media for Paramount after CBS  acquired the franchise’s copyright several years ago, released Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Three on April 25, 2013. The six Blu-ray discs are ensconced in a slim Blu-ray jewel box package. Its cover art (which is duplicated in the cardboard slipcover) features ST-TNG’s Starfleet insignia against a lemon-green backdrop. Within the Starfleet delta are portraits of Capt. Picard, Lt. Commander Geordi LaForge and Dr. Crusher. The background art depicts the Enterprise-D orbiting a Class-M planet, with distant stars lying further away.


My Take: I’ve never owned previous Paramount’s VHS or DVD issues of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I can’t offer a comparison between the Blu-ray edition and its forebears. According to the package blurb and some of the behind-the-scenes materials in the set: 

Season Three of Star Trek: The Next Generation took televised science fiction storytelling to new heights. Now, on high definition Blu-ray, the seminal season of this beloved series is more spectacular and compelling to watch than ever. Experience such thought-provoking episodes as “The Survivors,”  “Sins of the Father,” “The Offspring” and one of the great cliffhangers in television history: Part One of “The Best of Both Worlds”…like never before, in glorious 1080p with 7.1 sound.


 In contrast to the remastered versions of Star Trek: The Original Series, the wizards at CBS Video/Blu-ray did not replace the 1989-1990 special effects with 21st Century updates. They did, however, digitally clean up the images directly from the original film used during the show’s production. The result: a vast improvement in video and audio quality that doesn’t compromise the vision of the original directors and effects supervisors.

As in the Season Two set, Star Trek: The Next Generation features a ship’s cargo bay’s worth of extras.

There are two behind-the-scenes documentaries and various featurettes. Some of them are carryovers from previous DVD collections of the series, while others are exclusive to this 2013 release.  (The Mission Logs for Year Three in each of the six Blu-ray discs are from the previous DVD editions.)

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Inside the Writer’s Room, in which Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane interviews several of ST-TNG’s writers. Participants include Ron Moore, Brannon Braga, Rene Echeverria, and Naren Shankar. The role played by the late Michael Piller in improving the series is one of the topics discussed here.

There’s also a longer documentary about Season Three, its production, and its impact on the series and the rest of the Star Trek franchise. Resistance is Futile – Assimilating Star Trek: The Next Generation is divided thusly:

Part One: Biological Distinctiveness
Part Two: Technological Distinctiveness
Part Three: The Collective

There are also two posthumous tributes to the late David Rappaport and Michael Piller.  



Note on Languages (Subtitles and Audio)

Though the product listing on Amazon only lists “English” in the Language category, Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Three features various languages in both audio and subtitle options. English is the default selection on the preliminary menu, but viewers may also choose Danish, French, Japanese, Castillian Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish. (Some of these options apply to audio and subtitles, though some apply only to subtitles.)



Season Three Episode List

Disc One:

Evolution
The Ensigns of Command
The Survivors
Who Watches the Watchers
The Bonding

Special Features:

Episode Promos
Archival Mission Log: Mission Overview Year Three

Disc Two:

Booby Trap
The Enemy
The Price
The Vengeance Factor
The Defector

Special Features

Episode Promos
Archival Mission Log: Selected Crew Analysis Year Three

Disc Three:

The Hunted
The High Ground
Deja Q
A Matter of Perspective
Yesterday’s Enterprise

Special Features

Episode Promos
Archival Mission Log:  Departmental Briefing Year Three: Memorable Missions

Disc Four:

The Offspring
Sins of the Father
Allegiance
Captain’s Holiday

Special Features:

Episode Promos
Archival Mission Log: Departmental Briefing Year Three: Production

Disc Five:

Tin Man
Hollow Pursuits
The Most Toys
Sarek
Menage a Troi

Special Features:

Episode Promos
In Memoriam David Rappaport
Gag Reel (HD)

Disc Six:

Transfigurations
The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1

Special Features:

Episode Promos

Resistance is Futile – Assimilating Star Trek: The Next Generation

Part One: Biological Distinctiveness
Part Two: Technological Distinctiveness
Part Three: The Collective

A Tribute to Michael Piller (HD)

Recommend this product? Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12