Episode: | 1 | | | Writer: | D. C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry | | | Director: | Corey Allen | | | Air Date: | 28-Sep-1987 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching the 106th story in the Star Trek franchise: Encounter at Farpoint! That's such an old school sci-fi title; it sounds like it's from a tie-in novel.
Encounter at Farpoint is also the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which itself was the first of the live-action Trek spin-offs. The Rick Berman-era of Trek started here. 15.7 million people tuned in for the episodes in the US, and 11.5 stuck around for episode two, The Naked Now. The series then hovered around that level for the rest of the run, with even season seven pulling in 11 million, so it's no bloody wonder they kept making more spin-offs.
I got that information from Wikipedia so you know it's all true. Though hang on, Wikipedia claims that The Naked Now is actually the third episode, not the second. The reason for this is that Encounter at Farpoint is a two-hour telefilm that can be split into two parts. Though I'm going to be splitting this review into three parts, because I've got a lot to talk about. It's a fairly important episode!
CBS spent a lot of money to go back to the original negatives and remaster the entire series, and it really looks fantastic now in HD. It's one of the best remasters I've seen, it's awesome. Though you can just go to TrekCore if all you're after is beautiful high resolution screencaps, you don't need me for that. So instead I've decided to show off the authentic fuzzy 1987 version of the episode...because I've spent money buying the ancient DVDs and I'm determined to get some use out of them. You should be grateful I'm not showing shots captured from a VHS tape recorded off BBC 2 really.
I should also give you a SPOILER WARNING as I'm going to give away absolutely everything that happens in this story. I might also spoil things from other Trek stories that came out before 1987 (so The Man Trap to Star Trek IV: The One with the Whales), but that's as far as my spoilers will go.